Robert Irwin and Jeff Wall at the Walker: perspective.

Robert Irwin's Slant/Light/Volume ended today at the Walker in Minneapolis.  It was  available during a time that the immense Cibachrome, Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona  by Jeff Wall was also on display in another room.

Sadly, the Irwin installation was in a space containing a rectangular concrete pillar, a structural element of the gallery building.  This impeded being able to traverse the room at an optimal distance to have the respective diagonal distances coalesce and vanish.  An entrance way to the right permitted complete right-angle view of the slanted wall of illumined scrim.  Had the back left door been permitted to open, a path could have been suggested that the visitor might follow.

The Jeff Wall, however, was in a space that allowed traversing from a few feet to the right of the image, across through roughly what I took to be the photographer's perspective and then a few feet farther past the left extent of the frame.  From the view right of the image, your perspective is that of a green wall of glass leading left, but by the time you arrive on the left, with the image to your right, you are at a veneer wall and the green glass is cramped and distant far to the right - as if the entire twin panels had morphed with your passage like sparse trees in a prairie landscape sweeping past you on a highway.

It is a shame that they could not have been in adjacent galleries with a path (the Walker offered pads on which to sit and meditate before the Irwin, a static view which negates the change so inherent in Slant/Volume/Light for the mobile, the pedestrian visitor.)  The Jeff Wall seems to invite taking a position near the pillar (the pillar in the photographic image) and adopting a static viewpoint.  But the cleaner was moving, the water was moving, we are not the statue, all those who entered this space were moving, as were all those who entered the Irwin space or the Walker.

Space, movement, time.  And now the Irwin will be gone tomorrow.  Yesterday I left a favourite scarf at a poetry slam.  I begin to forget the Arthur Ganson mobiles in Boston at the MIT museum, his face, his voice, his manner that put my son at ease, a mobile fountain in Basel, the first time my children rotated the cams of a movable sculpture.  We reach an age when time seems more unreal, spring again so soon, the past collapsing  in irregular accordian folds as if memory itself had begun to wheeze.