Robert Irwin Getty Garden Hardcover – August 29, 2002

ABSOLUTELY fantastic.

Weschler wrote a wonderful book about Irwin called "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees", and spent a lot of time with Irwin, who was one of the major figures in minimalist painting and installations, and won a MacArthur fellowship based on that work. Weschler himself is a very interesting and enjoyable author, and I also recommend his "Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder" especially.This book is an expansion, with photographs, of a 1997 New Yorker magazine article about Irwin's first garden installation project.I read this book at the library. Unlike one of the other reviewers, I found many of the photos very disappointing. Some are actually out of focus (or overly enlarged), and none of the larger scale ones really grab my eye. Many of the closeups of plant details are much more graphically satisfying. The photographer had not a lot of experience with this particular garden subject type, she says in the notes. The photos do, however, inspire one to wish to see the actual garden. It's obvious from the photos that the garden is designed to play with the viewer's close up perceptions of texture, light, and contrasts of detail and visual rhythm, as Irwin's wonderful minimalist paintings and light installations have done for decades.Given Weschler's knowledge of Irwin, I am surprised at the shallowness of some of his questions, but they are meant to elicit responses, and Irwin does indeed go on at length. There is detailed description of the physical process of plant and materials selection, and construction process.If you are interested in Irwin's thought processes and actual physical methods, the narrative is good. Otherwise, it gets a bit tedious, like "dancing about architecture". Irwin is very interested in philosophy and cognition of perception, which is reflected in his style of aesthetic self analysis and description of purpose and process.I will probably go back and read it again when i am more interested in his description of his thought processes, although I found some of what he said unconvincing. Perhaps he was intellectualizing about his instinctive aesthetic reactions. He does say that he relies on those extensively, more than theoretical doctrine.Overall, worth at least one or two readings. I haven't decided if it's worth buying...I'd like to read the New Yorker article for comparison to see how much if anything the photos really add. They are certainly no substitute for experience in person, on which I can agree with other reviewers.

I felt that this book is not only a beautiful book on art and gardens to own, but qualifies as an "Everyday Reference" for our Architecture office. The photographs by Becky Cohen, 2000 Alfred Eisenstaedt Award winner, were reason enough to give this gorgeous book as gifts to friends as well as other Associates in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design. The images she took relay the purposefulness and soulfulness of the design of the gardens, which in turn, connects and inspires the Designer in their own field, whatever it might be. As a reference book to Designers, the book surpasses it's own purpose to show the incredible Getty Gardens and to view the dialogue between Weschler and Irwin, which at times, I'm sorry to say, can be dull and stupid sounding. However, the compositions and textures of the photographs are just too stunning to harbor that opinion of the dialogue for very long. In the book, you feel you might realize that Cohen's immensely thoughtful compositions of the garden photographs are a better art itself than of the artistic gardens. Again and again, with every page, they follow one after the other to reveal a new thought, not just about gardens or a particular spectacular plant or flower, but about how you see them. It inspires a desire to see them for yourself, as she does, to open an intimate experience with nature. Each image impresses that the two dimensional beauty you see in front of you might be part trickery. The "real" gardens couldn't have that much beauty! But, of course, when you visit the gardens, they do. Cohen is merely brilliant at capturing it. As you find the last of the images at the end of the book, it reminds me of the wonder you feel when you see anything beautful for the first time, it sort of makes you hold your breath and makes your heart skip a bit.

This bok is a revelation of the landscaped sculptured garden by an " abstract expressionist"