David Ireland Part II

This weekend a friend was in town who has worked with me on a variety of projects, from music to art. One thing that we always seem to get back to is sculpture. Mike is a great fabricator. I can sketch an idea out in rough and he can quickly figure out how to build it. He also is quick to find sloppy ideas, poorly thought-out areas, and the like. We work well together and have for the almost 15 years that we have worked together. Our best work is probably in the border area between sculpture and musical instruments. Last year (or the year before, perhaps? Time flies) we had a show of sound sculptures in a gallery in San Diego, where Mike lives.

I also like going to museums with Mike, because he can talk about art well and has the ability to really look at it critically (an ability that is increasingly rare these days). So we went to the Oakland Museum.

Amalia is not into looking at art for the length of time that we are, and Melanie was not too crazy about the Ireland show the first time she went, so they went off to the Natural History section to look at animals. So Mike and I had a good hour or so to digest the Ireland exhibit.

I was at least as impressed by the Ireland show the second time as I was the first time. The art babble on the wall text bugged me just about the same, but one thing really got to me. The curator made the claim that Ireland was somehow bucking convention by using "dirt" in his paintings, "a material not usually associated with making art." Well, I mentally ran through the contents of my paint box and have to ask: what, pray tell, are terre verte, yellow ochre, Burnt Umber, and that is not even thinking about terra cotta, if not varieties of dirt? Since I do not like dyes, almost my entire paint box was dug up somewhere.

Certainly Ireland's dirt is less refined than the dirt that Windsor and Newton dig up and grind into linseed oil, but then so are some of the lesser brands. Ireland's dirt looks like dirt, but so does Moran's or Watteau's, when that effect is needed.

Another idiotic claim was made about one of Ireland's projects involving turning a house into a sort of walk-in sculpture. The inevitable quote was on the wall about painting and walls and dissolving and Zen and all that, along with expressions of astonishment that Ireland saw the walls themselves as integral to the art.

I can think of a little chapel in Rome or a certain duke's ceiling or many other examples where the walls were the art. Sure they had figurative works on them, but so what? Are audiences really that stupid that they think that all art is portable?

Anyway, the low level of curatorial babble has been well-documented and will provide fodder for the next generation to tear the current one to pieces. What stands and will continue to stand is the art, which, all concepts and fads and trickeries aside, must be formally sound. Ireland might be smitten with all the Zenesque goofiness he talks about, but when it comes down to it, he understands form. His sculptures, many of which are assemblages of commonplace items, have a way of etching themselves into the memory. His later works on paper show that he has paid careful attention to Diebenkorn, Ryman and Oliveira (and ignoring the sometimes tedious trends in Olliveira's work).

Even his large chairs (for Bay Area folks who are not going to make it to the museum - the giant chair outside the Emeryville IKEA is one of his), reminiscent of Oldenberg, share in the ability to dance on the edge of good sculptural form and whimsy. I don't know if Ireland is going to be remembered as a great figure in late 20th century art or simply as a good local example (for more on the deprovincialization of American art, read Teachout's About Last Night - he has been talking about this recently), but he provides us with a model of how late modernist ideas of art can still work to create interesting pieces.