1. Mr. Irwin’s primary interest, he says, is the relationship between fine
arts language and mass culture language. He tackles it playfully,
inviting the viewer to an illusionary space where nothing is what it
seems to be. Maybe that playfulness comes from his experience as a prop
maker for Florida’s theme park industry. Indeed, a lot of Mr. Irwin’s
objects look like they’re here just for making the surrounding space
more interesting. He uses mirror surfaces and Plexiglas to add a
seeming third dimension to a flat object, but he does not invite us to
a trip through the looking glass. Instead, the message is that there
isn’t any third dimension. It’s not about the wonder of discovery, more
about the despair of loss. This coincides with what Mr. Irwin told us
at FORUMak: “Art is fighting for its relevance in the modern world. And
I’m not sure it will win.” Mr. Irwin looks with despair at the hollow
landscape of American mass culture and, throughout most of his work,
woes of profanation of the fine arts language, sometimes trying to
return the stray bits and pieces back into fine art from the mass
culture. This is, for instance, what he attempts to do with Jackson
Pollack’s splattering technique. Invented in the fifties, in the
eighties it was massively used in T-shirt designs and other popular
culture objects. So, Mr. Irwin tried to combine it with his usual
2.5-dimensional objects. He probably thought these two techniques would
merge on the basis of them both originally belonging to the same fine
arts’ language. But I think this offering is too small to appeal to
Apollo, because the splattering doesn’t add anything to Mr. Irwin’s
message. And I would agree with Chekhov here: less is more.
Mr. Irwin’s first major project was
called “American Trucking - Trade Show Display”. It is quite different
to his other works. At the talk, Mr. Irwin explained that he sought out
to examine the relationship between the glamorous life shown on the TV
and an ordinary American citizen’s life and labor. In this
installation, which looks like a prop for a TV show, Mr. Irwin attempts
to glamorize the truckers by remodeling their standard outfit in a
futuristic anime-style plastic suit, put them on TV and show their
labor as some fashionable activity. This was made in 2000 and still
appears at the top of the list if one googles “Jason Irwin”. I would
argue this proves it is one of Mr. Irvin’s finest moments. “American
Trucking” was indeed a fresh, funny and thought-provoking take on mass
culture.
In my opinion, Mr. Irwin’s standout work is the racecube.
This was made in 2007 for “Air Kissing”, an exhibition of contemporary
art about the art world itself. The exhibition was all about parodies,
and maybe this context has given Mr. Irwin the idea of going deeper
than just an illusion. Or maybe it raised his mood to manifest his
playfulness not as something self-centered and cynical, but rather as
something childish, eager to explore the world. So Mr. Irwin started
out with a minimalist cube and found out the only way to further
improve it was to speed it up! And as a result he presented a cube with
a built in remote control buggy. One of the cube’s sides can be taken
off for maintenance, thus the buggy inside is revealed. At the talk Mr.
Irwin said that his concept was to show us the systematic difference of
minimalist sculpture and aerodynamics by taking a figure so perfect in
one context, and placing it in a context where it becomes the exact
opposite. But I think this interpretation is just the starting point of
a thrill-packed rollercoaster ride through the looking glass of the
human imagination. It’s a real pity Mr. Irwin provides us with this
entry point only once.
Gintaras Rishkus – gluckpaletz@gmail.com
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