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IRWIN, Robert. “The Narrows, part I” and “The Narrows, part II” From Lawrence Weschler. Seeing Is Forgetting the Name the Thing One Sees: Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin. Berkeley: UC Press, 2008, pp. 43-117

“Ferus was like a magnet. It was an energy level, a level of conviction, an attitude about art, a general attitude about the significance of the work, a sense that we were all at the right place at just the right time.” p.5

“that it was indeed precisely the abstract expressionist project to fulfill cubism’s initial ambition of collapsing the artificial distinctions between figure and ground” p.9

“…the control of nuance. And the fact that you were meant to hold them meant that they could only be experienced privately, intimately.” p.11

“shapes on a paintirig are just shapes on a canvas unless they start acting on each other and really, in a sense, multiplying” p.12

“That’s what a good Vermeer has, or a raku cup, or a Stonehenge. And when they’ve got it, they just jump off the goddamn wall at you. They just, bam!” p.12

“Here we have the principle of limitation, the only saving principle in the world. The more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention.” Kierkegaard’s young poet p.16

“At first I just placed the two lines intuitively. But then I said to myself, ‘Who really put those two lines on like that?’ Was it really spontaneous intuition or was it rather cultural indoctrination?(…) So when I go up and put two lines on the canvas, did I put them on? Or was I simply reflecting this whole baggage that I’m carrying around?” p.18

“look at them perceptually, you find that your eye ends up suspended in midair, midspace or midstride: time and space seem to blend in the continuum of your presence You lose your bearings for a moment. You finally end up in a totally meditative state. The thing is you cease reading and you cease articulating and you fall into a state where nothing else is going on but the tactile, experiential process.” p.19

“to one who is in fact present. Back at home, you may remember what it felt like to stand before the painting, the texture of the meditative state it put you in, but the canvas itself, its image in your mind, will be

evanescent. 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.” p.20

“There’s a danger in spelling these recollections out so lucidly that your reader gains the impression that at the t”ime I knew what I was doing and where all this was leading in some sort of intellectual way, You have to make it very clear to anyone who might read your essay, especially any young artist who might” happen to pick it up, that my whole process was really an intuitive activiry in which all of the time [ was only putting one foot in front of the othet, and that each step was not thn resolved. Most of the time I didn’t have any idea where I was going; J had no real intellectual clarity as to what it was I thought I was doing.” p.24PDF=p.89

“the answers seemed to matter less and less: [ was becoming much mote of a question person than an answer person.” p.89

“”The end result in terms of this curved canvas was that on the level of physicality, the curved read as more complex than the flat. But on the level of imagery – well, there was no imagery at  all. In other words, there was no overt sense in which the thing was curved. You didn’t say, ‘Ah, a curved canvas,’ and attach it to an idea. You only picked it up subliminally, this added energy. So in a way that’s a perfect example of what I was talking about, in other words, that I could maximize the energy or the physicality of the situation and minimize the identity or idea or imagery of the situation.” p.94

“What stays in the museum is only the art-object, not valueless, but not the value of art. The art is what has happened to the viewer.” p.95