Only a mind opened to the quality of things Only a mind opened to the quality of things, with a habit of discrimination, sensitized by experience and responsive to new forms and ideas, will be prepared for the enjoyment of this art. The experience of the work of art, like the creation of the work of art itself, is a process ultimately opposed to communication as it is understood now. What has appeared as noise in the first encounter becomes in the end message or necessity, though never message in a perfectly reproducible sense. You cannot translate it into words or make a copy of it which will be quite the same thing. Meyer Schapiro, Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art The work is what it meansThe medium is the messageWhat the painting was not about
What the painting was not about That is why for many years Irwin declined to allow his work to be photographed, because the image of the canvas was precisely what the painting was not about. Indeed, the problem is even more complicated than that. For in a very real sense the achievement of these paintings was in their making, and the finished canvas at one level is only an incidental relic, a fossil of that original process of discovery: not only do you have to be present before these paintings in order to experience them, it may be that you have to have made them as well. Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees Only a mind opened to the quality of things photographyimages