RACHEL HAYES

Rachel Hayes, Choo Fence, Monticello, NY


Rachel Hayes, Duality of Light Without Violence, 2008

Rachel Hayes, Rainbow Quarry, Colorado Springs

If you can imagine a body of work that is the offspring of Robert Irwin and Alan Shields (remember him?), it might look something like the work of Rachel Hayes. Using translucent colored fabric, she activates spaces and sites with layered saturated color and light, and sensuous handmade tactility. Her deep sensitivity to the inherent sociological and psychologocal resonance of materials and processes imbues her work with a primal congruence that can transform our sense of place and self. Images from the artist's website.

ROBERT IRWIN at PaceWildenstein

Robert Irwin, Red Drawing White Drawing Black Painting, 2009, Detail

The title of the new Robert Irwin installation, at the PaceWildenstein 22nd Street space through February 28, is Red Drawing White Drawing Black Painting. The huge warehouse space is divided by two massive temporary walls, forming two narrow rectangular spaces, and a third "empty" space in back. The first space greets the viewer with a wall of white flourescent light in a seemingly intuitive arrangement of diagonally placed right angles. As we move around the floating wall to enter the second space, there is a high gloss black "painting" placed on the end wall of the first space. The second space presents a similar flourescent arrangement in intense red, with a glossy black panel centered on the opposite wall. In addition to the black panels, the polished concrete floor of the space reflects the array of flourescent light causing the arrangement of shapes on the walls to continue onto the floor in reverse. The black panels are not large, but offer compressed glimpses in which the reflective light and space close the loop and contain themselves, and simultaneously, allow and encourage oblique and changing ponts of view. Compared with the stealth and subtlety of much of Irwin's earlier work, this piece at first might seem overly flashy (forgive the pun). But the flash is only in the medium; there's nothing tricky going on here. Irwin is offering the viewer a moment of pure sensation -- light, space, color, reflection, movement -- a heightened sense of one's own presence and perception -- a small chunk of consciousness, isolated and enlarged.

ROBERT IRWIN

Robert Irwin, Varese Scrim, 1973 (Panza Collection)

My first encounter with Irwin’s work was in 1973 or 74 when he installed a scrim piece in a stairwell at the Fort Worth Modern Museum. The piece occupied one wall adjacent to the stairs, maybe 10 feet wide and 20 feet high, making a translucent ghost wall that was about 12 inches inside the actual wall. The effect of this piece was startling, and yes, in many ways life changing. It was my first realization of the possibility of an artwork that was not an object but a situation -- an experiential condition – something like a hallucinatory event. Of course hundreds of people walked right past the piece and didn’t even notice it. But once noticed, then truly experienced, it caused a kind of floating displacement that required a re-orientation of one’s position in space, and by doing so, called attention to the contingent nature of all perception.

One of the hallmarks of a classic hallucinogenic experience is a flood of revelatory perception accompanied by an almost total inability to articulate the specifics of those revelations. Language suddenly becomes cumbersome and overly complicated, but also completely lacking sufficient nuance or clarity to reflect the wholeness of the experience. It is the breaking down of the filtering process of language that makes such an experience possible, suggesting that “pure” experience, insofar as that exists, resides somewhere beyond such sequential constructs.

To me, this is Irwin’s great and continuing contribution, finding ways to remove art from its connection to critical discourse or from language in general, and situating it in the realm of pure experience. I can’t think of another artist who has dealt with actual space, perception and the nature of aesthetic experience as deeply, consistently and clearly. What his work seems to require and invoke is a total suspension of the incessant linearity of reason -- a surrender to the presence of pure sensation.