Inside the iceberg cathedral: Robert Irwin returns to the Walker

When the Walker Art Center opened its original building in 1971, then-director Martin Friedman wanted to make a splash. He commissioned 22 pre-eminent artists for a site-specific celebration, "Works For New Spaces," that would inaugurate the gallery—and successfully show the pull that our little Midwestern cultural outpost could have. The major schools of contemporary art were represented, including a cardboard sculpture from pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, and minimalist work from artists like Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. One of the largest and most subtly powerful of the contributions was an untitled work known informally as Slant/Light/Volume from Californian conceptual artist Robert Irwin, which has been unearthed from the Walker archives for display through November of next year (so hurry) in the Friedman Gallery of the Walker's metal-sided new building.

Irwin was one of the founders of the West Coast Light and Space Movement (along with James Turrell, whose massive Sky Pesher installation was used as a Walker concert venue this summer), which softened the hard-edged minimalism of precise steel bars and boxes that Judd and Richard Serra were a part of in New York. Like the New Yorkers, the West Coasters began as traditional or expressionist painters, but became frustrated with the limitations of paint and canvas. Seeking new ways to explore sensory perception and visual stimulation in art, they radically pared down their materials to open conceptual avenues, inviting their viewers, simply, to see in a new way. Irwin went so far as to say, “The act of art has turned to a direct examination of our perceptual processes."

So don’t expect technically brilliant paintings, CGI-driven imagery, radical performance art, shocking nudes, or paint of any kind. Slant/Light/Volume is a big piece of cloth with some lights stretched across a gallery: “An oblique plane of translucent scrim fabric,” according to the Walker’s press release. It's the kind of avant-garde simplicity that is often dismissed as ludicrous or simplistic.

But Slant/Light/Volume is an immersive, deeply calming experience, literally consuming the whole gallery space. The fabric stretches 48 feet across and slopes above the viewer at a 45-degree angle. The ghostly light coming through the translucent fabric lends the room the feel of an iceberg cathedral, and plays off your peripheral vision like being soaked into the aurora borealis. Elizabeth Carpenter, the Walker visual arts curator who oversaw the reinstallation, told The A.V. Club in a recent interview that “the extraordinarily ethereal effect is almost legendary,” and we'd have to agree—the silent, bright-white space invites contemplation and reverie.

Slant/Light/Volume is also legendary because its sheer magnitude. Like many Irwin pieces, that means it's rarely exhibited, previously appearing in 1989, long before the new wing was built. To fit Slant/Light/Volume into the Friedman Gallery, the Walker reconstructed the ceilings to match the original dimensions of the installation, with Irwin consulting and signing off on the final design. “I consider this to be one of the great works in the Walker’s collection," Carpenter says. "I have been working as a curator at the Walker for eight years, and all this time I have been waiting for the opportunity to bring this piece out of storage.”

Irwin once said of his work that “to be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception.” In these times, a radically simple challenge to our everyday perception isn't just welcome—it may even be a comfort.