{"id":2033,"date":"2024-01-15T12:18:38","date_gmt":"2024-01-15T04:18:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=2033"},"modified":"2024-01-15T12:18:38","modified_gmt":"2024-01-15T04:18:38","slug":"to-see-or-not-to-see-learning-from-the-late-great-robert-irwin-tourist-paintings-and-what-if-chris-burden-had-gone-to-therapy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/to-see-or-not-to-see-learning-from-the-late-great-robert-irwin-tourist-paintings-and-what-if-chris-burden-had-gone-to-therapy\/","title":{"rendered":"To See or Not to See: Learning from the Late Great Robert Irwin, Tourist Paintings, and What if Chris Burden Had Gone to Therapy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to \u201cTo See or Not to See,\u201d a\u00a0recurring column<\/a>\u00a0covering a handful of exceptional Los Angeles gallery and museum exhibitions\u2014the good, the bad, and the criminally overrated\u2014in easily digestible, bite-size pieces.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is the nature of the game we\u2019re in?\u201d the late Robert Irwin asked me during an interview in 2016. So began his standard 90-minute art school lecture, recounted in a nondescript McDonald\u2019s in San Diego. It was riveting, to be honest. In Irwin\u2019s telling, the story of modern art was a radical, heroic event: \u201c100 years of dismantling pictorial reality\u201d during which Kazimir Malevich had achieved a new artistic ground zero. Recognizing \u201cnothing they knew or loved,\u201d friends of the late Suprematist called his floating squares a desert. Malevich however, freed from the burden of pictorial representation, looked at his own paintings and saw what he described as \u201cthe supremacy of pure feeling.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not \u2018I think therefore I am,\u2019\u201d Irwin said. \u201cIt\u2019s \u2018I feel, and therefore I think, and therefore I am.\u2019 And that is the name of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

Irwin, the pioneering Light and Space artist who died last October at the age of 95, had over the course of his decades-long career diligently unraveled the great mysteries of art. Yet there he was, having just finished a McMuffin, explaining it in the simplest terms. To me, his practice has always been a profoundly spiritual endeavor. In the 1960s, he had successively stripped his work of the conventions of art-making\u2014he shed mark-making and the edges of the frame before abandoning his studio entirely\u2014like a monastic journey of abandoning one\u2019s material possessions. In his itinerant installations that sought communion with the elusive, ephemeral qualities of light, I saw the pious pursuit of the sublime. He minimized the imagery in his work to maximize its physicality, that ineffable feature that can\u2019t be captured by photographs, but only felt in person. In that 90 minutes Irwin had imparted countless bits of wisdom, all of which boil down to the most uncomplicated rubric through which to view art: the simple desire to be moved.<\/p>\n

\u201cArt is about maximizing our understanding of feelings alongside thinking,\u201d he said. \u201cI feel, I think, therefore I am.\u201d Irwin redefined my perception of the artist as the one who seeks art beyond the limits of that which we know and love, following their curiosity to its unknown ends. In this edition of \u201cTo See or Not to See,\u201d that describes the way Paul Pfeiffer\u2019s experiments in video show us the perversely religious subtext of our ordinary rituals of spectatorship. Or how Hugh Hayden<\/a> imagines the queer future and comes to delightfully absurd conclusions. Taking us on her own journey of self-actualization, Barbara T. Smith embarked on a new art form called performance. So much of what artists do involves showing us the things we don\u2019t see. \u201cPart of my shtick,\u201d Irwin often said, \u201cis to make you aware of how fucking beautiful the world is.\u201d<\/p>\n