permission
By now it’s apparent how deeply I’ve fallen for Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin. (Weschler’s name is more commonly associated with his Pulitzer Prize-winning Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders).
I had thought when I first picked up the book that it would be a series of formal interviews, but it’s nothing like that. Instead it feels like you’re in Irwin’s car right beside him, Weschler in the backseat, and you’re passing the California landscape and listening to Irwin talk, and Weschler’s holding Irwin’s words and directing them at the landscape, at his paintings, and drawing lines to the past and future. I confess that I didn’t know much at all about Robert Irwin before I read the book, and in some ways I still don’t care about him in particular. He asks me to look past him toward my own hopes and observations, to see the world again.
What the book does is it gives me permission. Again and again, the book here in my studio with me, it gives me permission to be here, doing whatever, regardless of whatever. Irwin lives the questions. He can spend a month staring at a line he painted on an otherwise blank canvas, staring at it, napping, staring at it, napping. And by the end of the year maybe he’s made five paintings, five lines, and maybe he doesn’t even care about them anymore, that’s not the point. Maybe that takes him to the desert for a few weeks, and maybe he returns with nothing but a new sense of light. He is pushing himself in ways that only he can see, trying to understand human perception. And by the end of his life he is even more in love with the world. At eighty years old, when the book closes, he can’t live long enough to celebrate in his own quiet way the power of human perception. How many can say that? Being beside him in the car, it’s huge and it’s also — strange word for an art book — comforting. In some ways he lives the life of a monk, secluded in his studio caring about questions that almost no one else can see, and he’s a good person — a good man. And he’s also normal. He loves Coca-cola.
I could quote from the book all year, but here’s one more beautiful passage that captures both Irwin’s energy and Weschler’s writing (p. 235):
If you spend any time with Irwin, you’re likely to notice that he has two quintessential gestures. He’ll be rolling along, expounding at length, and then, at a certain moment, he’ll bring his hand up, thumb and fingers bunched together, like a tulip, which he then proceeds to open out, in a blossoming — his whole face opening, his eyebrows riding up his broad forehead, a bemused grin spreading across his face. It’s an easy gesture of openness and release. You’ve got to keep your sense of humor, he may say; at a certain point, you’ve just got to let things go. The tulip opening. All I’m saying — ppfff, the tulip opening — is that the wonder is still there. Then, at other times, his entire being will seem to focus, to concentrate: his face will scrunch up, his eyes will narrow, he’ll seem to throw all his body weight behind his arm as it screws an imaginary anchor into an invisible massif before him — a gesture gritty with determination. In fact, sometimes he’ll even grunt — mmmff. I mean, either you’re going to do it or you’re not going to do it, and if you’re going to do it you’ve got to get in there and — mmmff — do it. You’ve got to take all that and somehow, man — mmmff — you’ve got to nail it. You really have to bite the bullet if you’re going to do philosophy; halfway doesn’t count for anything and there are no excuses. There are all sorts of excuses, and good ones, for not beating the shit out of yourself, but if you’re going to pursue certain lines of thought, take on certain tasks, well — mmmff — you’ve really got to make the commitment.
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I talk about Irwin’s contradictions, and, in a sense, this is one of the core ones. Because here’s an artist who tries time and again to nail down beatitude. He wants to take all that bliss, all that serenity, all that wonder, and — damn it — he wants to batten it down. He wants to batten it down tight and then — ppfff, the tulip opening — to simply let it go.
