Artist Likes ‘Invisible’ Art : But David Ireland Does Show His Work in UC Irvine Exhibit

First-time visitors to David Ireland’s exhibitions sometimes have an embarrassing problem: They can’t find the art. But for Ireland--who likes the idea of making “invisible” art that obliges viewers to scrutinize their surroundings--this state of affairs is drolly amusing.

In a recent group show in San Francisco, he built a wall that was parallel--and almost identical--to one of the real walls in the gallery.

“I loved it because people came and said, ‘Where is your piece?’ ” Ireland recalled recently. “And I’d say, ‘It’s over there.’ And they’d go over there and come back and say, ‘We couldn’t find it.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, jeez, it’s 30 feet long! How could you miss it?’ ”

Tall and slim, with friendly blue eyes and white hair that curls up at the collar, Ireland, 58, is one of the Bay Area’s leading conceptual artists. He’s also an expert carpenter.

“I am a believer that, if you’re a good musician or a good cook or a good gardener, (those activities) should be (a basis) for what you do as an artist,” Ireland said during a brief visit to UC Irvine, where several of his installations are on view through April 30 in a show at the Fine Arts Gallery (organized by the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery at UC Santa Cruz).

“I built a house with the help of a carpenter in the ‘60s, and that sort of started it.” But it wasn’t until he was well into his 40s that he found a way to turn decisively from printmaking and painting--which had begun to seem “arbitrary” and lacking in meaning--to a new kind of art that involved the revamping of architectural spaces.

In 1976 he helped artist Tom Marioni restore the main gallery of the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco. Their goal was to re-create the former appearance of the space--originally a printing plant--while retaining traces of the exhibitions that were constructed in the space during the previous 6 years.

Ireland used a smoking hibachi to blacken the walls and he darkened the floor authentically with printer’s ink. His restoration even included such details as the dust-silhouette left by a clock that had been removed from the walls, and abrupt shifts in the color of the walls, made by artists who painted around hard-to-move objects that had since been removed.

“The goal was to do a work which would become invisible because of its completeness,” Ireland explained. “You couldn’t see (the work) because (the gallery) had been restored so perfectly.

“It’s like someone who does photo-realist paintings: We marvel at their precision, and the success of the work has a lot to do with their craft as well as their observation. I got very excited by the notion that there was content in doing something so well it becomes (invisible).”

After this revelation, Ireland said he “couldn’t go back to just working on a rectangle.” The next opportunity that presented itself was 500 Capp St., a derelict house he purchased in San Francisco’s Mission District. Its former owner never threw anything away--from the rubber band that wrapped each morning paper to a succession of worn-out brooms. To Ireland, these objects reveal “social systems,” the activities that happened on a regular basis in this house.

He preserved such eccentric details of the house as a collection of toilet paper cylinders (piled to create a honeycombed “sculpture”), an old TV screen and the brooms. Bundled together with a bit of wire looped through their handles, and arranged according to the lengths of their bristles, the brooms become a graceful chorus line.

Ireland sealed every crack and discoloration in the walls and wood floors under coats of varnish. Gleaming in the changing light during the course of a day, these almost-bare rooms create an atmosphere of nostalgia, a documentation of the myriad tiny details that bear witness to the passage of time in a particular place.

Light is the silent partner in Ireland’s work. It is, he said, “the thing that makes things happen. . . . It has to do with ambiance, atmosphere, how you feel. You know, what kind of day it is is based on the kind of light that exists. You wake up in the morning and look out the window and (that light) has a lot to do with your demeanor.”

At 65 Capp St., another house that Ireland turned into a project, light becomes the dominant subject. The artist refashioned the structure as a giant piece of sculpture, clad in reflective corrugated sheet metal, with windows and skylights positioned to create changing patterns of light and shadow.

Ireland’s work isn’t all strictly about architecture. One of the pieces in the UC Irvine show is “School of Chairs,” which consists in its entirety of 14 ordinary Fiberglas chairs pushed together every which way, as if abandoned by unruly students.

“I was thinking of chairs as a didactic tool,” Ireland said, draping himself into a chair he casually pulled out of the installation. “If you can let go of the fact that they’re chairs and see them as sculpture, as objects, then you’ve got the (idea).”

He regards the chairs as living things--”almost like a flock that’s a little bit scared, you know,” he said, laughing. “Like fish jumping together, or sheep. So it’s a school, a herd, a flock.”

Another piece at UC Irvine, “Shrinagar Diary,” offers a series of written observations about a trip to India, each one positioned under a scratched area of the white gallery wall. The sentences are quotes from Ireland’s diary (one reads, “The man at the airport was strangely friendly”), and the scratches look like faint traces of unreadable images.

The point, Ireland said, is that the images a viewer could conjure up to go with the texts are likely to be “much grander and larger” than anything an artist could dream up. But then why bother to make the scratches?

“Well, I guess I’m trying to get you started, you know,” Ireland said, a trifle apologetically. “And there’s something else that appeals to me, too. I’ve scraped a lot of walls and they reveal mysteries (underneath). So it’s sort of a double-entendre. . . .

“It’s kind of tactile too,” Ireland-the-craftsman mused. “The sanding--I use a sanding machine, a little vibrator--has smoothed some bumps out. And there’s a chance thing that’s kind of exciting: You don’t know if there will be a nail hole or a seam or whatever. You just take what you get.”

The largest piece in the UC Irvine show, “Reading Wall,” is a wall with four window-like openings. Behind each opening there is a rudimentary desk, a chair, a fluorescent light and a copy of the exhibition catalogue. Steep ramps on the inside allow energetic viewers to climb up to each window.

“I was thinking that there was a little element of exploration (in the piece),” Ireland explained. “(It’s) like a tomb or a sanctuary--it’s elevated and it’s a little bit precipitous but it’s for the person who wants to be a little more adventurous. . . .

“(At the opening) every space was filled (with people reading). . . . It was really quite gratifying because that’s what it was for--for you to be able to see these people almost as paintings--or like gems, because they were wearing colored blouses and dresses. It was quite a brilliant display.”

Ireland believes his influences come primarily from other Bay Area conceptual artists like Marioni, Paul Kos, Tony Labat and Howard Fried. “We’re not a rat pack by any means,” he said, “but the appreciation of one another’s work happens in that group. I learn from these people.”

Like them, a “non-consumer” artist--Ireland said he has never made work with the idea of selling it--he lives on a carefully juggled combination of grants, teaching and public art commissions. Some of his smaller pieces recently have found buyers in New York, where he is represented by Damon Brandt Gallery. So far no collectors have surfaced in the West, where, Ireland said, people “may not want to sit still long enough” for his ideas to sink in.

For the most part, he prefers to work in what he calls “real-time” spaces--where “there is the possibility of something else going on.” But galleries are inevitably the settings of his smaller pieces, including his small tableaux that often come complete with gently battered tables. In one of these works, “Life on Earth,” a book with that title--held upright between twin sloping masses of concrete--sits on a table underneath an irregular piece of fabric that hangs on the wall like a portable sun.

Galleries also are the repositories for his “little time toys.” Made of such humble materials as dirt, newspapers and concrete, these are nondescript objects he produces to represent the hours when he is not doing anything in particular. Some were part of an installation he created in December for the “projects” series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“They’re not trying to be super-intellectualized objects,” Ireland said. “They are merely evidence that I have been doing something during a period (of time).”

So they could just as well have been the kind of doodles people make while they’re on the telephone?

“Exactly, precisely. Somebody says, ‘Did you talk to anybody today?’ And you say no, but there are all these doodles on the pad, or cigarette butts, or whatever.”

Ireland’s first “non-objects”--made in 1983--were the “Dumb Balls,” roughly formed concrete balls that he placed in a simple display case made of particle board.

“If you take concrete and set it down, it just flattens into a pancake. You must keep it active for 15-plus hours,” Ireland explained, making the appropriate hand-to-hand movements.

“(A dumb ball) has no intelligence imposed on it--it’s just really (the outcome of) a process. It’s a fluid that becomes solid in time. You could read a book (while you make it) or watch television or you could be a person of low IQ. You could achieve this dumb ball if you just dedicated yourself to the process. . . .

“People have questioned me about the fact that I call ‘em ‘non-things’ or non-intellectualized things. They say it takes as much intellectual (substance) to do this as some other thing, and I say, ‘You’re probably right.’ ” He laughed. “I think maybe it’s sort of futile (to try to make ‘non-things’) because it takes some energy to produce anything. . . .”

Actually, when Ireland looks at the future of sculpture, he sees a new stress on intellectual content.

“People will want to look at work that gives them something to think about,” he said. “They may not want to sit still or stand still long enough, but maybe they won’t have to. Maybe (the new work) can still fill the needs of a person who is too busy to spend time with it. Like a Robert Irwin perceptual work--they could just catch it as they go by and think about it when they’re a long way away.”

“David Ireland: A Decade Documented” is on view through April 29 at the Fine Arts Gallery, UC Irvine , off Bridge Street. Hours: noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission: free. Information: (714) 856-6610.