Who's Afriaid of Red Yellow Blue

                I have mentioned in class that one of my favorite artists is Robert Irwin, an abstract expressionist who eventually abandoned painting because he became more interested with the environment that a work of art occupies rather than the work of art himself. Much of Irwin's work is phenomenological, focusing on the act of seeing rather than the work as an object to be considered. In this way, Irwin is a deeply philosophical artist, preoccupied with human experience as it relates to the world. Irwin’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue? is a great introduction to Irwin's ideas. A take on a Barnett Newman abstract painting of the same title, this installation is composed of 6 large reflective rectangular panels – two red, two yellow and two blue. The panels, placed side by side linearly in the middle of the room, drawing on a classic sense of perspective. Further, the white emptiness of the room in which the artwork is installed is necessary experience the full visual effect that the installation represents in an instant.

       The panels, all of the same size, are inescapably large. When entering the room, one first encounters the red panels, then the yellow panels and the blue ones at the far end of the room. Purposefully set side by side, each panel is highly reflective and when looking straight on from the entrance to the installation, one can begin to the see the form of the other panels inside of the front red panel in the foreground. Looking straight on at the work from the entrance, as if to see red first, then yellow and then blue descending off into space, the effects of absorption and reflection confront the viewer. Not only does one detect the other panels and lights in the highly reflective surface, but this very detection alters the physical nature of the apprehended panel itself. What one had initially detected red becomes something much more than color and form but a mirror by which to reconsider one’s connection notions of absolute color. Whatever opaque understanding of what constitutes something as red or yellow or blue is reconstructed in Irwin’s installation. The composition of the panels in conjunction with the light filtering into the space renders the viewer’s vision momentarily changed. As one walks around the installation, each panel takes on new life – the content of each transformed by virtue of its highly reflective surface as well as the light and space of the room.  The colors themselves are reflected onto one another, and something like yellow on yellow becomes much more than color.

Providing the viewer with a new set of relationships, Irwin takes the most familiar and basic elements of vision, the primary colors, and represents them in a new challenging way meant to make the viewer aware of their complacent knowledge of the world. Irwin forces the viewer to go beyond merely looking and into apprehension, beginning to see according to the work of art rather than merely looking at it.

Martin Heidegger’s, The Origin of the Work of Art asks the fundamental question: what is the source of the nature of the so-called work of art? Heidegger indentifies works of art as “naturally present as thing” insofar as the work can be “shipped like coal.” However, a thing is “not merely an aggregate of traits, nor an accumulation of properties by which that aggregate arises” yet, when apprehended, the work of art seems to posses qualities that are self-evident. Heidegger argues that in order to fully assess the “undisguised presence” of the work of art, we must disassociated our prior conceptions that have nothing to do with the specificity of the object.

Adopting this notion of specificity and greater meaning the physical composition of the object itself, Irwin aims to generate inquiry by presenting something other than a mere object. Appropriating nothing, Irwin open’s up our vision to the conditions in which an object exists; discarding the disclosed being of a thing in favor of fully present energy. In this way, Irwin’s installations participate in Heidegger’s notion that “the work belongs, as a work, uniquely within the realm opened up by itself,” controlling the present conditions of a work in order to reveal the conditions by which experience all things – through the apprehension of light and space.

 For my senior thesis, I would like make use of contemporary art examples, mainly minimalist and post-minimalist art, in order to express how the performance of a body in space instantiates philosophical inquiry and is related to philosophical theory. In other words, an interaction with the space that Irwin can affected the viewer in such a way to direct  towards concepts that the viewer may have had. I think I am going to use Martin Heidegger, Micheal Fried, Judith Butler and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.