“garden art”">“garden art”

Set in the fake for­est of UCSD’s euca­lyp­tus groves is one my favorite art­works. Robert Irwin’s Two Run­ning Vio­let V Forms was installed in 1983 as part of the cam­pus’ Stu­art Col­lec­tion of site-specific out­door art. The piece, like much of the artist’s out­put, is a sub­tle pres­ence that takes a while to absorb.

Here’s how you might encounter it, approach­ing on a path through the trees:
irwinencounter.jpg

The piece is pretty unas­sum­ing and is almost not there. Stain­less steel posts raise two V-shaped runs of a tight blue-violet col­ored chain-link mesh up into the tree canopy. That’s basi­cally all there is to it, mate­ri­ally at least, which of course would be basi­cally say­ing the same thing as a Mark Rothko paint­ing is a piece of stretched cloth with some paint applied to it.

Once you add some light, the magic hap­pens. Depend­ing on where you stand and depend­ing on how the light hits it, the piece’s pan­els are either almost trans­par­ent or absolutely opaque. What looks trans­par­ent sub­tly dark­ens and col­ors what you view through it. The pan­els that appear opaque accept shad­ows of the sur­round­ing branches grace­fully.

irwincorner.jpg

Move around the work and things change. What starts out trans­par­ent turns opaque; what begins as opaque dis­solves into a blue-violet vapor. Vis­its dur­ing sunny weather end up being sub­tly dif­fer­ent from those on over­cast days. Like the liv­ing trees around it, the piece responds to the weather and its surroundings.


irwinlayers.jpg


irwinlongside.jpg

To the gen­eral pub­lic Robert Irwin is now prob­a­bly most famous–to me unfor­tu­nately so–for design­ing the Cen­tral Gar­den at the J. Paul Getty Museum in LA. It’s a beau­ti­ful and inter­est­ing gar­den, but not one that shows off what he does best. The Getty web­site talks about the gar­den as “always chang­ing, never twice the same,” which any gar­dener would say about their own gar­den. But it also is a descrip­tion I’d apply to the piece at UCSD.

It’s inter­est­ing that the Run­ning Vio­let V Forms, from 20 years ear­lier than the Getty gar­den, also has a botan­i­cal ele­ment. The Stu­art Col­lec­tion descrip­tion men­tions that “[p]urple flow­er­ing ice­plant, echo­ing but not match­ing the color of the chain link, is planted under the fence.” When he was work­ing on the Getty gar­den, Irwin was quoted declar­ing him­self not to be a gar­dener, and of his work­ing with plant con­sul­tants to com­plete the design. This is where bring­ing in a plant con­sul­tant at UCSD might have resulted in a dif­fer­ent art­work. Today, the ice­plants live on only as one or two lit­tle mounds that almost never bloom. You wouldn’t take them to be inten­tional parts of the art­work. Planted in the fairly deep shade of the under­story, these sun-loving suc­cu­lents live out a mea­ger exis­tence, deprived of the very light that gives life to the art­work high overhead.

March 17 2008 | Categories: art • places | Tags: • • | 1 Comment »