{"id":4524,"date":"2013-06-18T08:38:27","date_gmt":"2013-06-18T15:38:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=4524"},"modified":"2013-06-18T08:38:35","modified_gmt":"2013-06-18T15:38:35","slug":"hmm-empty-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2013\/06\/18\/hmm-empty-room\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Hmm, empty room\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Back at the Whitney, Tinkering With Perception<\/h1>\n

\"\"Nancy Crampton<\/em><\/p>\n

By\u00a0RANDY KENNEDY<\/a><\/p>\n

The artist Robert Irwin took over the fourth floor of the\u00a0Whitney Museum of American Art<\/a>\u00a0in 1977 with a single work that became a kind of legend, though many visitors at the time failed to see it. \u201cPeople would step out of the elevator, say, \u2018Hmm, empty room,\u2019 and hop back in before the doors shut,\u201d Mr. Irwin recalled recently.<\/p>\n

But the room was not quite empty \u2014 and in Mr. Irwin\u2019s work, \u201cnot quite\u201d can mean the entire world. He has become one of the most important artists of his generation through work that is less about objects and how they might be perceived than about perception itself. The Whitney piece was a radical experiment in dialing art down to almost nothing: simply a white translucent polyester scrim bisecting the open space, extending from the ceiling down to about eye level, with a black painted line on the wall creating the sensation of seeing floating rectangles. Daylight from one of the museum\u2019s trapezoidal windows was the only illumination. The effect, for the receptive observer, was as if the room were separating into its constituent parts.<\/p>\n

Mr. Irwin later described the work as the \u201cX at the point where I jumped off,\u201d and told the writer\u00a0Lawrence Weschler<\/a>\u00a0that he considered leaving the art world after the show. \u201cI don\u2019t know what else I would do exactly,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I\u2019m not wedded to that world at all anymore.\u201d In the end, he decided to stay. But the Whitney is not staying in its Marcel Breuer building, for which Mr. Irwin created the piece; in 2015 the museum\u00a0will move<\/a>\u00a0to a new home downtown. And as part of the rolling goodbye to the Breuer, Donna De Salvo, the museum\u2019s chief curator, long dreamed of resurrecting Mr. Irwin\u2019s piece, which has not been seen since it came down 36 years ago.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times Back at the Whitney, Tinkering With Perception Nancy Crampton By\u00a0RANDY KENNEDY The artist Robert Irwin took over the fourth floor of the\u00a0Whitney Museum of American Art\u00a0in 1977 with a single work that became a kind of legend, though many visitors at the time failed to see it. \u201cPeople would step […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4524\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}