Lawrence Weschler's Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees is a splendid act of art writing, one of the finest examples of journalism I've read. It is "a life" of Robert Irwin, the artist (What does that mean, "a life"? Is that different from "a biography"?). Robert Irwin led a difficult career to capture, since he prohibited photographs during most of it, photographs can scarcely capture his mostly-white objects, and for about half of his career he didn't make discrete objects at all but only altered the character of given spaces. But Weschler makes it all pellucid with his clear writing and close research. Most writing, about more familiar art classics, is not half as readable as Seeing Is Forgetting.

Irwin began as a teenager with figural drawings and paintings, and was quite accomplished at it, and then proceeded with a process of inquiry that asked what each element was doing; anything that wasn't doing something went. The first thing to go was the figure, then the line, then the frame, and so on through the object. Yet it's important to realize that Irwin was not just throwing these things away for the cleverness of it; he cultivated particular aesthetic qualities in the pieces he created. In the abstract paintings, he cultivated spontaneity, as well as precision. Later on, it was various qualities of presence and ambiguity that he was more interested in cultivating. A scientist trying to determine the mechanics and psychology of the human eye might use methods, and create objects, similar to what Irwin made. In fact Irwin collaborated with a physiologist briefly in the middle of his career. Also part of that collaboration was James Turrell, whose work is a helpful correlate.

The James Turrell installation I came across at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, circa 2003, remains one of my own favorite art experiences. The most interesting piece was a huge room of eerie blue light. Viewers removed their shoes and stepped up to a higher plane to enter the room, which from afar seemed to be a flat blue screen; even with people standing in the opening, they looked silhouetted against this flatness. Inside, I was surrounded by this even blueness, whose walls seemed to have no particular position or corners. The far end plane of the room was a completely different shade of blue, which gave several strong associations. One was of a drive-in movie theatre: this large, glowing, oblong surface looming above and illuminating your friends nearby. Stronger even than that was the sense of standing in a cave behind a waterfall—but somehow, the Ultimate waterfall, as in a science fiction movie, at the core of the Earth or at the edge of some interstellar crusier—a waterfall made of an alien material, subject to unknown forces, put there perhaps by devious beings. There was a faint hum which made me think the whole thing might be powered by dilithium crystals, or might be giving me brain cancer on the spot. There was a vague sense of danger, seeing this even, glowing surface a few feet away, not knowing if it was solid or if it represented a space, a dropoff. And it was utterly, utterly blue.

Besides the space itself offering an intense experience, the world outside takes on a new character after leaving the room. Colors change, of course; things seem oddly stable; tree leaves rustling in the breeze seem impossibly detailed, impossibly natural.

I wonder what is the fate of art after delivering such intense, such primal, minimal and necessary experiences as this. What can anyone hope to accomplish by painting a face, or making colored mobiles, or for that matter animated LED installations or dramatic films?

There is an answer to this question, and I'm excited to find out, but I don't know yet.