Being and Circumstance Notes Toward a Conditional Art

Robert Irwin, who is one of the most important artists of this era, was a seminal figure in "Light and Space" art. He began as an Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1950s, and was for some time (but is no longer) an artist who produced no art obejcts. Irwin's philosophical and aesthetic theories are so far-reaching that only now, some twenty years after they were first posited, has the art world begun to recognize that his questions about perception come to bear upon the definition of art itself. In the 1960s, his disc paintings succeeded in "breaking the edge of the canvas," with the resultant effect that the space surrounding the work became equally important. In the 1970s, Irwin created room-environment pieces of a phenomenal or non-object nature across the United States. Comprised solely of light, string, or nylon scrim, these works placed the responsibility upon the viewer in order to bring him to a position where he could "perceive himself perceiving" - "The Mondrian was no longer on the wall - the viewer was in the Mondrian." In the last ten years, Irwin's sculptural aesthetic and his philosophical theories have merged to provide the impetus behind a major body of sculpture created in response to a specific site, situation, or locale. Irwin's importance as an artist lies not only in the beauty and clarity of his precendent-setting work, but in his theoretical contribtion, which provides a framework by which all phenomenal works can be examined. This book, written by the artist, lays out his theoretical position and documents the working processes behind seventeen major sculpture projects created over the past decade. -- from dust jacket.