Review: A useful but unsatisfying new documentary tackles the career of Light & Space artist Robert Irwin
LA TimesIn 2016, the Chinati Foundation in the remote West Texas desert town of Marfa opened “untitled,” a massive permanent installation by Southern California artist Robert Irwin, the leading figure of the movement known as Light and Space art. The Marfa environment, a low-slung, single-story concrete building constructed on the ruins of a military hospital, is explored at the end of “Robert Irwin: A Desert of Pure Feeling,” a 93-minute documentary film from director and editor Jennifer Lane having its Nov. 12 debut at the 13th annual DOC NYC festival. A suburban high school kid more enthralled with bebop than academics, self-taught in phenomenological philosophies, rigorous in paring down painting to its perceptual basics when he finally committed to being an artist, supporting himself through a savvy gambler’s skill at the racetrack and more — “A Desert of Pure Feeling” is structured as a conventional biographical chronology. One undercurrent of the film is that Irwin’s monumental achievement as an artist has largely escaped New York, the world’s most provincial art city.
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