David Ireland: the alchemist: San Francisco artist David Ireland transforms ordinary materials, such as concrete and domestic debris, into playful sculptural installations inspired by Zen precepts. A traveling show surveys his work since the 1970s

Art in America, Dec, 2004 by Peter Selz

When curator William Seitz popularized Dubuffet's term "assemblage" with the exhibition "The Art of Assemblage" at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1961, he wrote of "a truly magical transformation from banality and ugliness ... to often beautiful objects ordered by principles inseparable from this century." (1) Some 40 years later, these principles still apply in the work of San Francisco artist David Ireland. But in this case, Seitz's notion of beauty is no longer relevant; Ireland is more concerned with the idea of the everyday object.

For about 20 years, the artist has produced concrete "Dumbballs," which look like snowballs but are laborious to make. He tosses handfuls of wet concrete back and forth from one hand to the other until the substance cures, a process that can take 15 hours. In the catalogue accompanying Ireland's current traveling retrospective, organized by the Oakland Museum of California, curator Karen Tsujimoto writes that the process "is like repeating a mantra or trying to paint a perfect circle, a calligraphic exercise often performed in Zen practice." (2) The balls appear on their own and in various works, such as Dumbball Box (1983) and Dumbballs with Carriers, Dedicated to the Memory of John Cage (1992). Ireland admired Cage's attention to everyday life experience and his use of chance procedures.

The study of Zen was of signal importance for the many West Coast artists who read works by Alan Watts and Shunryu Suzuki in the 1950s and '60s. Pursuing their teachings, Ireland firmly believes that the act of making the piece is more important than the object produced, and that perfection can be achieved by accepting things for what they are. But, with his sense of irony, he plays with Zen concepts. For instance, Zen precepts tell us that the essence of a vessel is emptiness, so Ireland fills a bottle with concrete so that it can never be empty again. Concrete is one of the artist's favorite mediums. In 1987, for an exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute, he mischievously poured concrete down the staircase in Smithsonian Falls, Descending a Staircase for P.K Instead of "an explosion in a shingle factory," we have here the Big Drip a la Robert Smithson.

Three years after he employed this title, Ireland actually had an exhibition at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Among his other solo shows were those at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art (1984) and Museum of Modern Art (1988), the University Art Museum at UC-Berkeley (1988) [see A.i.A., Sept. '89], the Helmhaus in Zurich (1991) and the American Academy in Rome (1997); but the current show, consisting of 91 works produced since 1972, is the 73-year-old artist's first major retrospective.

David Ireland was born in 1930 in Bellingham, Wash., and got his early training in San Francisco at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts), where soon to be prominent Bay Area artists--Robert Arneson, Robert Bechtle, Manuel Neff, Nathan Oliveira and Peter Voulkos--were enrolled at the time. There, Ireland was exposed to many divergent ideas; after Oliveira received his MFA, Ireland served as his assistant for a semester, and took his degree in industrial arts and printmaking. In the mid-'50s, after a stint in the army during which he was stationed near St. Louis, he worked as an illustrator and traveled around Europe, Asia and Africa. From the mid-1960s to the early '70s, while the cultural revolution and political protests were happening in the U.S., Ireland was leading safaris in Africa. In his 40s, however, he decided to become a full-time artist and went back to school at the San Francisco Art Institute. Now his colleagues were the Bay Area Conceptualists and installation artists--Tom Marioni, Paul Kos, Terry Fox and Howard Fried, among others.

After graduating from the Institute in 1974, Ireland went to New York, where he maintained a studio for about a year. He became interested in the work of monochrome painters, such as Robert Ryman and Robert Marigold, and their predecessors Ad Reinhardt and Yves Klein. A typical work of 1975 is A Portion of: From the Year of Doing the Same Work Each Day, which Ireland considers a "relic" of an activity. After spreading 94 pounds of dry cement powder on his studio floor, he each day made all-over, monochrome "drawings" by mixing and troweling wet cement onto a support until the material was gone (many works from this series were destroyed as part of a related action, 94-Pound Discard). These works differ significantly in origin from Ryman's paintings, which are dialogues between paint and support; the quality of Ryman's surfaces is due to his analytical planning. In Ireland's, the image is indistinguishable from the medium. He simply made these drawings, he said, by detaching the mind and being pleased with the result. About a year later, Ireland made a fingerprint drawing using smears of Plasticine on fiberglass mesh, producing textured surfaces that recall Piero Manzoni's "Achromes" or his Fingerprint (1960).