The Medium Doesn’t Matter

In Life magazine’s 1962 “The Call of California” issue, “painting surfboarder” Robert Irwin stands on the beach at Pacific Ocean Park with a longboard on his left and a painting on his right. “A specialist of the surfboard,” wrote Life. “He has been water-skiing, surfing and life-guarding since he was 14 but takes care not to overdo it.” 

The board has a nice pulled-in nose and looks to be around 10 feet. The bottom has been hand-painted by Irwin’s Ferus Gallery stablemates Billy Al Bengston and Ken Price. All that’s visible of the painting to his right are the wooden stretcher bars and the blank canvas back. It’s facing away from the camera because, at that time, Irwin didn’t allow his work to be photographed, prompting one critic to describe him as “a sacred fool” with “dogmatic purity.” 

Many will remember Irwin for the Central Garden (the 134,000-square-foot garden he designed at the heart of the Getty Center in Los Angeles), his line-and-dot paintings, the ethereal scrims and disks he made, his MacArthur and Guggenheim grants, or his Venice, Whitney, MOMA, or Marfa installations. I remember Bob as a Herculean Californian who proudly embraced his cultural identity and boldly challenged generations of art establishmentarians—not just about art, but about the very question of human perception. Irwin put it best in a 2006 interview, when he said, “Part of my shtick is to make you aware of how fucking beautiful the world is.” 

Born in Long Beach in 1928, Irwin was raised in Baldwin Hills. By the time he entered Dorsey High School in the 1940s, football, competitive swing dancing, the ponies at Hollywood Park, girls, and cars had eclipsed surfing as his main interests. Throughout his life, Bob refused to draw a hard line between artist and craftsman. 

Once he began rebuilding cars in high school, he joined what British architectural critic Reyner Banham described as the Southland’s “freemasonry of talent,” a collective of individuals who moved comfortably between art and industry. In fact, Irwin probably had as much respect for pioneer car customizer George Barris or master surfboard builder Dale Velzy as he did for most of the artists showing in New York City’s blue-chip galleries. While many master craftsmen, as Irwin put it, didn’t know “art from shmart,” like artists, they made complex aesthetic decisions every day.

I will never forget the evening in the early 1970s when Irwin’s fugly green Cadillac Coupe de Ville, accompanied by the sound of the Glenn Miller Orchestra, glided into our Santa Monica Canyon driveway and changed my life forever. For the next 15 or so years, Irwin was my de facto stepfather. Relieved of all parental responsibility, he had the luxury to be a stern but ultimately generous teacher. 

By the time I met him, Irwin had left painting, sculpture, and his Venice studio behind, though he was well known as both an artist and a teacher. Not only did he look like Socrates, but he also acted like him (sans disciples). Over weekly meals at the Hamburger Hamlet, Musso & Frank Grill, the Hungry Tiger, Monty’s, and a handful of other LA favorites, Irwin would lecture me and whoever else was with us about whatever was on his mind: the latest book of philosophy he was fighting with, USC’s Rose Bowl prospects, using your senses and not your brain to look at art, some fine-art bureaucrat he was feuding with, or whatever immediate fabrication challenge he and his Sancho Panza–like assistant, Jack Brogan, were facing.

As a teacher, Irwin never wanted to be anyone’s mentor. Instead, he encouraged his students to be the best they could be in whatever medium they chose. The medium really didn’t matter, because the most important rule never changed: The harder you worked, the better you got, and the better you got, the luckier you got. In a short span of time, Irwin taught and inspired a remarkably talented and diverse group of artists at Chouinard and UC Irvine, many of whom went on to have very successful careers. The Irwin alumni included Larry Bell, Ed Ruscha, Alexis Smith, Vija Celmins, Chris Burden, and others. Throughout his storied, almost 70-year career, Irwin inspired many more artists and thinkers outside the classroom. Some—like Jack Barth, Jim Ganzer, Ned Evans, Marty Sugarman, Sean and Nelson Valentine, Stephen Niles, Peter Cole Jr., and myself—also happened to surf. 

Irwin did not hesitate to put me in my place when he sensed that I was getting too full of myself—and too comfortable in my Westside Manchu bubble of private surf spots, private beach clubs, private schools, and enervating privilege. Once, when I was bragging about my standout performance in a Little League game, he said, “Hold on a second.” He then moved his chair so that he was directly in front of me, tilted his head back like he was sunbathing, and said, “Go ahead. I just want to bask in your self-confidence.” 

Irwin always made it crystal clear that if a person wanted to pursue a career in any creative field, they needed to be able to support themselves with a side hustle that had nothing to do with their chosen endeavor. If one didn’t do this, he maintained, they would be quickly compromised by the fickle tastes of collectors, the whims of gallery owners, the fiats of academic administrators, or the censorship of timorous editors. 

Bob’s side hustle was the horses, and he was an extremely disciplined gambler who consistently won more than he lost. I went to Hollywood Park and Del Mar with him a few times, and it was serious business. Most evenings during “the season,” he would buy the Daily Racing Form and carefully mark it up with a Flair pen. There was no “system”—just a lot of homework about horses, jockeys, track conditions, and other floating variables. 

Irwin showed me that creative lives require contemplation—and this was not a group activity.

That and frugality bought Bob the latitude to pursue his art career with creative and intellectual freedom. This also bought him the ability to tell those he disagreed with, in no uncertain terms, that they were wrong. He did not suffer fools, did not hesitate to go for the jugular, and seemed to draw energy from his conflicts with the oppositional figures who cropped up throughout his life. 

“I was a wild child, and Irwin never pulled any punches,” recalls artist, photographer, and LA surf fixture Jim Ganzer. When Bob’s friend, the painter and sculptor Billy Al Bengston, began to talk shit about their dealer and greatest supporter, Irving Blum, Bob punched him. They got into a brawl and never spoke again. When a rich LA museum patron complained about his art, Bob said simply, “Fuck you, lady!” 

My favorite story was of the art critic Irwin took to see an elaborately customized car in an outer borough of the San Fernando Valley. When the critic refused to concede that the teenager who expertly and painstakingly rebuilt the car was making sophisticated aesthetic decisions, Bob stopped his own car, made the critic get out, and left him by the side of the road. 

Bob’s “dogmatic purity” was captured on film in Concert of Wills, the 1997 documentary about Pritzker Architecture Prize–winning architect Richard Meier and his work designing and building the Getty Center. After Irwin is awarded the contract for the museum’s Central Garden, “the filmmakers are there to record the unveiling of Irwin’s proposal, and Meier’s distaste is evident,” wrote design critic Michael Bierut. “The artist’s bias for whimsical organic forms, his disregard for the architecture’s rigorous orthography, and perhaps even his Detroit Tigers baseball hat all rub Richard Meier the wrong way, and he and his team of architects begin a reasoned, strongly-felt critique of the proposed plan.” 

In the film, Irwin listens to the architects say their piece, then offers a one-word response: “Bullshit!” 

“This single word literally brings the film to a crashing halt,” wrote Beirut. “A very long fifteen seconds of dead silence follows, broken at last by an awkward offscreen suggestion that perhaps on this note the meeting should end, which it does.”

One of the many things Irwin also showed me was that creative lives require contemplation—and this was not a group activity. To do it honestly, one could not be part of a herd, and there were much worse fates than being alone. Just because I surfed didn’t mean that I should assume the persona of “surfer.” Just because I played football, baseball, and basketball did not mean that I had to be a “jock.” And just because I liked to make art did not mean that I had to play “artiste.” Bob encouraged me to squeeze every hour out of every day, to cross cultural lines, and to be open to experiencing all the wonder that the world had to offer.

He also taught me that, no matter how rich my dad was, I always had to have a job and make my own money, because money bought the freedom to make independent decisions. After high school, much to my father’s dismay, I didn’t go to college. Instead, I continued to work construction in downtown LA, sold pot to the marijuana have-nots of South Central, and saved every penny. In late 1983, days after my 19th birthday, I boarded a flight to Australia. When my plane stopped over for a few hours in Honolulu, my mom and Bob were there to greet me at the gate. Over a Steinlager at an airport bar, Bob told me how proud he was of me for setting out into the world—alone.

I returned to LA seven months later, and only one thing was certain: I never wanted to live there again (and never did). Weeks before the start of the fall semester, I heard about a small, strange liberal-arts college in New York that admitted students on the spot. Despite my low GPA and semi-disastrous high school record, Bard College gave me a shot, and, like Bob, also changed me forever. For the first time in my life, I became a serious student, and I began to read many of the same books that I’d once watched Irwin sweat over.

While I was in New York, I was fortunate to be a fly on the wall at many dinners with Bob and his old friend Irving Blum. In addition to a lightning-quick wit, the Ferus Gallery founder had a tongue like a stiletto. After one particularly memorable meal at the Odeon, listening to Irwin and Blum draw back the curtain on the New York City art world and the neo-expressionism that was all the rage in the 1980s, it became harder and harder for me to take it all seriously. After all, Mary Boone was no Irving Blum, and Jean-Michel Basquiat was no Bob Irwin. During my junior year, I changed my major from art to history and began writing a senior thesis that grew into my PhD dissertation and first book, Law and War.

My respect for Bob never faded, but there comes a time in a young man’s life when he sees his idols for the mere mortals that they are. That day came for me in 1986, when I received an unexpected and urgent nighttime call from Bob. He was in New York City, working on a commission at the 28-acre Wave Hill estate in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx. Bob was modifying an existing portion of the garden by lowering a section of lawn by 18 inches. After excavating the area, he planned to resod it, then border the “Wave Hill Garden” with rusted steel. 

Of course, the head garden bureaucrat hated him. And, of course, Bob hated him back. It was the standard Irwin “fuck you–fuck you” situation. Being a bureaucrat, Bob’s nemesis did not work on the weekends, so, one Saturday, Bob and Jack Brogan pushed the envelope of the permissible. They brought in a piece of heavy equipment to move dirt. Not only did they get the machinery stuck up to its axles, but they also got a second vehicle stuck up to its axles while trying to free the first from the springtime mud.

I told Bob not to worry and met him at Wave Hill early the next morning with two four-wheel drives, towropes, snatch lines, and four strong friends. We freed the vehicles and then used Bob’s shovels to repair and obscure the evidence of the debacle. 

My relationship with Bob ended very abruptly in 1988, after he and my mother went their separate ways. There was some acrimony, and I sided with my mother, as sons are wont to do. 

Over the years, I would occasionally read something about Bob or one of his projects in the press. I never thought words, Bob’s or anyone else’s, did justice to his art. Nothing excited him more than when someone looked at one of his pieces and reacted viscerally to it with their senses and not their brains—or, as he used to say, “BAM! It hit ’em between the eyes!”

I did not see Irwin again until we ran into each other at the restaurant 72 Market Street in Venice in 1994. I had just received my doctorate and was now investigating war crimes in Cambodia, trying to get my first book published, and surfing the biggest waves of my life. We were both happy to see each other, and as I filled him in on my career, I could tell that he had missed me as much as I had missed him. We’d shared some really good innings of our lives. 

As I’ve grown older, I’ve made a point of acknowledging and paying my respects to those who have helped me along the way. Two of my greatest teachers, Brigadier General Telford Taylor and James Shenton, died before I had a chance to thank them. I did not want to make this mistake again, so I wrote Irwin: 

Bob…

I wear many hats these days: husband/father (boys 9+11), author, history professor, martial arts instructor, ocean safety/junior lifeguards instructor, defense contractor, veteran adviser, and private investigator. I have spent much of my adult life helping others.…

Thanks for pushing me to see the world without restraints,
but to be practical about it and, above all, always keep a day job to fund the art so that it can progress organically without outside pressure. I have to come to California this fall and would love to catch up if you have time. 

Sincerely, 

Peter Maguire

He responded with a note, and I arranged to see him. I wanted to thank him in person for all that he had taught me. A few months later, I drove down to La Jolla, where my mom had lived and I had surfed as a boy. After a sunrise go-out at Windansea, I headed up the hill to Bob’s house, and he greeted me warmly. Although he was still sharp as a tack, he was now more than 90 years old, and one of his eyes was failing. I sensed that the sand was running out of his hourglass and did not want to take up too much of it. I brought Bob up to speed on my life and thanked him for making a difference in it. I said goodbye knowing that I would probably never see him again. 

After my mom called on the night of October 25, 2023, to tell me Irwin had died, I took my 10’2″ Owl Chapman balsa-wood gun—the board that I’d ridden the biggest waves of my life on—off the wall and waxed it up. The next morning, my wife and I made a lei out of yellow daisies, and I went down to Wrightsville Beach to paddle it out to sea in Bob’s honor. 

The waves were consistent, and it was a pain in the ass to get the big board through the beachbreak. Just as I reached the outside and was preparing to say a few sentimental words and toss the flowers into the ocean, a set came and caught me inside. While I managed to hang onto my board, the lei exploded, and now there were clumps of bright-yellow daisy petals scattered on the surface of the olive-green water. It was quite beautiful and, to borrow a term from Bob, “site specific.”

I’ll leave it to others when it comes to “minimalism,” “Finish Fetish,” “light and space,” “conceptualism,” “phenomenology,” and the other big words that get thrown around loosely and imprecisely when people talk or write about Bob’s art. Instead, I’ll remember Bob Irwin as a guy from the Southside who taught me how to hustle.

[Feature image: The late artist, in his San Diego studio with various works in progress, 2015. Photo by Mark Mahaney.]