Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees – Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin (Expanded Edition) - Hardcover

Weschler, Lawrence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520256085 ISBN 13: 9780520256088

Publisher: University of California Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

"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

From the Inside Flap

"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

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520256085
• ISBN 13: 9780520256088
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352