Inferior Quotations

IQ: This is an excellent documentary of a really thoughtful artist. Are you in a hurry? Fast Forward to my favorite scene. This DVD’s great; no stupid previews it goes straight to the menu.

Robert Irwin: The question is: What is the role of art? I mean what is it that art does.. that is a unique contribution to the overall dialogue of our being in the world.

The first thing you have to do is separate art from all the myths that are wrapped around it, and the most powerful myth is to mix up the object wi’the subject.

The subject of art is a non-thing; we’re talking about feelings. An’ these feelings have values for us that is they enhance they enrich, they.. make our lives more interesting.

And art really is a continual investigation of our potential as human beings to incorporate those values in to our lives.

The artist essentially shows you the world in ways you have not seen it before, and brings you to look at it again.

The beauty of all this is that it’s totally free. It’s not about owning; it’s not about possession. It’s about seeing it’s about being aware, b’cause it’s aroun’ you all the time. An’ what you learn from really spending time with art is an awareness o’the world which has the potential of a richer life at every moment.

Robert Irwin: I started essentially alone in the studio, having to sort out the whole issue for my self as to why I was there and what art was about for me. I had to s-really put my nose to the grindstone; I had to put every thing else aside. So it was not a very graceful act it was a very obsessive kind of act and I think a lot of people still see me as this obsessive person, but it was some thing I had t’do.

Robert Irwin: People have a lot of difficulty people that’re sort of locked in to painting have a lot of deal— a lot of trouble dealing with things that are outside of that realm, and although I been doing that for twenty years there’s still a lot o’resistance so at least that is a possibility.

Robert Irwin: Over a period of time, being alone in the studio, the paintings began to talk t’ me. They set up a set of questions which I had to address, I had to pay attention to.

And uhm one o’ the things about questions is that as you start to act on them you’re always over your head. You’re actually alllways flying in a way by the seat o’your pants.

Pshoo. Ugh, beginn’ to creak.

For example I coulda stopped at the point o’ being a painter, and gone on with infinite variations o’ that. But after a while when you get involved with what you’re doing an’ it begins to feed back to you and you begin to understand the possibilities an’ the consequences of it, an’ you become hooked on it. You sort of wanna see it through you wanna understand where it’s going.

Robert Irwin: Over a long period of time this inquiry has taken me to places that I had never thought I would be. I think a lot o’ people are not sure I’m even an artist any more that I’m even playing the game any more. There’s like a frame of reference which we use, we’ve decided whether it’s art or whether it’s not whether it’s beautiful or not beautiful. An’ the idea of actually questioning that context really develops a problem for people. They forget that we made those rules. We define them as human beings, an’ we at times as human beings have t’ redefine them.

IQ: There’s a lil foreshadowing with the styrofoam Winchell’s cup.

Robert Irwin: I’d started dancin’ with the door knob at home in-in my bed room.

Robert Irwin: And the whole thing got in to a real smooth, so when the moves were made they were made like so ya know; bvamf-vamf-vaow, hheh-heh! h-heh!

Robert Irwin: And uhm I had this one of those niice moments th’t you get once in a great while where you’re not shittin’ your self, when you actually for just that one moment actually look at your work not all colored by your needs and your desires and your wan’ing to like it, but actually seeing it cold turkey, and it was terrible. I mean it was terrrible. An’ that’s when I started beginning to be an artist was on the basis o’ that. I looked at it and said Oh my god what am I doing, y’know.

IQ: Wait a.. minute. “Robert Irwin” is in Akzidenz-Grotesk on the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris poster from 1994, but in Meta on the similar DVD cover from 1997. Why Meta.

Robert Irwin: A lot of people thought I had come to point zero that there was no place to go. That I had now engaged the space around them the issue was how do I actually deal with them I mean like what kind of an artist am I.

Robert Irwin: An’ the idea of literally looking at some body weave their way through all the most complex kinds of thoughts about why an’ who we are an’ why we do what we do an’ how we think. ’t’s a marvelous thing. I’ve tried to do that to some degree about why I’m an artist an’ how I’m an artist an’ it comes from this process of self-educating.

Robert Irwin: There it is right there. Laowww. We gotta make a u-turn. The reason I come alll the way to this one is because they have the right kind of ice, an’ they’ll pour it the way I wan’ it poured. An’ there’s a difference.

Robert Irwin: When I was in Las Vegas spending twelve hours a day reading philosophy an’ the only time I would stop was to go get a Coke, an’ at one point I suddenly realized there’s no sense having one unless you have a really great one. An’ so I put it all together: the ride, the music; I’d take my self a little break. It’s my philosopher’s walk.

Robert Irwin: I could argue that the only real moment is that first moment of actually being there, running your hands in’imately over a situation, and being in the presence of some thing that really has impact on you.

Every step from there is by degrees an abstraction. The idea of photography is a classic example in which we think the photograph can actually some how emulate or record the moment; it does, but only in the terms of images. But it has none of the in— suh-subsidiary information, which is uh the quality of the light, the feeling of th’ of-of this rock on my on my ass right now. Uhh no sense of the way the breeze is blowing across me. Uh the sound in the sense of its relationship to the space in distance: close behind me, far in front of me. The— all those things overlap and coalesce and make a moment.

IQ: Yess the moiré pattern and the chromatically aberrative noise, and the zig zags and fuzz, and the prismatic pauses, and the beigy yellow blur as the camera recedes from Untitled (dot painting), 1966. Wheww. Folded Hands emoji. Favorite visual in the film for sure. The spectrums peak at the height of interference (perhaps that was obvious), which is at the beginning of his sentence, so he might sound like—

Robert Irwin: Wh-ere I c-ro-sse-d o-v-er an’ re-co-g-ni-ze-d the world of phenomenon was when I really became aware that the shadow was as real as the center o’the painting.

IQ: —if you’re savorin’ the DVD on a Cars® TV, and pausin’-unpausin’-pausin’-unpausin’ and so on for different moiré arrays. Yeah an’ in the convex glass reflection of my TV are sparklin’ sunlit strands of an iridescent curtain maybe twen’y feet behind me. Metallic and prismatic. Now lemme bother you with the following quotation…

Robert Irwin: I began to slowly understand more an’ more that the real art is the experience; the viewer actually looking at what the artist has given them is an extended way of looking at the world. It’s about seeing it’s about being aware, it’s some thing that once you gain it you carry it with you all the time, and you live in an enriched world.

The beauty of all this is that it’s totally free. It is some thing that you have every moment of your life when you walk through the world you can see things and I see things that are more interesting an’ more beautiful ’n any thing I’ve ever made.

Robert Irwin: The art doesn’ reside in the object. The art in the object or the art in a set of circumstances is in a sense the opportunity for you to have this moment of awareness, this moment of really in a sense touching some thing special th-that human beings can touch. So that what you walk out of the room with some how is what’s of value.

Robert Irwin: If the value is the experience then it doesn’t die in that sense it essentially i-i-is incarnate in you you are essentially are now hacked on and are a result or a kind of collection of all those experiences. And so the idea of some thing being ephemeral or that you can own it or not own it it doesn’t make any difference. Actually i-if youu take the position that-that in fact we do proceed and that we are the important thing then nothing is lost.

Robert Irwin: The whole issue really was about context. It was not about objects at all. It was about how we perceived objects in context. The object may be there but y’don’t see it separate from or outside o’the context it’s in.

Robert Irwin: There’s nothing more interesting than plant material which catches the light and has a lot of filtering of light.