Art: Seeing the light
It takes chutzpah to devote an entire museum gallery to a single artwork, especially one made up only of some light bulbs and a fabric scrim.
Just a few artworks get such star treatment -- the Venus de Milo at the Louvre and Michelangelo's "David" at the Academia in Florence, for example.
So, is Robert Irwin's "Slant/Light/Volume" of that rank?
Absolutely, as Walker Art Center proves in an absorbing new installation that will be up for more than a year.
Commissioned from the California artist in 1971 for the opening of the Walker's then-new brick building, "Slant" is a light sculpture, a concept that's easier to imagine than to fabricate. Light is, by its nature, amorphous, ephemeral, impermanent and intangible. It comes and goes, changes color, responds to its environment and disappears just when you notice it.
So how do you give form or shape to this ineffable phenomenon? Is it possible to "sculpt" light so that it becomes almost palpable?
That was essentially the task Irwin set for himself in the early 1960s when he gave up abstract expressionist painting and started messing around with tiny dots of color on canvases and discs of light that seemed to hover in space, glowing without an apparent source of illumination. Those were the beginnings of his light sculptures. For the Walker commission, he was asked to create a new work for a new space, to "challenge the architecture" of an all-white, windowless gallery.
He did so by creating the illusion that one wall of the gallery was missing and that the low-ceilinged room opened into a misty void of shimmering light that stretched into infinity. The "Slant" effects came from fluorescent lights discreetly concealed above and behind a slanted "wall" of sheer fabric tautly stretched between ceiling and floor. With those prosaic materials, Irwin evoked a modern experience of the romantic sublime that rivaled the most grandiose efforts of centuries of landscape painters.
The work also helped to define a new direction in contemporary art. Irwin -- now better known for his work as a landscape architect -- came to exemplify California light-and-space art with a couple of L.A. pals, Doug Wheeler and James Turrell (whose 2005 sky-viewing chamber "Sky Pesher" overlooks the Walker's sculpture garden).
Despite its fame, Irwin's "Slant" has not been shown at the Walker since 1989. It was just a bundle of wood and fabric tucked up in storage when curator Elizabeth Carpenter first noticed it, shortly after arriving at the Walker eight years ago.
"Since Day One, I dreamed of installing this work," said Carpenter, who knew it only from photos.
The reincarnation retains its capacity to mesmerize. On a recent afternoon, Virginia Andersen, 21, a Grinnell College senior spent more than 20 minutes studying the piece. She and two friends, sisters Meredith and Caitlin Vaughan of St. Paul, were immediately drawn into the sculpture. "It's like being at a beach covered with fog,'' Andersen said.
"It feels like gravity is pulling you into the light," Meredith said.
"It's an inviting vacuum," Caitlin added.
"Like a black hole, but instead it's an inviting white hole," Andersen said.
