
In True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney , Lawrence Weschler notes that a Hockney comment, "You see with memory," runs diametrically counter to Robert Irwin's entire aesthetic. Irwin's creative starting point is concisely summed up in the title of Weschler's biography on Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. For Irwin, to truly see something, one needs to forget everything about it, right down to its very name. Yet, as Weschler points out, the seemingly divergent approaches of these two artists do have a fascinating meeting point: Their most successful projects draw us into the artist's world.
As we come to know their pieces, we are, in effect, in the work with the artist through this engagement. Their creative projects do not hold us as removed spectators, but ask us to step in and join their vision. This relational aspect is most explicitly contextualized in the final essay of the Hockney book, which speaks of artist's return to painting in 2007. After Hockney mentioned that he had taken to thinking of these late landscape canvases as figure paintings, Weschler pointed out that there are no bodies in these works. Hockney replied that the viewer is the figure in the work.