ABSTRACT
Throughout his career, artist Robert Irwin has signaled the influence of the writings of philosopher Alfred Schütz on his own aesthetic practice—a visually restrained blend of abstract experimental sculpture and “site-conditioned” installations, often realized through fabric, natural light, and subtle architectural intervention. While the American uptake of European phenomenological discourse (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) has attenuated the reception of Irwin’s artworks—and, more broadly, shaped the theorization of minimalist artistic practice from the 1960s onward—Schütz’s influence has gone unexplored. Drawing on Irwin’s unpublished writings and Schütz’s personal papers, this chapter examines the direct influence of the philosopher on Irwin in order to addresses what Irwin has termed the “social implication of a phenomenal art.” In so doing, the author proposes a re-reading: using what Schütz described as a fundamentally participatory embodied experience—a “theater where knowledge and action are fundamentally intersubjective”—he suggests a new genealogy for Schütz’s explicitly social program for phenomenological inquiry. By rethinking how the discourses of phenomenology and modern art have been historicized since the 1960s, the author invites a re-examination of the implied limits of the social dimensions of minimalist, post-minimalist, and site-specific practice.
