The World Always Draws You Back

“… you’re on a swing,and you swing way up to the top and for a split second you can see over the wall, you can see all that light, but you’re already on your way back into the world. … the world always draws you back.”

This is from forgetting the name of the thing one sees: over thirty years of conversations with Robert Irwin by Lawrence Weschler (expanded edition: 2008). I join Weschler and Irwin at the close of his 1977 Whitney retrospective:

… Sitting there in the Whitney’s coffee shop, Irwin pointed through the glass wall up at the play of shadows on a building facade across the street. “That the light strikes a certain wall at a particular time of day in a particular way and it’s beautiful,” he commented, “that, as far as I’m concerned, now fits all my criteria for art.” At the terminus of Irwin’s trajectory, when all the nonessentials had been stripped away, came the core assertion that aesthetic perception itself was the pure subject of art. Art existed not in objects but in a way of seeing.

A few months before the Whitney show, Irwin described his situation in terms of a tense, if coy, analogy. “It’s like I’m on the trapeze now, and I’m swinging in the dark. Everything feels correct, and I’m telling myself that at the top of my swing, if I let go and reach out, there’ll be another rung out there, and I’ll just swing off on that one. But only a fool lets go and reaches out until he’s somehow thoroughly weighed the consequences of letting go.”

A few days after the Whitney show opened, back in Los Angeles, Irwin seemed satisfied with the weighing.

… “The issue of my possibly no longer being involved in the art world is not a really complicated one for me,” he said. “I don’t like the art world very much anymore; it’s not what I thought it was; it’s not nearly as interesting as I thought. … “

… I asked Irwin, given all that, why he had gone to so much trouble preparing and realizing his Whitney project, and he smiled in reply: “Let’s just say that show provided me with an opportunity to mark an X at the point where I jumped off.”

Next chapter:

Almost three years had passed since the Whitney opening, and we were talking in his Westwood study. His work table was brimming over with architectural plans, aerial photographs, topographical maps. Mailing tubes were arrayed along the back wall, prepared for dispatch to places like Dallas, Columbus, Berkeley, Lake Placid, Cincinnati, Lawrence, New York city, and Seattle. Irwin was only in town for a few days …

… I asked him what had happened, I thought he had been prepared to jump off the ledge. “Ha!” he laughed. “Let’s just say I hit an outcropping about ten feet down.” He was palpably pleased with the image. “It was great — real dramatic and everything. I looked good going over the edge, looked good to everybody behind me, but I hit a rock ledge about ten feet down, and all that happened was I scratched myself up a little . . . “

… ” … progression is something which, like a wave, comes again and again and again. You step back and you start over and you do it another way, taking it down to the same point, and then repeating. And each time it’s articulated, it becomes more visible.

“After the Whitney, I might have just disappeared, and in a way that would have been nice. But as it turns out, I couldn’t. And maybe it’s for the same reason I’ve never been comfortable with the argument from certain spiritual quarters about enlightenment. I don’t doubt that those people devoted to Zen and yoga, the Krishnas and all of them, do attain an altered state of consciousness, that they are in a different place, and in a sense a nicer place. But this is not an enlightened world. And the world always draws you back.

“The fact that I can go off and stand there by myself just thinking for two hours or two days or two months doesn’t negate the fact that in two minutes I’m going to have to drive a car, listen to the news, buy a Coke, and every one of those things draws me back into the world.

“There’s a tendency to think that the ordinary has been weighed down by all the biases which ensnare it, but in another sense, it was never part of those biases. The presence of something, anything, everything, is untainted. The ordinary, could we but see it, is just as extraordinary as the highest consciousness imaginable.

“And in a way, the Whitney, far from launching my disappearance, poured me back into the world. It gave me more work than ever.”

I’m leaving out descriptions and explanations of the kind of work Irwin was getting into. Rather I’m interested in descriptions of his motivations:

… Irwin’s playing for all the marbles. And that may be one of the reasons his work is still so elusive to most people. Irving Blum, Irwin’s former dealer, expressed a common exasperation one afternoon when he commented, “There’s such a thing as having too high an ambition, so that it’s unrealizable. But whose fault is that? Society’s for not being ready to understand? No: it’s the artist’s for aiming too high and not realizing. … “

… “There are things I’ve undertaken as an artist that I will never accomplish in my lifetime,” Irwin told me one afternoon. “It’s just not possible. The kind of thing I’m envisioning, the ideas I’m entertaining, simply don’t enter society whole. There’s always a process of mediation, overlapping, intermeshing, threading into the fabric. But we’re headed there: the complexity of consciousness, its capacity to sustain being in presence in all its rich variety will be growing with each generation. Sometimes I feel on the verge of this.”

Irwin paused for a moment, lost in thought — this man who shuns metaphors and yet is so gifted by them: “It’s like you’re on a swing,” he finally said, “and you swing way up to the top and for a split second you can see over the wall, you can see all that light, but you’re already on your way back into the world. So you swing harder and you get a little higher and you see a little more, but back down into the world you go. To recognize something and then live there takes a tremendous conversion of your being. You don’t just swing up there and say, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ and stay there, hanging in midair. Hanging in midair can be nice — I did it at the Whitney. I did it in the desert, for a moment with the dots. But the world always draws you back.”

My most recent previous post from Weschler’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/