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

Ireland is, in fact, very fond of chairs. He has made several large-scale versions over the years. The show includes the 18-foot-high Big Reading Chair (2003), an imposing architectural object constructed of drywall. Inside the chair's base is a reading station with more chairs, where visitors can view catalogues of the exhibition.

When Ireland uses mass-produced angel figurines, he turns from simply showing things as they are and engages metaphoric meaning. His 1996 sculpture Box of Angels consists of numerous cast-plaster angels in a vitrine; the work recalls Arman's "Accumulations" of the 1960s. The angels Ireland found are sentimental little creatures with beseeching eyes that seem to plead for release from their claustrophobic enclosure. The piece de resistance in the Oakland show, Angel-Go-Round (1996), is a large collection of garden statues--nymphs, maidens, replicas of Michelangelo's David--lying in a circle, heads toward the center. What had once been high art, fashioned by the Romans or Michelangelo, has become debased, mass-culture kitsch. Above the statues a motorized gray fiberglass angel sweeps in circular flight, as if blessing dead soldiers. When the piece was installed at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 1996, art critic Kenneth Baker questioned whether Ireland was "mocking renascent religiosity" or commenting on "the bankruptcy of representational tradition in sculpture." (3)

At the end of the exhibition, the viewer came upon Debris Pile (2003), a huge heap of drywall and scrap metal from previous shows. In this context, the rubbish assumes a place of honor, recycled into a new artwork that transcends its useless parts.

(1.) William C. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1961, p. 92.

(2.) Karen Tsujimoto, "Being in the World," in Tsujimoto and Jennifer R. Gross, The Art of David Ireland, University of California Press, 2003, p. 99.

(3.) Kenneth Baker, "Two New Outlooks on Conceptual Art/ Idea Centered Pieces Make a Comeback," San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1996.

"The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are" debuted at the Oakland Museum of California [Nov. 22, 2003-Mar. 14, 2004] and traveled to the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. [Apr. 15-July 18], and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Gardena, University of Nebraska, Lincoln [Aug. 21-Nov. 14]. It appears at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art [Dec. 11, 2004-Mar. 15, 2005]. The show is accompanied by a 229-page catalogue with essays by Karen Tsujimoto and Jennifer R. Gross.

Peter Selz is an art historian living in Berkeley, Calif. His book Art of Engagement is forthcoming from the University of California Press in 2005.