"Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees"

There's a breezy start to Lawrence Weschler's profile on Robert Irwin, whose Getty Garden is one of my favorite spaces. (I hadn't know that he was responsible for that, and the Lake Wabin installation at Wellesley.)

• "You are the best in your class without even trying, which is the best way to learn nothing."
• building cars: "A folk art is when you take a utilitarian object, . and you give it overlays of your own personality... You enhance it with your life."
  
• For three years he extended the winsome camaraderie of his high school years: he danced contests, built cars, chased girls, bet horses.
• "God, those things were dumb," recalls Irwin, "kids and merry-go-rounds and balloons, I was so naive." His mother hoarded these pieces, doled them out selectively to particularly deserving relatives, whose mantelpieces they adorn to this day, to Irwin's painfully recurrent dismay.
• European tour: "like some Davids that were technically really incredible;.. and there were some that really just jumped out at you, like some Vermeers which were just spectacular. Now and then a piece of Egyptian art or something would really bang you." 
• Well, what was happening to me as I was on my way to Ibiza was that I was pulling all those plugs out, one at a time: books, language, social contacts. And what happens at a certain point as you get down to the last plugs, it's like the Zen thing of having no ego.
• He offers impatiently, "'controlled' meaning they were essentially mannered. There was a lot of drawing in them. They were not gestural; they were very designy drawings with a lot of rich colors and so on and so forth."