Robert Irwin is an artist known for his site-specific light and space installations that aim to draw viewers into contemplating phenomenology and their own experience. The document discusses Irwin's origins and artistic evolution, including his intense period producing canvases with minimal straight lines and later questioning if it's possible to paint without an image or linear mark. It also examines Irwin's Venice studio and how contemporary artists like Warhol, Turrell, and Eliasson have redefined the concept of an artist's studio.

1. Robert Irwin
The Beauty of Questions

2. Note
Taking
in the form of a Haiku
5-7-5

3. Financial Crisis
Stalled too many customers
CEO no more

4. Note
Taking
via Twitter
#butyques
(140 characters)

5. Light + Space Art
Origins

6. Art +
Science
Robert Irwin, James
Turre%, with Ed
Wortz at CalTech

7. Solitude
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

8. Irwin had taken the means of traditional
painting right to the edge, but he was still
balancing on this side of the edge.

9. Phenomenology
Irwin says, "The real beauty of philosophy is the
examination of your own moment, your own being in
circumstance."
"When people walk into a gallery where I’ve installed
some of the things I’ve been doing recently, a lot of
them say, "Oh, it’s an empty room. The question then,
of course, is empty of what?" The point of Irwin’s work
is to draw people into a place once considered too
incidental to have meaning. For an artist to make the
viewer a critical player by inscribing his or her specific
experience into the work is a humanistic goal.

11. During a period of intense activity—holed up in his studio for
fifteen-hour days, seven days a week, for months on end—he
produced ten canvases, each with two straight lines hand-
splayed over a monotone ground, into which they virtually
disappeared. Although the lines’ placement had been
painstakingly calibrated for the most neutral effect, each
canvas still read as “a painting of two lines,” and Irwin next
wondered, “Is it possible to paint a painting without subject
and without linear mark?”

12. During the sixties, therefore, Irwin
systematically pursued the mystery of aesthetic
presence, dismantling the activity of painting
through a series of progressive questionings—
or, more properly phrased, bringings-into-
question—at each stage stripping away the
inessential elements of the art act while
simultaneously opening up his perceptions to a
whole range of experience that had previously
been excluded.
“Is it possible to paint a painting without
image?”

13. Connections

14. The Artist’s Studio
Traditional

15. en plein air

16. Artist + Patron

17. Artist at Work

18. The Artist’s Studio
Contemporary Examples

19. Warhol’s “Factory”
The Factory was the hip hangout
for artsy types, amphetamine
users, and the Warhol superstars.
It was famed for its
groundbreaking parties.

20. Robert
Irwin
Venice, CA
studio on Market Street,
1970

21. St-Exupery / Turrell

22. Studio Olafur Eliasson forces the
visiting critic to reconsider what an
artist’s studio encompasses, and the
critic’s relationship to it. For the most
part, this is due to the studio’s labyrinth-
like complexity—the bewildering depth
and range of projects and people in play.
http://www.olafureliasson.net/
studio/pdf/
Sternberg_Press_Coles_Eliasson.pdf

23. Tate Modern - London

24. Olafur Eliasson’s
Weather
Project

25. Define: Artist’s Studio
What does it do? What is it for?

26. The Guggenheim
Frank Lloyd Wright’s design transformed by Turre%

27. What do artists DO?

28. FREE ASSOCIATION
EXERCISE
Attitudes about
Artists