[ Lost in the Landscape ]

garden designer, artist

Any rabid gar­den enthu­si­ast vis­it­ing Los Ange­les will prob­a­bly want to put Robert Irwin’s Cen­tral Gar­den at the J. Paul Getty Museum on their list of places to visit. I’ve writ­ten about it a few times, includ­ing [ here ] and [ here ], and so have a lot of other blog­gers. Robert Irwin is also involved in an instal­la­tion of palm trees at the Los Ange­les County Museum of Art.

The garden-making is a fairly recent addi­tion to the projects of this amaz­ing artist. Before tak­ing on bio­log­i­cal mate­ri­als he cre­ated a rich body of work that plays with sub­tle ways you per­ceive light and space. Yes­ter­day I had a chance to visit a show of some work in progress to see what he’s doing these days.

To look at this image to the left you’d maybe swear that this is a paint­ing of stripes. But step into the gallery and you real­ize that these works are actu­ally made out of evenly spaced flu­o­res­cent tubes, each of which has been wrapped in gels to mod­ify their color and to pro­vide lin­ear pat­terns on the face of the bulbs. Most of Irwin’s art uses sim­ple tech­niques like this, but the more you look, the more you get pulled into them.

The effects are so sub­tle pho­tos can’t really do com­plete jus­tice to the pieces. But the pho­tog­ra­pher, Philipp Scholz Rit­ter­mann, one of our local really tal­ented cam­era guys, has made a beau­ti­ful interpretation.

You can see the ver­ti­cal lines of the tubes, the lines of the dark gels, the sub­tle col­ors the tubes cast onto the fix­tures and the spaces between them, and the del­i­cate shad­ows of the fix­tures. The tubes, the gels, the fix­tures, the shadows–everything works together to give you a qui­etly rhyth­mic progression.

If I’m remem­ber­ing the help­ful gallery folks cor­rectly, each piece has four dif­fer­ent states, with dif­fer­ent bulbs being on at dif­fer­ent times. One of the big themes of the Getty gar­den is change–which really isn’t some­thing you have to explain to a gardener–and these new pieces play with how dif­fer­ent the same arrange­ment of bulbs appears as you turn some bulbs on and off.

Take a look at my gar­den photo at the top of this post, and look how the cen­tral top­i­aries of two kinds of clipped aza­leas uses the sub­tly dif­fer­ent leaf and flower col­ors to cre­ate inter­locked for­ma­tions. Next, look at one of the flu­o­res­cent bulb pieces and notice the sub­tle inter­plays of light and shadow that make up the work. It’s the same basic prin­ci­ple, but applied to wildly dif­fer­ing mate­ri­als. As the plants in the gar­den go in and out of bloom, as the sea­sons change, the rela­tion­ship of the for­ma­tions shifts. Same goes for what hap­pens when some bulbs are on and oth­ers blacked out.

I don’t often leave an exhibit thrilled and tin­gling, but this time I did. If you can make it to the exhi­bi­tion at Quint Con­tem­po­rary Art in La Jolla, go quick, before the show closes May 1. Or if you’ll be in New York in the fall, I believe I heard cor­rectly that there’ll be a show of this work at the Pace Gallery.

April 11 2010 06:30 am | Categories: art | Tags: light and shadow • Robert Irwin

7 Responses to “garden designer, artist”

1. Tatyana on 11 Apr 2010 at 7:08 am #

   Amaz­ing! I’ve never seen any­thing like that. Thank you for the explanation.

2. Benjamin on 11 Apr 2010 at 7:13 am #

   Now this is why I garden–to make art, to tans­late, to tran­scend, to play and mix. For a while I was going to be an archi­tect, then a painter, now I’m a writer (who gar­dens). All that math and the­ory and 2d sen­so­r­ial stuff aside, gar­den­ing is the per­fect blend / har­mony of all arts. Am I wrong?

3. Pomona Belvedere on 11 Apr 2010 at 11:02 am #

   You described so well the effect of Irwin’s gar­den (I’m one of those blog­gers who has writ­ten about it), and I was fas­ci­nated to see how he incor­po­rates the idea of change into his other art works. The Getty gar­dens amaze me because they do “play with sub­tle ways you per­ceive light and space”, and because there’s always some­thing new to see — as you move through the gar­den, and through the seasons.

   Of course it helps to have a huge foundation-sponsored gar­den staff — which a friend who works at the Getty describes as the hardest-working group there.

4. tina on 11 Apr 2010 at 12:45 pm #

   Very cool! I wish I could see it in person.

5. ryan on 11 Apr 2010 at 2:38 pm #

   Really cool. Wish I could see it in person.

6. Wendy on 11 Apr 2010 at 5:47 pm #

   A great way of look­ing at things. THanks for shar­ing. Cool stuff!

7. Stevie on 13 Apr 2010 at 6:52 pm #

   I wish I were closer — it’s very very cool.

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