Out of context: Reply #118
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When one makes an object, you’re not really making the object as much as you are honing your own sensibility to make the object, your ability to decide and make choices. You do that for 50 years or 60 years and you get pretty good at it after a while because that’s what you’re really working on. They get backwards, the idea that communication is what art is about, it’s not about communication it’s about knowing.
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Art is a continual inquiry into the potential of human beings to perceive another world with an aesthetic bias. What we see is the artworld which is not art per se, it is the process of how art is being innovated, and corrupted at the same time, into the world. This is not an “either or” or “better than” proposition. Without the process of the artworld doing what it does (well or not well) the inquiry of art would be like the tree that falls in the forest, it would have no effect. The act of art is this inquiry about the potential of human beings but everything from that point on is something else. The idea of making history has been very crucial and worked when the object had a kind of permanent transcendence about it. You set up a museum and you take up the position of trying to maintain it in perpetuity. The beauty of that is the idea that it creates this record, this body of knowledge from which the world steps off and we have that as a reference point. But one of the problems is that now contemporary art won’t hold still.
- A Conversation with Robert Irwin on Light and Space III