Robert Irwin
San Diego State University Art Gallery
If, as many maintain, space is the most salient area of inquiry in 20th-century art, reading space to determine one’s location within it, physically and conceptually, becomes an essential task. In the vernacular, “far out,” “into” and “spaced out” point to the body-centered sensation that determines space and place, and which historically has been manifest most clearly in architecture. Site-specific art and quite a bit of recent architecturally derived sculpture have dealt with this determination of space and place. Central to this form of perception is the haptic sense, that bodily sense which