The geometry of sight: five major installations were commissioned for a survey of work by Robert Irwin, who pioneered the use of art as a tool for shaping the experience of space

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The critic's only valid function is to clear away the extraneous considerations and return us, naked, to the experience before us.

--Robert Irwin, "Some Notes on the Nature of Abstraction"

Robert Irwin's articulation of the critic's task bears a serious resemblance to the role he has adopted for himself as an artist. He has shed old pictorial habits--the frame, the mark, the imposition of meaning--and created an art of pure experience. His means and materials have been reductive, his intent expansive. For 40 years, he has cultivated an advance in our perceptual responsiveness.

An exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) offered an opportunity to test Irwin's work against his own standards of progressive elasticity and enduring immediacy. Five new installations were created for the show, which was his most extensive since a 1993 retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. That surrey was followed by a series of three major installations at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1998-99. The San Diego exhibition took a concise turn through the phases of Irwin's career, landing in the present with exhilarating freshness.

Divided between the museum's two downtown venues, the show presented Irwin's work, in roughly chronological order, as a compelling narrative with significant forward momentum. The sequencing of works employed conscious foreshadowing and even a sense of mystery. Line emerged as a central character, examined from multiple perspectives--as color, energy, light. The taut construction of the exhibition (curated by director Hugh Davies almost exclusively from the museum's collection, the largest holding of Irwin's output in private or public hands) played up the work's sturdy philosophical bones as well as its increasingly absorbing physicality.

Irwin started out making potent, gestural paintings in an Abstract-Expressionist vein. His earliest work in the show, the 1959 canvas Black Raku. is a variant on Clyfford Still animated by diagonal plumes of black, dun and brick. As Irwin allied line more tightly with color, his paintings became increasingly calligraphic. In an untitled canvas from 1960-61, thick, stacked strokes form a crusty cage within a mustard ground. The monochrome paintings that followed toyed smartly with the conventional hierarchy of mark over ground in their raised horizontal lines of the same color as the surrounding field (sunflower, juicy red). From there, Irwin moved to tiny colored dots painted in densely packed rows at the center of a canvas, growing more widely spaced as they radiate and disappearing toward the edges. Then he lifted the dot paintings off the wall and gave them a subtle, convex bulge, producing an effect of diffusion that came to fruition in the aluminum and plastic disks of the late '60s.

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The disks were key works for Irwin, his first successes at subordinating frame and mark to overall presence. They have become icons of Light and Space art, but the installation of a 1969 disk here was still revealing. Irwin conceived these pieces for natural light, but when exhibiting venues couldn't supply enough of it, he devised a system of illumination from the four corners of a room, using two floods on the ceiling and two on the floor, so that the convex disk, protruding from the wall, appeared to merge with the four shadows cast behind it.

Irwin orchestrated the San Diego installation, opening up access to a skylight in order to bathe the large lenslike disk in natural light. Viewed head on, its edges evaporated and the sculpture became continuous with the wall, which bore no distinct shadows. This made for a quieter, less theatrical installation than has become common with the disks, but one much truer to Irwin's core phenomenological concerns.

He tweaked the architectural givens of the museum in several other places, altering entryways and walls to optimize the conditions for experiencing his work, operating on the premise that no aspect Of the environment is neutral and nothing is irrelevant. The changes never called attention to themselves--nor did a scrim piece installed in the same gallery as the disk, nor most of the early paintings.

Square the Room (2007), which many visitors never noticed, imposed a white, translucent scrim diagonally across the gallery, cutting off access to a wedge of the room. The space became more stable in its proportions as a result, but at the same time acquired a phantom limb, a curious, elusive appendage. Irwin covered the wood floor within with white contact paper, which further distinguished the blocked area from the rest of the gallery; the functional space was felt to generate a sculptural echo. Irwin has made scrim wall installations for more than 30 years, but the variant here delivered a surprise. It didn't merely register, it required discovery.

Since Irwin relinquished his studio practice around 1970, he has fashioned himself as a respondent rather than, say, a producer of objects, answering invitations to consider sites or sets of conditions and producing proposals for temporary or permanent works. Plans for several publicly sited projects were included in the exhibition. They hint at transformation and give some insight into Irwin's process. All of the projects represented--from the reconception of Miami's International Airport (1986) to sculptures designed for Chicago's City Front Plaza (1989)--were unrealized, though a commission from the Chinati Foundation to transform a former Army hospital at Marfa is in the planning stages. And he has many completed permanent installations to his credit. The latest, a palm garden for the redesign of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, debuted during the run of this show. Irwin's garden for the Getty Center in Los Angeles was launched in 1997, and his master plan for Dia:Beacon, which also includes a garden, was realized in 2003. His contribution to the Stuart Collection of outdoor art at UCSD dates to 1983.