Traces the life and career of the California artist, who currently works with pure light and the subtle modulation of empty space

"Robert Irwin, perhaps the most influential of the California artists, moved from his beginnings in abstract expressionism through successive shifts in style and sensibility, into a new aesthetic territory altogether, one where philosophical concepts of perception and the world interact. Weschler has charted the journey with exceptional clarity and cogency. He has also, in the process, provided what seems to me the best running history of postwar West Coast art that I have yet seen."—Calvin Tomkins

Soon after the book's publication in 1982, artist David Hockney read Lawrence Weschler's Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin and invited Weschler to his studio to discuss it, initiating a series of engrossing dialogues, gathered here for the first time. Weschler chronicles Hockney's protean production and speculations, including his scenic designs for opera, his homemade xerographic prints, his exploration of physics in relation to Chinese landscape painting, his investigations into optical devices, his taking up of watercolor—and then his spectacular return to oil painting, around 2005, with a series of landscapes of the East Yorkshire countryside of his youth. These conversations provide an astonishing record of what has been Hockney's grand endeavor, nothing less than an exploration of "the structure of seeing" itself.

A beautifully illustrated, accessible volume about one of the Getty Center’s best-loved sites. Among the most beloved sites at the Getty Center, the Central Garden has aroused intense interest from the moment artist Robert Irwin was awarded the commission. First published in 2002, Robert Irwin Getty Garden is comprised of a series of discussions between noted author Lawrence Weschler and Irwin, providing a lively account of what Irwin has playfully termed “a sculpture in the form of a garden aspiring to be art.” The text revolves around four garden walks: extended conversations in which the artist explains the critical choices he made—from plant materials to steel—in the creation of a living work of art that has helped to redefine what a modern garden can and should be. This updated edition features new photography of the Central Garden in a smaller, more accessible format.

In recent years as countries around the globe have begun to move from dictatorial to more democratic systems of governance, no more traumatic (or dramatic) ethical problem has arisen than what to do with the previous regime’s torturers. In most cases, the security and military apparatuses, responsible for the overwhelming majority of human-rights abuses, still retain tremendous power—and will not abide any settling of accounts. Now, New Yorker staff reporter Lawrence Weschler tells the extraordinary story of how, against tremendous odds, torture victims and human-rights activists in two Latin American countries—Brazil and Uruguay—tried to bring their torturers to justice and to rehabilitate their whole societies from harrowing periods of silence and repression. In this first of his two accounts, he tells how a tiny group of torture victims, clerics, and human-rights activists in Brazil launched an extremely risky, nonviolent plot to get even with the former torturers by publishing an indisputable account of their savage system of repression—indisputable because it is drawn from the regime’s own files. In the second, set in Uruguay, he tells how a more broadly-based movement attempted to bring to light the dark history of a military regime engaged in more political incarceration per capita than any other on earth at that time. In this illuminating and beautifully written book (portions of which appeared in five issues of The New Yorker), Weschler examines what a small number of individuals can do to retrieve history and truth from the hands of torturers.

"Devoted to the writings of this seminal post-war American artist. Fully half of these writings, which span a period from the mid-1960s through the 1990s, are published here for the very first time"--Dust jacket.

From a cuneiform tablet to a Chicago prison, from the depths of the cosmos to the text on our T-shirts, Lawrence Weschler finds strange connections wherever he looks. The farther one travels (through geography, through art, through science, through time), the more everything seems to converge -- at least, it does if you're looking through Weschler's giddy, brilliant eyes. Weschler combines his keen insights into art, his years of experience as a chronicler of the fall of Communism, and his triumphs and failures as the father of a teenage girl into a series of essays sure to illuminate, educate, and astound.

A beautiful book on the famed Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas The Chinati Foundation, a world-famous destination for large-scale contemporary art, was founded by Donald Judd (1928-1994) to preserve and present a select number of permanent installations that were inextricably linked to the surrounding landscape in Marfa, Texas. This handsome publication, first published in 2010 and now available with a new chapter devoted to the permanent installation by Robert Irwin that was inaugurated in 2016 and a new foreword by Jenny Moore, director of the Chinati Foundation, describes how Judd developed his ideas of the role of art and museums from the early 1960s onward, culminating in the creation of Chinati. The individual installations featured here include work by John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, David Rabinowitch, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, Ingólfur Arnarsson, Carl Andre, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen, and John Wesley, as well as by Judd himself. The book also features a complete catalogue of the collection and writings by Judd relating to Chinati and Marfa. Published in association with the Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati

This book explores four decades of Robert Irwin's outdoor environment projects through his drawings and architectural models. Over the course of a storied career, Robert Irwin has come to regard art as site determined, or something that works in and responds to its surroundings. This book opens with his projects on college campuses between 1975 and 1982. These are followed by Irwin's major, yet never realized, commission for the Miami International Airport, where he proposed to transform the structure, parking lots, and roadways into a sequence of aesthetic and practical spaces that engaged directly with the South Florida environment. It then turns to one of Irwin's most celebrated works, the Central Garden at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Finally, the book takes readers to the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and one of Irwin's most ambitious works to date--a monumental artwork that brilliantly connects viewers to the land and sky. Throughout this collection of drawings, models, and photographs of magnificent, groundbreaking projects, readers will come to see Irwin as a visionary artist and a brilliant draftsman.

My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me: 1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie. Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?