Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

In 1977, a Whitney Museum retrospective of the work of Robert Irwin, probably the single most influential contemporary California artist, was condemned by one critic as "a repudiation of art and life." In the artist's own view, the retrospective represented "the opportunity to mark an X at the point where I jumped off" but his dramatic leap was not the suicide of his art. Rather, as Lawrence Weschler explains in this biography, the vast, almost empty room included in the Whitney show was as inseparable from the continuous transcendent motion of Irwin's unique artist development. As Weschler charts that development, he demonstrates that Irwin's work is a vibrant celebration of the aesthetic richness of the everyday world. Weschler bases his account on hundreds of hours of conversation with Irwin. The richly anecdotal quality of Weschler's narrative, recording the concrete reality of Irwin's aesthetic evolution, afford a rare understanding of the influences that have shaped modern art. -- From publisher's description.