From THE book about artist Robert Irwin, Lawrence Weschler's Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees:
"In May 1980, Robert Irwin returned to Market Street in Venice, California to the block where he’d kept a studio until 1970, the year he abandoned studio work altogether. Melinda Wyatt was opening a gallery in the building next door to his former work space and invited Irwin to create an installation.
He cleaned out the large rectangular room, adjusted the skylights, painted the walls an even white, and then knocked out the wall facing the street, replacing it with a sheer, semi-transparent white scrim. The room seemed to change its aspect with the passing day: people came and sat on the opposite curb, watching, sometimes for hours at time.The piece was up for two weeks in one of the more derelict beachfront neighborhoods of Los Angeles: no one so much as laid a hand on it."
White Flag Projects continues its "DRINKS With..." series on December 9, serving complimentary drinks from 5-7 and screening a video interview with an artist (in this case, Irwin) at 6pm. The footage is drawn from a vast but rarely screened archive of footage gathered in the 70s and 80s by Kate Horsfield and Lyn Blumenthal of the Video Data Bank at the Art Institute of Chicago. Past screenings have included Allan Kaprow, Jeremy Blake, Buckminster Fuller and Sol LeWitt; upcoming, Vito Acconci, Robert Ryman and Louise Bourgeois. This is also a great chance to see PRETHUNDERDOME, White Flag's ode to 2012, the Norway seed vault, and other subtly apocolyptic tropes. Note: this screening would also make a great two-fer with the Matta-Clark exhibit that's currently on show over at the Pulitzer. --Stefene Russell
