Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

When this book first appeared in 1982, it introduced readers to Robert Irwin, the Los Angeles artist "who one day got hooked on his own curiosity and decided to live it." Now expanded to include six additional chapters and twenty-four pages of color plates, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees chronicles three decades of conversation between Lawrence Weschler and light and space master Irwin. It surveys many of Irwin's site-conditioned projects--in particular the Central Gardens at the Getty Museum (the subject of an epic battle with the site's principal architect, Richard Meier) and the design that transformed an abandoned Hudson Valley factory into Dia's new Beacon campus--enhancing what many had already considered the best book ever on an artist.

"Robert Irwin, perhaps the most influential of the California artists, moved from his beginnings in abstract expressionism through successive shifts in style and sensibility, into a new aesthetic territory altogether, one where philosophical concepts of perception and the world interact. Weschler has charted the journey with exceptional clarity and cogency. He has also, in the process, provided what seems to me the best running history of postwar West Coast art that I have yet seen."--Calvin Tomkins

'\'Lawrence Weschler\\\'s many books include Mr. Wilson\\\'s Cabinet of Wonder, Vermeer in Bosnia, and Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, which won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.\''

A Note on the Illustrations

A Further Note on the Drifting Present in the Narrative That Follows

Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (1982)

Introduction

Lifesource

1. High School (1943-1946)

2. Childhood (1928-1943)

3. Army, Schooling, Europe, and Early Work (1946-1957)

The Narrows (Part 1)

4. Ferus (Los Angeles/ New York)

5. The Early Ferus Years

From Abstract Expressionism through the Early Lines (1957-1962)

6. The Late Ferus Years: The Late Lines (1962-1964)

The Narrows (Part 2)

7. The Dots (1964-1967)

8. The Discs (1967-1969)

9. Post-disc Experiments and Columns (1968-1970)

Delta

Prelude

10. Teaching

11. Art and Science (1968-1970)

12. Playing the Horses

13. The Room at the Museum of Modern Art (1970)

Debouchement

Oceanic

14. The Desert

15. Being Available in Response

16. Some Situations (1970-1976)

17. Reading and Writing

18. The Whitney Retrospective Down to Point Zero (1977)

19. Since the Whitney: Return to the World (1977-1981)

Present All Around

20. Seeing Isn't Doing (1985)

21. Play It as It Lays and Keep it in Play

The Irwin Retrospective at MOCA in Los Angeles(1993)

22. When Fountainheads Collide: Robert Irwin at Richard Meier's Getty (1997)

23. Heaven: Irwin and Meyerowitz at the Dia (2000)

24. Irwin in his Seventies (2007-2008)

Afterword: On Robert Irwin and David Hockney

Acknowledgements

Bibliographic notes

Index