In the here and now

DASHES of white light flicked on one by one as the installation crew at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego worked its way across an expansive wall, mounting custom-built fluorescent fixtures in a syncopated, fragmented diagonal grid. On the eve of the museum’s Robert Irwin exhibition, the largest since MoCA’s retrospective in 1993, the 79-year-old artist, in trademark baseball cap and jeans, paced the space with barely tempered eagerness. A birth was imminent.

When the last of the lights on the 20-by-50-foot wall went on and the work was complete, Irwin’s smile added at least another thousand kilowatts to the room. The wall had come alive in a calligraphic dance of brisk luminosity and shadowy echo, an homage to both spontaneity and order. “You just get swallowed up in it,” Irwin beamed.

“Light and Space” was, for Irwin, the riskiest piece, the cutting edge in a show tracing his 50-year evolution from Abstract Expressionist painter to choreographer of ephemeral experience. He had mocked up a small version of the installation in the museum’s residency studio (which he is the first to occupy), but conditions in that modest space differed dramatically from those in the large gallery. He wasn’t at all sure what he would get when the work went full-scale.

Conditionality has been, ironically, the one unchanging characteristic of Irwin’s work since the early 1970s. The L.A. born-and-bred artist had spent the ‘60s reducing the vocabulary of his work on canvas. He distilled fields of active, multicolored gestures to monochrome canvases with austere pairs of raised lines. The line paintings gave way to slightly curved canvases across which thousands of fine green and red dots appear to dissolve. His push toward pure presence advanced further with the disk paintings of 1967-69. Mounted more than a foot away from the wall, the convex disks seem to merge intangibly with it.

In 1971, Irwin gave up his Venice studio and turned away from making self-contained objects. He began creating “site-generated” installations, many using translucent white scrim, that responded to the scale, shape, surface, light and shadows of a particular space. Irwin’s aims at the time have since remained central to his work: to heighten attention to the processes of perception, expand sensory awareness, reawaken wonder.

The San Diego exhibition, “Robert Irwin: Primaries and Secondaries,” fills both of the museum’s downtown venues with work drawn almost entirely from its own holdings as well as five new installations. Each of the new works extends lines of inquiry that Irwin, based in San Diego, launched in earlier work. But each is also startlingly new, devised for a specific space and set of circumstances. “When you’re working with the conditional, it’s always an experiment,” he says.

“Square the Room” does what its title states, a wall of scrim quietly trimming an irregular wedge off an upstairs gallery. Another new piece sets five floor-to-ceiling black scrim panels at a right angle to five white panels of the same size. The clean angularity of the structures generates something far more ephemeral, a dynamic dialogue in translucency and recession.

“Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue,” an expanded version of a work Irwin debuted this year at Pace Wildenstein in New York, sets three immense painted honeycomb aluminum planes side by side on the floor. Suspended high above each is another of the same size and color. Like elegant, elemental reflecting pools, the glossy surfaces catch the shifting natural light and mirror each other. As you walk around the piece, looking up, down and across, the hues intensify but also mix, the primary colors yielding secondaries -- orange, green, violet. “Primaries and Secondaries,” a separate installation of 13 wall-mounted panels (including black and white), engages similar phenomena in a different format.

These are but his latest staged surprises. Touring the exhibition, Irwin philosophized on the new works, the unique role of art and the big ideas that intrigue him the most.

On breaking the frame

“At one point, I looked around and I realized that there are no frames in the world. That’s not how we see at all. We’re like in an envelope, stuff happening on every dimension -- visual, auditory, tactile, smell. Our dialogue with the frame is part of a highly stylized, learned logic. It’s a way we’ve learned to see, but it’s not how we actually see. In terms of how human beings see and understand and order the world for themselves, it seemed we had to address that. I had to paint a painting that broke the frame. That’s what the disks were. Once you break the frame, all of a sudden you are in space. You’re dealing with energy as opposed to matter. [The disks] really do get lost. They become light and space.”

On being and thinking about being

“There are basically two realms, two kinds of consciousness. They’re mutually dependent and mutually exclusive, and that’s what makes them work. A little story I tell to try to illustrate that point: When you open your eyes in the morning, you’re laying in bed, the world is completely formed. You sit up, swing your legs around, you take the world with you and you don’t ask yourself how you did that. You just go off and take a shower.

“But if you laid there, for even an instant, a couple of amazing things would be revealed. One is that the world is not a given; you actually form it. But we do it in a time frame that is nonexistent, intellectually. Not only that, but if we did wait a moment, that is, [cogitate] on the act of perceiving, we wouldn’t be able to move, because at every moment we’d still be forming [the world].

“The human being is spectacular. The cognitive mind is never conscious of the process itself, and it can’t be. We wouldn’t be able to move if it was. When you start looking at what human beings are, from that point of view, what is the one thing that art does that nothing else does? What is the unique role of art? I would propose that art is a continual examination of the human being’s potential to perceive, know, understand and act in the world.”

On Modern art, abstraction and why the new isn’t easy

“Most of our ideas are homogeneous. We maintain the basic structures, the basic ideas, the basic concepts. We build on them. But once in a while, something comes along that actually challenges those most basic assumptions. Modern art is doing that, or has done that. People used to ask abstractionists, ‘What is it?’ That’s a literate question that says, ‘Take this, in front of me, and let me understand it, not by participating in it directly, but by referencing it in the world.’

“And [the abstractionists] would say, ‘It is.’ That’s a whole different way of looking at the thing. It’s not about something, it is something. When you make that kind of shift, it throws people off. It challenges the basic structures we’ve built. So people have a great degree of difficulty, because that’s asking too much, in a way, to give up this structure and cut yourself loose, to float in this other realm. It’s going to take a long time to see if we really want to play the game in this new realm.

“The history of Modern art, in my mind, is at least a couple hundred years old. It will be another couple hundred years before we’re going to know if it works and what kind of idea it is. I pursue it because my questions feel right, they hold water and I like the beauty of it.”

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‘Robert Irwin: Primaries and Secondaries’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 1100 and 1001 Kettner Blvd., San Diego

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays through Tuesdays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays

Ends: Feb. 23; at 1001 Kettner through April 13

Price: $10; seniors, $5; 25 and under, free

Contact: (858) 454-3541, www.mcasd.org