This is a 46-minute lecture by the Californian artist Robert Irwin (b 1928) during an event of the Chicago Humanities Festival in January 2010. He is one of the founders of the Light and Space movement in the 1960s. His work focuses on the issues of light and space within a specific site or environment, stressing on the perceptual experience of the self within the context of its surroundings. In this lecture he talks not only about light but also its inherent element of shadow, his concept and installations. His large scale work “Scrim veil-Black rectangle-Natural Light” of 1977 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has been re-installed and is currently on view in the original site of the museum’s uptown building until September 1.
"If art is about aesthetics and perception (seeing) and knowing in action…Can we continue the dialogue for art to be limited to the equal of making?"
- Robert Irwin
Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.
- George Santayana
"Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it. "
- Robert Motherwell
"Don't love yourself in art, love the art within you"
- Stellar Adler
"Art is not only a form of action, it is a form of social action. For art is a type of communication, and when it enters the environment, it produces its effects just as any other form of action does. "
- Mark Rothko
"When a thing is seen through the consciousness of temporality, it is changed into something that is nothing. This all-engulfing sense provides the mental ground for the object, so that it ceases being a mere object and becomes art. “
- Robert Smithson