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Seeing by Reordering Visual Experiences

You cannot correctly call any human action either creative or free if the individual does not participate directly in the setting, and intending, of his or her own meaning.—Robert Irwin, Being and Circumstance

Introduction

The history of western modern art can be read as a progressive reduction of imagery and of gesture. Malevich wrote in 1915, “Over the past millennia, the artist has striven to approach the depiction of an object as closely as possible, to transmit meaning, essence and purpose. Now objects have vanished like smoke, for the sake of a new culture of art, a new art with metaphysical implication.” His colleague, El Lissitzky was developing what became known as constructivism, merging art and political ideas for a new society. His “Prouns” were interchange stations between painting and architecture. Piet Mondrian in 1925 also attempted to make an integrative art, creating an environment, “Salon De Madame B à Dresden”, which was not exhibited until 1970 at the Pace Gallery in New York City.

The wonder of it all is that what looked for all the world like a diminishing horizon – the art-object’s becoming so ephemeral as to threaten to disappear altogether – has, like some marvelous philosophical riddle, turned itself inside out to reveal its opposite. What appeared to be a question of object/non-object has turned out to be a question of seeing and not seeing, of how it is we actually perceive or fail to perceive “things” in their real contexts. (9, p.145)

The context of objects and the vehicle which allows us to perceive it have become the new medium in the work of Robert Irwin and James Turrell. Working with existing environments within and outside the confines of museums, these artists examine different ways in which installation and materials activate the viewers’ awareness of their own act of seeing. The work of these artists challenges and questions our perception and psychology behind it, thus engaging the process of seeing as the most essential vehicle through which we experience all visual art.

Irwin often works with physical materials that slow or heighten our vision, scrim, translucent gels, wire fencing, plastic. But “the primary medium of Irwin’s art is neither steel nor glass, neither trees nor pavement, but our perception, our curiosity, and our desire to make sense of the world around us”. (2, p.148) By changing the physical environment in unexpected ways, Irwin provokes the viewer to question assumptions and to pay attention to phenomena which leads one to redraw a mental picture of the world, engaging the viewer in the process of discovery.

Turrell isolates and manipulates light itself which becomes the subject and the medium of his work. His installations often demand time to experience them and engage the viewer in the process of assembling and reassembling the pieces through seeing.
Expanding the role of the artist into the realm of psychology, architecture, physics, and most recently natural sciences, both artists challenge traditional modes of display by building or altering environments for the viewer to be in and experience.

These environments do not present answers, but grant the possibility for the viewer’s active participation in the creation of the work, while simultaneously seeing and being aware of the act of seeing. The viewer then becomes part of the installation display.

Psychology of Perception. Scientific experiments at Art & Technology.

When Kasimir Malevich did a white-on-white painting and was accused of nihilism, he looked his public in the eye and said, “Ah, but we have a world of pure feeling.” Perception is “unconstrained sensual experience”, in which feelings are essential in the act of looking. Influenced by the writings of phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, for Irwin, perception is a “direct interface with the phenomenaly given:, involving “overbrimming synesthesia of undifferentiated sensations which exist as the plenum of experience”. Turrell expresses it as “a reflexive act”. The physical space of the art and the space of the mind of the observer are inseparable. (5, p.208).

Exploring metaphysical states of the mind, Raku, the Japanese tea ceremony, is an aesthetic which aims at elimination of movement, decoration and variation of form. Raku brings attention to our perception as part of a whole experience, involving time and discovery:

“There was this person who had collected these bowls, if your karma was right, he would let you see a tea bowl. And the way he would do it is you would have dinner with him and at the end of the dinner, he would set on the table this box with a beautiful little tie on it -very Japanese – and you untied it, you opened up the box, he let you do that. And then inside of it was a cloth sack. You took the sack out, and it had a drawstring, and you opened up the drawstring and you reached inside and took out the bowl. By that time, the bowl had you at a level where the most incidental detail – maybe even just a thumb mark – registered as a powerful statement. “ (1, p.31)

In 1971, the Experiments in Art and Technology Project (E.A.T.) matched artists with scientists, mathematicians, technicians, and engineers from major corporations and industries. One project, led by Jane Livingston, an associate curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, teamed Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Edward Wortz, an experimental psychologist from Garrett Aerospace. For several months the three pursued whatever interested them: they sat in anechoic chambers; they played with light; they discussed ideas. Neither the art hardware nor the fascination with spectacle of the E.A.T. projects coincided with the true focus of the group. They took a more physiological approach in which perception precedes conception. They became interested in dissolving the object in the subject. The work that came after continuously invited viewers into an awareness of their own processes of perception, as well as their expectations of art. (5, p.71)

Circumstance – physical environment and conditions of artwork.

Controlling the space in a way that allows the artists to engage the viewer completely in the space of illusion, for the viewer illusion becomes complete. By adjusting light, environment, applied color and object to very similar, interchangeable levels of reality Irwin and Turrell achieve compelling illusions, which do not depend on anything outside the work itself.

Since his early paintings, Robert Irwin has been preoccupied with the display of his work. Continuously trying to break the confines of painting, Irwin blurs the edges and corners and even the flatness of canvas in his disc paintings, engaging in a progression of inquiry. The marriage of figure and ground in cubist painting opened questions which inevitably led to the marriage between painting and environment. The environment then became equal to the figure in importance, having as much meaning. While working on his late line and dot paintings, Irwin meticulously treated the back of the painting, laboriously finishing the walls around it, eliminating cracks and marks, experimenting with various temperatures of light until the entire presentation was wholly perfect – arriving at a situation that couldn’t be anything else and only in such circumstances could the viewer possibly see and experience what Irwin was seeing. Such controlling practices became impossible to continue as he began selling painting and they moved into new environments of museums and collections. But while searching for these “peripheral” elements of perceptual experiences, Irwin discards the painting as an object altogether and devotes his practice to the whole environment, the room, challenging the viewer’s perceptual interaction with it. (2, p.109)

Within the structure of museums, Irvwin choreographs the light and volume which exist in the space, so that the space itself becomes the pedestal for thought. The changes are usually not objects, but subtle and highly controlled use of materials that alter or challenge our perception. The viewer is given responsibility and the analytical acuteness of the work is given non-verbal and intuitive presence. In architectural work, Irwin activates preexistent qualities of the space, leaving it seemingly unchanged but elusively energized, or refocused, or he intervenes on the architecture’s behalf. “The object is dissolved in the energies that catalyze changes in and challenges to conventional perception. “ (14, p.113-114)

Turrell attempts to make the surfaces as immaterial as possible to bring it closer to the experience of looking at a traditional painting, where the square frame and the layers of varnish do not stay in the way of the viewer perceiving the subject. Working within the rectilinear format of most museum architecture, Turrell creates structures that echo the lines where the floor meets the walls and the walls meet the ceiling. When the structure becomes “transparent” within the space where it exists, the qualities of light, its volume, its density and color become important. The work and physical environment which the viewer enters are inseparable from each other. As one moves through the space and decides to see it in one way or another, the reality of the work can change. So the work becomes all about seeing. “It’s possible for you to make the reality of your experience of the piece become the determinant of its existence”. (3, p.15)

Irwin uses the layers of painting as veils to interrupt our view and to entice us in closer examination and observation. For Irwin, the installations become so much larger than our physical bodies, that the materials become abstract. Just like we experience moving through a skyscraper without being aware of steel beams, glass and concrete used to make it, when we follow a path in a garden we are unaware of the shape the path makes among the plants and trees. But Irwin creates visual interruptions, distortions, and by obscuring the subject, he invites the viewers to examine what is seen on an intimate level, bringing their awareness to subtle nuances. It’s like looking at a painting from far away and if you wish, if you are enticed enough by veils of scrim, intertwining branches, or frosted glass, you can actually walk into the painting and thus become part of it. You can simultaneously be the observer and be observed. Irwin’s background in painting becomes apparent as he creates his installations in layers of perception. The viewer becomes aware of physical distances and light that fills these spaces.

Both artists’ work is site specific and can not usually be displayed in a different setting, unless it is readjusted to the new space. Documentation of the work then becomes primary representation to viewers who are unable to experience the work in person. Yet, documenting the work which relies on phenomenological circumstances can become a real problem. Both artists resisted visual representations of their work, which almost completely takes away the personal and intimate experience of seeing the light, which is what constitutes the artwork anyway. What is interesting about the Roden Crater is that Turrell presented numerous depictions of the site, and records of his thinking process and the planning of the project but not the images of actual visual phenomena to be observed and experienced within and from the windows of the Roden Crater. In printed representation of Turrell’s work we become aware of the shape of the framing of the light more than the powerful qualities of light and their transcending effect on our consciousness.

Irwin’s work usually has a kind of “unthingness,” presenting not visual objects, but an uncanny reflexiveness to the viewer. Irwin says, “The real beauty of philosophy is the examination of your own moment, your own being in circumstance.” He continues: “When people walk into a gallery where I’ve installed some of the things I’ve been doing recently, a lot of them say, “Oh, it’s an empty room. The question then, of course, is empty of what?” The point of Irwin’s work is to draw people into a place once considered too incidental to have meaning. (2, p.148)

Pedestal and Museum.

By working within existing environments outside of the museum, the artists create the work, the pedestal for the work and the museum to house the work, creating a larger context and subtler transitions between every day reality and visual phenomena.

Roden Crater site, situated in the desert is accessible and open as a part of the ancient landscape, and yet it is removed from our daily experiences, so that approach to the site is in itself a discovery. Quite different from a traditional museum pedestal, Roden Crater’s solitary location forces the visitors to first experience its context, following the road and observing other cinder cones in the San Francisco volcanic field. The desert becomes a museum. Approach to the crater is possible from different directions, but Turrell prefers the drive from Flagstaff, which changes elevations and brings the crater in and out of view throughout the trip. At a certain distance, transportation is left in the area surrounded by lava cliffs, so that it is not seen from the crater. As one walks out from this enclosure, the crater becomes visible, and from this lower vantage, the viewer has a sense of looking at the Roden Crater full-face. “This kind of presentation and re-presentation is an important part of the work. It gives the crater a visual history and places it in time, in memory”. (3, 101)

One can arrive to the site by airplane, which then significantly changes visual discovery of the Crater. Visitors’ approach to Roden Crater presents and re-presents the crater and the desert environment it inhabits changing its relationship with the environment and the viewer’s awareness of spatial relations. How we perceive the crater is contingent upon how we make our journey to it. “The approach can order your experience. You can come in through the side door…and have a different experience than if you enter through the front door” (3, 104)

The pedestal is replaced by a path of discovery, quite like unwrapping a Raku cup, the viewer is enticed into Irwin’s garden and brought to a level of awareness where one can deal with intimacy and the most subtle kind of nuance. Starting with a grand scale, the viewer is brought down and is able to wonder upon a single flower up close. And this flower is only there now, as it will change and appear quite different at another time of the year.

Passage of time and the process of seeing.

In contrast to traditional landscape painting, which immobilizes natural phenomena, Irwin’s garden and Turrell’s crater work with experiential qualities inherent in specific moment and place, the work becomes “conditioned by the site itself”. The artists create artwork in which change is not only inevitable but the very premise of the piece itself. (5, p.157)

While painting presents preserved crystallized moment in time and allows the viewer to choose duration of being within that moment, and video presents moving moments to a relatively still observer, installation changes in meaning as the observer moves through its carefully crafted space. In this way, the presence of the viewer becomes integral to the meaning of the work, and to the viewer’s understanding and reflection of being part of the installation display.

Turrell frames natural light (sunlight, moonlight, starlight and light phenomena), while accounting and embracing its ever-changing nature, not reproducing the light, but creating a frame (space) for it to fill and to be brought to the viewer’s closer examination. Quite similarly, entering empty rooms, and questioning what it is one is looking at, the viewer is invited to open and clear the inner space of his/her consciousness and to allow the light to enter that space. This experience is potentially similar to Alice entering through the looking glass, through the experience of seeing the viewer has the possibility to inhabit the space and to create and recreate its reality as the light moves and changes. The range of natural phenomena of changing light presents an almost infinite range of its observational potential. (3, 108)

The viewer as part of the installation display. Framing.

While looking at a singe living cell organism, one can observe the visual and behavioral patterns that similarly function within the whole human body, or the ecosystem or the planet or the universe. A cell, body, planet and universe then are just names given to visual frames marking different levels of our perception of the living world, either with or without optical tools. Essentially, they are parts of each other, together being a whole complexity, a continuum, within which there is a range of possibilities. When we construct these frames and take words and meanings associated with them for granted, especially when we isolate them from their environment, we run the risk of misrepresentation and actually prevent ourselves from deep and meaningful understanding. Since they are given to us whole as independent sets of facts, even truths, it is no wonder that we fail at times to recognize them for what they really are: culturally compounded abstractions.

Since the invention of shaped panels and canvas, the western art practice has been participating in the process of framing our visual reality and by taking it out of context displaying it for the viewer’s contemplation.

Both artists invite the viewer back into their carefully structured and controlled visual reality which exists harmoniously within the existing physical space and by only slightly altering the viewer’s perception of it, draw viewer’s attention to their own process of knowing and experiencing reality through seeing.
What the viewers see inside the chambers at Roden Crater depends as much on their orientation as the space’s. One can look outward with it or turn around and look into the light the space perceives. Metaphorically, the viewer is able to look at the space’s vision, “watching the space look at something”; the art presenting a model for our perceiving our own perceiving. (3, p109).

The role of the artist, in Irwin’s terms, is to learn to see not only a physical, quantitative reality but the qualitative aspects of a situation, and to empower the viewer to gain access to that vision as well-to engage in a process of discovery. The real subject of Irwin’s art is not the object, then, but the viewer.

Conclusion

Since the early constructivist experiments in the former Soviet Union, artists have become aware of the environments that display artworks as integral part of the visual experience and understanding, often determining and altering meaning of presented work. But what happens when artists not only create environments and situations as their artistic work, but take part in the design and creation of the museums to house work of other artists?

I recently visited the Dia:Beacon, which was recreated within the old factory building by Robert Irwin. As I walked through the parking lot I recognized a sense of order and simplicity in the layout of islands of trees. But when I entered the building, I was overcome with a feeling of perfection. It wasn’t the kind of perfection with polished surfaces and sharp corners. Rather it was a feeling of wholeness, where every detail, every mark made sense and was filled with meaning. In a very natural way, the light was not uniform, but changed from luminous and bright on one end of the large open space into soft and shadowy on the other. The white of the walls changed depending on which direction I was facing. Paintings by Agnes Martin, Blinky Palermo, Sol LeWitt appeared to hum and vibrate, to recede into the walls, or to melt into them. As if unwrapping a Raku cup, I was seeing everything for the first time, with a heightened awareness and a pleasant feeling of finding myself seeing without the hierarchy of preconceived meanings. The texture on the floor and the treatment of windows was just as important as the lines on the painting, they were both responsible for what I was experiencing.

The inquiry into relationships between emotional/ perceptual and conceptual experiences of art questions the function of a traditional museum. Walking away with the sum of experiences becomes vital to seeing artwork and opening ourselves to its meaning. By Irwin’s measure, a work of art succeeds when it challenges our perceptions to such a degree as to cause us to reconsider our environment and invest it, and ourselves, with greater potential:
Now we are presented and challenged with the infinite, everyday richness of “phenomenal” perception (and the potential for a corresponding “phenomenal art,” with none of the customary abstract limitations as to form, place, materials and so forth) – one which seeks to discover and value the potential for experiencing beauty in everything. (9, p.145)

Bibliography

1. Robert Irwin Getty Gardern, Lawrence Weschler, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2002
2. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Lawrence Weschler, University of California Press, 1982
3. Occluded Front James Turrell, Edited by Julia Brown, The lapis Press, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1985
4. James Turrell, Long Green, Turske & Turske, Zurich
5. James Turrell, The Art of Light and Space, Craig Adcock, University of California Press, 1990
6. Being and Circumstance, Notes Toward a Conditional Art, Robert Irwin, The Lapis Press in conjunction with the Pace Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1985
7. James Turrell, Light & Space, exhibition organized by Barbara Haskell, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1980
8. Robert Irwin, edited by Russell Ferguson, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 1993
9. Robert Irwin. Notes Towards A Model. Catalog: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1977
10. Some Notes on the Nature of Abstraction, Perception and Pictorial Representation. Edited by Calvin Nodine, Praeger Publishing, 1979
11. James Turrell: Into the Light (exhibition catalog), The Mattress Factory, 2002
12. James Turrell: The Roden Crater Project, essays by Craig Adcock and John Russell, University of Arizona Museum of Art (Tuscon), 1986
13. James Turrell: The Other Horizon, edited by Peter Noever, MAK (Vienna, Austria) in association with Hatje Cantz Verlag (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany), 2002
14. Robert Irwin, MOCA, Rizzoli