 Good morning. I'm Anthony Colantuano from the University of Maryland in College Park. And before I introduce the next speaker, I wanted to also add my voice to the chorus of praises for the Barnes Foundation and the beautiful job they've done in organizing everything and with a fantastic keynote speech last night and also two brilliant papers already in the bank. I dare say things are after a good start. I'm here to introduce Michael Vetter. Michael came to the University of Maryland to study American art with Professor Renee Ader, but following her retirement last year, this privilege has now fallen to our modern and contemporary art specialist, Professor Joshua Shannon, who unfortunately could not be here today. But it's my privilege to introduce Michael with department chair hat on because Michael's been an exemplary presence in our program. And because even as a non-specialist I can only marvel at the extraordinary quality of his work, especially his dissertation research on Robert Irwin's new materialism. Michael has by now accrued a long list of professional achievements. Among these I would like to mention in particular his work as a museum fellow from 2013 to 15 with the curatorial department of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. In this capacity he contributed extensive research to major exhibition catalogs and the exhibitions themselves, of course, including Robert Irwin, All the Rules Will Change, At the Hub of Things, New Views of the Collection, and Marvelous Objects, Surrealist Sculpture from Paris to New York, as well as the video exhibition Days of Endless Time. More recently in 2016 to 18 he has held a two-year assistantship at the University of Maryland Art Gallery where he's curated the exhibition Progress and Harmony for Mankind, Art and Technology Circus 1970 writing the accompanying exhibition catalog. The exhibition is the achievement of a mature scholar curator focusing on the theme of American artists using technology in the years around 1970. The exhibition includes works loaned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. We're all very proud of this exhibition and I'm sad to say it's actually closing. Today is the last day, so we'll be, I guess, packing it up Michael tomorrow and sending it off, so I'm going to miss it. It's quite amazing. The title of Michael's paper today is Robert Irwin's Desert of Pure Feeling. Thank you Dr. Collins-Winow for that introduction and thank you also to the Barnes Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania for hosting us today and thank you all for coming out to hear my talk. In 1999, artist Robert Irwin was invited to design a work for the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Established by minimalist sculptor Donald Judd in the late 1970s, the Chinati Foundation owns and maintains a group of permanent installation works by Judd and his contemporaries on the grounds of Fort D.A. Russell, a military base in Marfa that closed at the end of the Second World War. Irwin quickly settled on the base's abandoned hospital as the location for his installation work. Numerous plans for the site were proposed, but concerns about the building's structural stability led to its eventual demolition. Irwin finally settled on a design that would rebuild the hospital building from the ground up, a costly and labor intensive undertaking that was not finished until 2016. The work, called Untitled, Dawn to Dusk, is Irwin's first site-conditioned piece to be conceived as a standalone structure rather than an installation within an existing building or public space. And just as an aside, Irwin's term site-conditioned is what he prefers to the term site-specific. With its massive scale and complex design, Untitled functions as a summation of Irwin's aesthetic and conceptual interest since he ceased making oil on canvas paintings in the mid-1960s. The main structure closely mirrors the original layout of the military hospital, which was configured in a U-shape with entrances on both ends that you can see here. Irwin subtly altered the new building, however, to feature thicker concrete walls and higher windows. Inside the building, the two side corridors are bisected lengthwise by panels of scrim fabric, one in Irwin's traditional white and another in black. In the central corridor that joins the two sides, Irwin installed a series of six scrim panels from floor to ceiling with openings in the center through which viewers can walk. The panels gradually shift in tone from black to white, matching the color scheme of the two entrance corridors. And I realized that it's a little hard to visualize what this looks like from my description. So I made a little diagram. You can see here this photograph was taken where this dot is looking this way through the corridor. This one down here was taken looking this way up through the east corridor and then this photograph was taken here looking this way through the west corridor. For the courtyard outside, Irwin designed a garden featuring a group of Palo Verde trees and blue grama grass enclosed by a strip of weathered steel, which raises the grassy area slightly higher than the side walk around it. At the center of the garden is a large sculpture constructed from textured basalt that was specially quarried from Washington State. The basalt columns are all uniquely sized and grow in height from the outer perimeter to the center, forming a large solid shape akin to a monolith. The overall complex draws on the full variety and range of Irwin's artistic practice, combining his indoor scrim installations of the 1970s with his later work in garden design and architectural modeling. In this presentation, I will use Irwin's untitled as a lens through which to consider the critical reception of his work and its relationship to the legacy of minimalist sculpture. In contrast to art historians who have described Irwin's practice as a retreat towards traditional modernist sensibilities, I outlined the ways in which his work fosters the kind of embodied observation and close looking that was central to the minimalist project. I conclude with a comparison between Irwin's untitled and Donald Judd's Chinati installation of the untitled works in Mill Aluminum, arguing that both works are invested in immaterial and metaphysical qualities of light and negative space that earlier art historians have been eager to downplay or ignore. In an interview about his Marfa work for the magazine Texas Monthly, Irwin recounts a story involving the seminal white paintings of Russian modernist, Kazmir Malyevich. When confronted with Malyevich's rigorously abstract canvases, his contemporaries are said to have exclaimed, you've left us with a desert. Yes, Malyevich supposedly replied, but it's a desert of pure feeling. The anecdote is one that Irwin has recounted frequently throughout his career as an explanatory model for his work whose aesthetic tends to be extremely spare and lacking the traditional signifiers of the art object. And the story's allusion to the desert makes it particularly fitting to share in relation to untitled, which occupies a sparsely populated plain in the high desert of West Texas. Irwin is fond of quoting modernist painters to describe the conceptual underpinnings of his artistic process. His most frequently repeated citation comes from the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, who in his 1937 essay Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art wrote that, quote, the culture of particular form is approaching its end. The culture of determined relations has begun, end quote. For Irwin, the notion of art as a culture of determined relations is central to his working process and the experience that he wants to elicit from viewers. The Marfa work, for example, was designed to integrate seamlessly with its surrounding environment. The building cuts into the hill on which it is situated rather than resting on top of it, and its windows are oriented on an east-west axis so that it is flooded with light at sunrise and sunset. The piece is not an imposition on the landscape then, but one that responds and adapts to it, establishing a determined relation between artwork and sight. This methodology carries over into the work's interior where viewers must walk through the entire building to fully understand its layout and design, observing the subtle changes in opacity and light that occur as their bodies move around the space. If Irwin's art is guided by the idea of a culture of determined relations, of a dialectical relationship between viewer, artwork, and landscape, his invocation of Maljevic and his desert of pure feeling would suggest a rather different approach to understanding this installation. In this alternative formulation, the work is less about physical and temporal discovery than an emotional experience before nature, a version of minimalism that is not predicated on the banal, everyday qualities of space and movement, but on the revelation of pure feeling in the dramatic landscape of the Texas desert. This discrepancy between the two quotations reveals a certain inconsistency in Irwin's own interpretive logic and strikes at the core of a critical debate that has circled around him since the late 1960s. Although Irwin's work often shared a close formal relationship with the minimalist sculpture being made in New York by artists like Judd, his fascination with the evanescent qualities of light were read by certain critics as a retreat towards an outdated modernist sensibility, replacing the obdurately physical, antitranscendent instincts of minimalism with a focus on sublimity and the metaphysical connotations of emptiness and negative space. If minimalist artists in New York had strove to dismantle modernism's utopian naivete and replace it with a rigorous emphasis on the physical properties of space and the contingency of the human subject in relation to its discursive environment, Irwin's work was said to merely rehash modernism's belief in an ecstatic and fully interior emotional experience before the art object. With this interpretive framework in mind, the Chinati Commission distills the conceptual tension that has structured Irwin's work for most of his career. While the building and its surroundings were designed as a response to the physical particularities of the Marfa landscape, the work is also invested in a paradigm of visual drama that uses light as its primary medium. When the interior is illuminated at sunrise and sunset each day, raking light streams through the windows to create rectangular shapes on the large panels of black and white scrim fabric. Furthermore, the gradated scrim panels at the work's center creates striking optical effects that play with illusions of transparency and darkness. As one moves through the middle corridor, objects and other visitors that appeared blurry and indistinct when seen through the layers of scrim fabric suddenly come into sharper focus. Looking from the darker black scrim corridor towards the white one on the other end, the architectural details of the building become better illuminated and easier to discern. Facing the other direction produces the opposite effect as the structure gradually dissolves into darkness and opacity. The juxtaposition of white and black materials in the building's two halves produces subtle metaphysical connotations suggesting a passage from darkness into light or the opposite. You're allowed to enter the structure on either side, so you can approach it from either way. While the scrim panels produce dazzling light patterns and evocative moods, particularly the black fabric, which is a new addition to Irwin's repertoire of materials, the illusions of the work are also undone by the viewer's movement through the space. All of the locations that are blurred or hidden by scrim can be seen from another vantage point in the building. The structure ultimately gives up all of its mysteries so that the full form of the space is revealed and clarified rather than hidden or obscured. Irwin has certainly not relinquished an interest in creating works of formal beauty with poetic and transcendent connotations, but the installation remains grounded in a physical and temporal process of uncovering and discovery. Furthermore, the structure's tall narrow windows serve as a bridge between interior and exterior, framing the Texas landscape and the large expanses of open sky for which Marfa is known. Irwin specified a higher placement for the windows during the building's reconstruction so that the surrounding vistas would be seen with a low horizon line, allowing the sky to dominate the view. Just as Irwin's early installation works of the 1970s incorporated windows and portals to position viewers in relationship to the world outside the gallery, Untitled also makes the surrounding landscape an integral component of the work, both as a changing source of light and as a series of distinctive views that are visible from multiple points within the space. Evidently, Irwin conceived of the work not as a hermetic monument, but as an installation that would play off of and showcase the landscape that surrounds it. If the work's emphasis on natural beauty suggests a rapturous experience of the sublime, this tendency is also mitigated by the relational quality of its design. While the thick concrete walls and tall narrow windows lend a sense of drama and cloistered interiority to the space, they also function as a frame for what is outside and help to integrate the building into its environment. Furthermore, Irwin's use of light does not preclude an affinity with minimalism's interest in close observation and critical looking. Although the bright Texas sun adds a poetic touch to the work's interior, it also marks the passage of time as visitors move through the space. Viewers discover that the light patterns in the scrim corridor can change drastically within a matter of minutes, making the work appear entirely new and calling attention to areas of the structure that might have been overlooked before. In this way, the work manages to sidestep a more conventional understanding of the art object as a site for personal revelation and private meaning, instead creating a visual experience that is constantly changing and without a distinctive center or core. It is this juxtaposition of the sublime with the banal of modernism's ecstatic transcendence with minimalism's everyday physicality that structures not only untitled but most of Irwin's art since the late 1960s. When asked about his own work's relationship to that of Judd, who celebrated installation of milled aluminum boxes, forms the centerpiece of the Cennadi collection, Irwin replied that Judd was, quote, the closest to somebody who had the same interests as me, end quote. To suggest a connection between his work and Judd's emphatically material specific objects would seem to contradict his interest in the metaphysical abstraction of modernists such as Maljevic and even Mondrian. Long considered one of the chief architects of minimalism's rejection of modernist sensibilities, Judd's famous dictum that his works were merely one thing after another is a far cry from Maljevic's desert of pure feeling. Although Irwin and Judd would seem to be divergent in their approach to artmaking, a comparison of Irwin's installation with Judd's 100 untitled works and mill aluminum reveals that the two artists have more in common than one might imagine. Created over a four year period from 1982 to 1986, the 100 aluminum boxes were installed in two of the fort's former artillery sheds. Judd replaced the building's garage doors with walls of windows and added a vaulted roof and galvanized iron on top of the original roof which doubled the building's height. Each of the 100 works has the same outer dimensions of 41 by 51 by 72 inches, but the interior is unique in every piece. The installation is one of the few works by Judd that could be called site specific. Although his pieces were often designed to be installed on walls or to have some relationship to the architecture of their surrounding environment, they were also usually intended to be portable and could be exhibited in a wide variety of different locations. In contrast, the scale and dimensions of the 100 aluminum boxes coincide with the specific measurements of the artillery sheds and the buildings were retrofitted in turn to best showcase the objects on display inside. A permanent fixture on the Chinati campus, the boxes were never intended to be exhibited elsewhere and form part of a cohesive installation that is as much about Judd's objects as it is about the physical framework of the sheds and the landscape outside. The visual interest of Judd's installation drives not only from the individual variations and the design of the boxes but also from their setting in a vast open space that through the extensive use of windows seems to integrate itself into the surrounding desert. Like Irwin's untitled, the work is especially popular with visitors at sunrise and sunset when golden light illuminates the boxes and creates a variety of reflective effects across the floor and walls. If the work remains resolutely material and physical in its design inviting observers to look closely at the differences between the boxes and admire their highly polished aluminum surfaces, this physicality and spatial awareness is balanced by an interest in nature that contrasts with those same anti-transcendent tendencies. As in Irwin's work, light plays a dual role here both as a reminder of the desert's striking beauty and as a marker of passing time. When the sun rises and falls the color of the aluminum boxes changes in turn with the result that viewers are encouraged to look at the objects again under different visual conditions. Ultimately the work seems to hover between the more banal notions of specific objects and one thing after another and a simultaneous interest in the sublime connotations of the West Texas landscape which acts as a dramatic interlocutor in the space and a central component of the installation's visual effect. When described in this way, the similarities between Judd's boxes and Irwin's hospital installation emerge more clearly. Both works complicate the strict division that historians have established between a critical materiality and the fleeting transient properties of light and negative space, revealing the ways in which the immaterial construction of viewing experience that is attentive and not merely lost in transcendent reverie. But while Judd's polished sculptural objects and Irwin's walls of scrim create environments that accord with minimalism's focus on three-dimensional space and a sustained temporal engagement with the work of art, this drive towards the commonplace exists in concert with an evident delight in the physical beauty of the site and its connotations of emptiness, superiority and grandeur. There is a residual sense in both works of a modernist sublime and this metaphysical inclination is all the more striking in Judd's work which for decades has been singled out as being particularly representative of a post-structuralist rejection of modernism and its utopian idealist dimensions. If the description of Judd that I have offered diverges from the standard account of his role as the arch-minimalist and foremost propagator of a post-modern sensibility in the art of the 1960s, this interpretation is less than misreading of the work than one that recognizes the impulses towards metaphysics that are latent within his oaf as well as the work of his minimalist contemporaries. While Irwin's work does not provoke the exclusively physical and temporal experience that critics have described as the central innovation of minimalist sculpture, Judd's work equivocates between these two poles in similar ways. Ultimately, Irwin and Judd's works at the Chinati Foundation underscore the transitional and tentative nature of avant-garde art around 1970 which stridently rejected the terms and priorities of late modernism while subtly retaining many of those same qualities. Historians and critics have focused on Irwin's interest in light and space as a means of discrediting his work as rearguard and conservative but more recent thinking on the interchangeability of the material and immaterial has worked to ease these strict demarcations between various styles and geographic schools of minimalist production. Just as Judd's emphatically symmetrical aluminum boxes allow for an intimation of the aetheriality they were meant to reject, Irwin's evanescent installations of light and scrim can facilitate a perceptual process that is in line with minimalism's more advanced poststructuralist tendencies. While untitled does not resolve or alleviate the competing inclinations of Irwin's work, it urges a reconsideration of the narratives that have been fashioned by scholars to shape the history of minimalism and the art that followed it. If Irwin's work blurs the line between material and immaterial and the attendant theoretical connotations of those terms it also undoes the hierarchy of criticality and progressiveness that art historians have implicitly structured according to that same metric of physicality. By occupying a stylistic territory that is deliberately situated between the solid and the impermanent, untitled clarifies the opposing drives and animating tendencies of Irwin's larger body of work and of minimalism as a whole. Thank you.