David Ireland
American, 1930-2009
Untitled (Cabinet with Partially Open Door with Painting by Roy de Forest), 1978-88
cabinet: painted metal; painting: acrylic and oil on wood
68 1/4 × 25 1/2 × 14 3/4 in.
SBMA, Gift of Agnes Bourne
2003.86a-d
David Ireland in San Francisco in 2003.
COMMENTS
In viewing David Ireland’s work, we gain an understanding of the power of his voice, which cannot be captured in words or analysis. He is playing at the edge between reality and illusion, fact and art, and the relationship between the two. He encourages us to ask: Is that art? If so, why? If not, why not? We are reminded of Marcel Duchamp's statement, "It's art if I say it's art."
Our new work is a partially open metal cabinet topped by an abstract, heavily impastoed, Roy de Forest painting, which we view at eye level. The cabinet appears to be empty, yet we peer in, hoping to find something which would justify the installation of the cabinet in our gallery. The cabinet suggests the vitrines, display cases and niches of traditional museums, though it is also only an old dilapidated cabinet. However, we are drawn to explore it for meaning, particularly since it has a painting by a well known artist on top, which suggests it must be important, have some special meaning. Ireland invites our participation with his process, the choice of the cabinet, the choice of the de Forest painting, the choice of color for the cabinet, the unconventional method of displaying the painting. Are we led to wonder how art is placed in museums like ours. Perhaps a painting set on an empty cabinet parallels some experience we have in museums. And what about all that emptiness in the cabinet? Can a void have meaning?
Does every inch of a museum have to be full of objects that we immediately understand and can put in a category? If that is the case, we will have trouble with this piece. Diana has included it in a room of still lifes and abstractions. Perhaps this work is both a still life and an abstraction. It is interesting to compare our cabinet with the cake plate displaying ultramarine pigment. Again Ireland to offering us a container, in this case with the values reversed. The container itself is valuable and beautiful in an accepted way, while what is displayed is worthless by conventional standards. Yet in displaying the pigmented material as if it were worthy of admiration, we are led to question what it is about about objects that illicits our acceptance. These are only my musings. It would be fun to get together and share our responses to this piece.
Biography
David Ireland was born in 1930 in Bellingham, Washington, to Martha Quam, a teacher and lover of theater, and David Kenneth Ireland, a insurance broker. The third of four children, he first attended college in Bellingham and then continued his studies at CCAC, California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, studying theater and industrial design with Eric Stearne, printmaking with Nathan Oliveira, and sculpture with Robert Winston, among others. After graduation in 1953, he was drafted into the U.S. Army but did not serve overseas. Though he returned to Bellingham in 1955 to work for a year as an illustrator for a local architect, he was drawn into travel, which would determine the course of his life over the next decades
.Beginning in 1956, Ireland traveled to Europe with a friend and went on that winter to Johannesburg, South Africa, to visit a CCAC classmate. Fascinated by Africa, he stayed to travel throughout the country and work for his friend as a draftsman for an architectural firm. Though he returned to Bellingham to work with his father’s insurance firm from 1959 to 1965, feeling he owed it to his parents for their steady support over the years, he continued his connection to Africa by establishing Hunter Africa, an import business and gallery for African artifacts. During this period he married Joanne Westford, a local girl. Their son, Ian, was born the following year and their daughter, Shaughn, two years later. When his father retired, Ireland also left the insurance firm, and relocated his family to San Francisco, producing some award winning African wildlife films and developing a second business, David Ireland, Ltd. Safaris, which provided wildlife photography and hunting tours to Kenya. Establishing a second office in Nairobi, the conducted ten trips to Kenya and Tanzania for safaris and filming of wildlife between 1965 and 1972. He also visited Hawaii, India, Thailand, Hong Long, Japan, and Western Europe.
Following the breakup of his marriage, he closed both businesses and in 1972 enrolled as a graduate student at SFAI, San Francisco Art Institute, on the GI Bill, focusing on printmaking, especially lithography, with Kathan Brown. Concurrently he attended Laney College in Oakland and studied plastics technology and lithography and maintained a studio on Union Street in the old Hunter Africa storefront.
After receiving his Master of Fine Arts degree from SFAI in 1974, he moved to New York, worked at Hunter College and maintained a studio on East 59th St., completing his 94-Pound Series made of cement, a turning point in his work.
After more international travels and another period in New York, he settled in San Francisco, purchasing an 1886 Victorian house at 500 Capp Street in the Mission District. In San Fransicso, he was exposed to Zen Buddhism, and though never an avowed Buddhist, the minimalist style, emphasis on presence, and unconventional approach to materials have made a deep imprint on his work.
In 1978, following his first one man show in Bellingham, he opened his Capp Street house for public viewing and received an NEA fellowship grant. Continuing to travel widely and experiment in various forms of artistic expression, he became increasingly recognized as a unique conceptualist voice. He continued to renovate houses in San Francisco, opening them for public viewing and had his first New York show called David Ireland in New York, a one-day presentation at White Columns, exhibiting a readymade suitcase with studio objects accompanied by a audio cassette.
In July of 1984 a solo exhibition, Currents: David Ireland, opened at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. He also accepted a commission for the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C., to design an apartment for visiting artists, titled Jade Garden. He created the interior and Robert Wilhite designed the furniture.
Ireland explored dance, theater design, costume design, and performance pieces, in addition to his constant “art making,” which could be anything from shaping lumps of clay to paper and pencil sketches to formal minimalist paintings. In 1987 he became artist-in-residence at the Headlands Art Center in Sausalito, redesigning the school’s main offices from abandoned army barracks. That same year he began teaching at SFAI, a position he has returned to often over the years.
His growing prominence and frequent generous grants and commissions have allowed Ireland to express his startling and unconventional vision.
Summarized by Ricki Morse from The Way Things Are, The Art of David Ireland, Oakland Museum of California, 2003.