David Ireland is widely recognized as a prominent figure among the artists of Conceptual Art movement. His life and artistic achievements can only be described as unconventional and eclectic, characterized by shifts and experimentation.

Born in Bellingham in 1930, David Ireland attended Western Washington University, originally called Western Washington College of Education, from 1948 to 1950. Seeking to experience the cultural life of a larger city, Ireland enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in Oakland from which he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in industrial design with a minor in printmaking in 1953. For the following 19 years, life challenges, opportunities and personal interests shaped his view of life and enriched his artistic sensibility. In 1955, after a period in the army, he traveled throughout Europe and South Africa. He returned to Bellingham in 1958 and started a family while working with his father as an insurance broker. Later he established Hunter Africa, an African artifact import business, moved to San Francisco and became a tour guide specialized in photographic and hunting safaris in Eastern Africa. Finally in 1972 at the age of 42, he courageously enrolled in graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute while taking additional printmaking classes at Laney College in Oakland.

After graduating in 1974, Ireland briefly worked in New York but later returned to San Francisco. Ireland was an affirmative and outspoken agent for the arts. His work has been distinguished by a diverse production, spanning from abstraction to minimalism to conceptual art, in a wide range of media - all punctuated by exhibitions, lectures, interviews and extensive travels in Asia and Europe. The artist passed away in May 2009.
David Ireland
Bigger Big Chair, 2004-2006
Painted steel plate
12 1/2' h. x 6' w. x 12 8' d.
Western Washington University Outdoor Sculpture Collection.
Western Washington University in partnership with one-half of one percent for art law, Art in Public Places Program, Washington State Arts Commission. © David Ireland, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California. Photo: courtesy JS Parker


David Ireland's lifetime artistic accomplishments were honored at the Oakland Art Museum of California in a retrospective entitled The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are that ran from November 2003 to March 2004. Karen Tsujimoto, Senior Curator of Art at the Oakland Museum authored a monograph of the exhibition and discussed Ireland's artistic diversity and maturation during his long creative career. Her book, informative, detailed and expressing a fine sensibility in integrating David Ireland's life and art, leads the reader through a fascinating discovery of the artist's ideas, life philosophy and artistic accomplishments (The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are. California: Oakland Museum of California, Berkeley: University Press, 2003.) The present text, while following Karen Tsujimoto's general analysis of Ireland's production, focuses on specific artworks by the artist as a conceptual framework for the presentation of two sculptures in possession of the Western Washington University: Homage to John Cage (1912-1992), 1993 and Bigger Big Chair, 2004-2006. Homage to John Cage (1912-1992) was acquired by the Friends of the Gallery, Western Gallery, in 1994. Bigger Big Chair, a sculpture commissioned in 2003 by Western Washington University in partnership with the Washington State Arts Commission, Art in Public Places Program, has been a part of Western Washington University Outdoor Sculpture Collection since 2007.

Tsujimoto discusses the artistic influences that shaped David Ireland's unique approach to art during his academic years at CCAC. In particular, his focus on architectural, industrial and stage design aligned him with the Bauhaus school and to the notion that art and life are interrelated and integrated human endeavors. Indeed, Ireland's artworks incorporate everyday objects redefined through a creative reinterpretation of their function, shapes and textures. This Western modernist approach blurs the barrier between high art and the ordinary object, between noble and humble media and forces us to redefine how we look at art and to recognize the relative nature of our hierarchical value system.

Tsujimoto points out the Zen connection in Ireland's art. In the 1950s and 1960s, many West Coast artists studied or were familiar with Zen philosophy through the writings of Shumryu Suzuki and Alan Watts. In adherence with Zen philosophy, Ireland's artworks demand a perception of objects outside their conventional connotation - an appreciation of reality the way it is, through an increase of our awareness and interpretative potential. Ireland's transformation of his residence at 500 Capp Street, an 1886 Victorian house in the San Francisco Mission District, was paradigmatic of this philosophy and also an expression of the maturation of the artist in the realm of Conceptual Art. Ireland bought the house in 1975 and realized that the practice of cleaning and organizing his rundown dwelling was equivalent to the practice of his own artistic work and began to "live" the transformation of the house as a creative idea in progress. Further, Ireland became conscious that the house expressed past existences - an accumulated history built through the previous owners' lives. The artist initiated and recorded the "deconstruction" of the house by stripping layers of wallpaper, sanding the floors and preserving materials and objects (generally considered waste) as relics or archeological evidence of 100 years of modern urban dwelling. Ireland also conceived his artistic endeavor as a disclosure of the hidden original character of the house - a metaphor for extracting the real nature of things.

Another guiding principle of Ireland's artistic philosophy is the acknowledgment that art resides in the process of art making - if the process is experienced in a creative manner. Indeed, the process could become more important that the object itself - another tenet of Zen philosophy. Process implies transformation and Ireland's artworks emerge and develop through continuous experimentation - a free and casual association of ideas and intuition.

David Ireland
Dumbball Action, 1986
Gelatin silver print
14 x 11 inches
© David Ireland, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, California

Ireland's dedication to the process is exemplified in the making of the Dumbballs, spheres of concrete that the artist obtained by repetitively tossing a blob of moist concrete from one hand to the other, in an almost ritualistic fashion, until it hardened into the shape of a ball. Ireland created tens of Dumbballs and each time the process might have taken several hours. The patient devotion to the task is only one aspect of Ireland's creative process. Another aspect is the surrendering to, and acceptance of "the way things are," in this case allowing the natural physical qualities of the drying cement to emerge.

David Ireland's artistic endeavor at 500 Capp Street was recounted in an oral history interview conducted by Suzanne B. Riess (David Ireland, "Inside 500 Capp Street: An Oral History of David Ireland's House," Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2003.)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's website provides a podcast of David Ireland accompanying the viewer inside his house at 500 Capp Street (http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/361), Released on September 2009 as part of the SFMOMA Artcast series.

The SPARK episode "The Grey Eminences" on National Public Radio (February 2004) also featured a short video inside the house, with comments by Karen Tsujimoto, as well as scenes during the preparation of the Oakland Museum exhibition "The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are".