The Brooklyn Rail

I was riding up the elevator in the Whitney Museum’s Marcel Breuer building in the spring of 1977, “minding my own business” as it were, and unaware of a forthcoming shock, when the large elevator doors opened. I was stunned and thrown backwards by a John Cage-type experience of nothing. At first, I timidly stood still, but then with the danger of a closing elevator door, I stepped out onto the fourth floor of the museum where I encountered Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977) by Robert Irwin. I began to perambulate the space that I thought I had known from earlier visits, but it was an entirely unfamiliar and revitalized experience of that gallery. There were no interior walls at all and no artificial lighting either. The so-called cyclops window at the north end of the gallery was the only light source, from which a ray with imprecise edges came forth. As the apartment building across 75th Street is taller than the Whitney, and the window is north facing, the light was gentle and diffused across the dark stone floor and coffered concrete ceiling.

What had at first thrown me off my bearings so dramatically were the only actual physical touches by Irwin in the empty space. He had installed a huge sheet of scrim from the ceiling of the seventeen-and-a-half-foot tall space to five and a half feet from the floor; it hung across the north-south, 117-foot span of the gallery, with a metal bar at the bottom to steady it. Though mighty in dimension, the semi-transparent scrim had a lighter-than-air, evanescence. On the wall encircling the entire gallery, Irwin had drawn a thin black line in ink at five and a half feet above the ground, thereby rhyming with the scrim. These simple physical elements together with the ethereal light created that initial sense of dislocation and wonder which I experienced from the elevator entrance to this work of art. All the physical characteristics of the space, especially what I thought I had known from previous visits, were undone.

As I slowly circumnavigated the space, I investigated virtually every inch of the gallery as well as the geometrical relationships between the structural elements. I experienced light in an almost breathless way, and realized that I was in the presence of an artwork like no other in my experience until then. It was as if a painting by Mark Rothko had achieved lift off, or that Barnett Newman’s “zip” had become materialized, however insubstantially, in that shaft of light from the window.

If one were to record a physical description of Irwin’s work for a label or catalogue, one surely ought to include, along with the scrim, metal bar, and ink, the volume of light, if quantifiable, and even its level of lumens. In the interest of completeness, the overall spatial volume of the room should be recorded on such a label, too. Furthermore, and because there was not much of a there there, the sounds from outside the gallery could be listed in the manner of John Cage, in this physical report of Irwin’s endeavor.

With the Whitney work, Irwin had carried the vocabulary of 1960s Minimalism to the arena of a total work of art, a 1970s style Gesamtkuntswerk. Here was site-specificity at its most natural, with the site being an exquisite ally in enhancing the viewer’s experience. Indeed, in my subsequent experiences, Breuer’s architectural achievement never again induced an equal aesthetic thrill.

Speaking of thrills, Irwin’s remarkable work offered an exhilarating experience of both emptiness and nothing, and the fulsome potential of those qualities. It was a refreshed idea of the art experience and the physical character of a work of art. On these quests, Irwin had, of course, only added to the discourse, but he had done so with a panache and decisiveness that stood out for me. Because of its scale, tautness, drama, and sheer sensory inclusiveness, the Whitney work was an exemplar for this type of art, which was rather dryly dubbed “installation art.”

My own work as a young curator was much influenced by this experience. Two years later, for the then-named University Art Museum, Berkeley, I organized an exhibition entitled Andre, Buren, Irwin, Nordman: Space as Support. My title was intended to ironically amplify Greenbergian discussions about the support of a painting defining its limits and field of endeavor. Later, in 2003, I wrote a book entitled Understanding Installation Art: From Duchamp to Holzer, in which I sought to survey the breakthrough of installation art through the whole of the twentieth century, an endeavor that was initiated in my experience by Robert Irwin’s work.