Welcome to Eden (Circa 1997)

Robert Irwin is the wild card of the Getty. A California artist who’s spent the last 30 years creating environments that manipulate shadow and light, he was given the prime 134,000-square-foot parcel of land that constitutes the Getty’s Central Garden and told to just do his thing.

Of course, Irwin’s no rookie when it comes to site-specific works. The subject of a 1993 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, he’s completed numerous small-scale permanent public works and drawn plans for several massive projects. He devoted most of the ‘80s, for instance, to redesigning Miami International Airport, a job that was aborted at the 11th hour due to a change in airport management personnel.

But the Getty is the first organization to finance and execute his plans for a major commission, so the garden, budgeted at $7 million, represents an important landmark in his career. That the Getty bankrolled his vision is doubly impressive considering that Irwin had never attempted a garden before--a detail he dismisses as irrelevant.

“I’m not a gardener,” he points out. “This is a sculpture in the form of a garden that’s aspiring to be art. It’s an extension of the artworks I’ve made and is not intended to operate in any of the ways normally associated with gardens.

“Sometimes, when I stand at the base of the garden and look up, it strikes me that the surrounding buildings finish the garden off nicely,” he adds with a hint of mischief. “My hope is that people will recognize that this is a sculptural environment, but that they’ll also find it inviting enough that they’ll flop down on the grass because this is a garden to be used.”

In the past, Irwin’s work could be described as rather austere. At New York’s Pace Gallery in 1992, for example, he hung three scrims that divided the room in four and distorted the viewer’s depth perception. The point of this and Irwin’s other simple and contemplative installations was to sensitize the eye by giving the retina very little to focus on.

With the Getty garden, however, he’s shooting for something frankly spectacular. Situated on a gently sloping hill west of the Getty Museum and south of the Research Institute, it can be seen from multiple vantage points on the site.

Key to his design are two descending rows of London plane trees that create a canopy over a man-made stream. The newly planted trees have the elegant fragility of young ballerinas, but in 50 years, they should provide a grand complement to the jumble of stones Irwin collected in Montana and Northern California to delineate the recirculating stream, the banks of which are planted with flowers whose colors increase in intensity down the hill. Since the Getty will be seen by visitors year-round, Irwin selected several long-blooming plants--bougainvillea, iceberg roses, azaleas--to anchor it.

“The problem with these hardy plants is they don’t seem special because people are used to seeing them, but the way you stage a flower can change how it’s perceived,” Irwin says. “Because this garden will get great maintenance [it will be tended by four full-time gardners five days a week], we’ll let the hardy plants intermingle. Then several times a year, we’ll add a plant that’s more delicate.”

Visitors will descend into Irwin’s garden along a path that zigzags over the stream, which collects in a reflecting pool at the base of the hill. Built into the pool is a geometric maze planted with azaleas that appear to float on the water. Irwin says that, to his knowledge, nobody’s ever attempted a “floating” maze of this sort; his hope is that it will read as the cherry atop his horticultural sundae.

Born in Long Beach in 1928, Irwin came of age as an artist in the ‘50s, making Abstract Expressionist paintings. The style quickly bored him, however, and he began stripping his canvases of anything that struck him as extraneous. By the late ‘60s, everything--including the canvas--was gone. Under the sway of phenomenologist philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl, Irwin began designing scrim installations that allowed him to tweak the way the human eye processes visual information.

A seminal figure in the California Light and Space Movement of the ‘70s, Irwin received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1984, and today is an artist of international renown. Yet it’s surprising that he landed the commission for the garden--particularly since it originally was to be designed by Richard Meier. That changed in 1992, when Harold M. Williams, president and CEO of the Getty Trust, and Stephen D. Rountree, vice president of the trust, decided they weren’t satisfied with Meier’s plans.

“Richard’s design would’ve served the architecture well, but we felt that his approach missed a beat in terms of doing something special,” Rountree recalls. “Our idea was to make the garden a work of art, so we invited Bob and [artist] James Turrell to submit plans. We had to abandon Turrell’s plan because it was too difficult logistically, but we continued with Bob and soon realized we should give him the freedom he needed to develop his ideas because they were exciting. His stream bed, for instance, is essentially a sound sculpture. We had no reservations about the fact that Bob had never done a garden because he approached the project with incredible intensity right from the start.”

Needless to say, Meier didn’t welcome Irwin, and a clash of the titans ensued, delaying the garden for a year and making it the down-to-the-wire chapter of the Getty saga.

Late last month, Irwin was out there in the blazing afternoon sun. Slender and tan from months of working outdoors, he’s almost 70 but looks 10 years younger (it’s not surprising to hear he has a 4-year-old daughter at home in San Diego with his wife, Adele), and he’s able to nimbly position himself on a precarious temporary bridge that spans the stream. Staring down intently at a large stone, he bends over and shifts it a fraction of an inch. “That’s better,” he declares to no one in particular. One of his crew looks on while sucking on a lollipop and flashes a reporter an amused smile.

“What usually happens with architectural projects of this scale is, they figure out when the buildings will be done, then tell you to clean up the yard in the time left over,” Irwin says with exasperation. “I told them this garden was complex and would require a real construction period, but they didn’t even move the building equipment out of the garden until late October. We got a late start and had to work around that equipment.

“Still, these final weeks of work have been like Christmas every day,” he adds. “You knew you were getting a shirt, but you didn’t know it was gonna be that shirt. Some things look wrong, but other things look better than I’d anticipated. Nonetheless, this has been a pressured experience and I’m worn out.”

Andrew Spurlock of Spurlock Poirier, a San Diego landscape architecture firm that’s collaborated with Irwin over the past 12 years and is the prime consultant for the garden, confirms that “Bob’s been in a state of high anxiety. He’s still been fun to work with, though, because he’s open to discussing things. I’ve come to love and admire his open-ended way of working.”

Open-ended flexibility is definitely called for here. The garden is, after all, an expensive artwork whose success pivots on the fate of young plants. Before the Getty showed up with bulldozers, there was a ravine where Irwin’s garden sits, and after a heavy rain, water destined for the Ballona Wetlands coursed down its center. Oh, and did we mention El Nino?

“El Nino could blow the trees down because they won’t have developed deep roots yet, and the soil could erode because ground covers aren’t established,” Spurlock acknowledges. “The crape myrtle and the London plane are both vulnerable to mil-dew and blight, too, but Bob really liked those trees.”

Irwin deferred to consultants from dozens of disciplines, but his gut instinct was to design the garden with his eyes. “Bob is strictly a visual person, and when we visited nurseries, he always gravitated to some scrawny, dying plant stuck in a corner because he liked its shape or color,” laughs Richard Naranjo, the Getty’s manager of grounds and gardens.

Over time, Irwin has learned enough to know that winter storms could be a problem this first year. “With plant material, a million disasters can happen, but the thing I worry most about is the azaleas. If the trees or the azaleas don’t thrive, there will be some major holes in the garden.”

With or without holes, Irwin’s garden doesn’t exactly blend in with the surrounding grounds. Those were the handiwork of Meier, who declines to comment on Irwin’s work except to say: “This conflict has been resolved, and I don’t think any comment I would make would serve anyone usefully.”

Laurie Olin, whose Phil-adelphia landscape design firm helped Meier, describes the architect’s design as an attempt to “echo the Medi-terranean civilizations of Greece, Italy and Spain that produced much of the art at the Getty. Bob’s garden is dramatically different, and I expect it will be very popular. He made some choices I wouldn’t have made, but I don’t think it will be terrible. Putting azaleas in the middle of the pool--you think: geez, they’re gonna fry--but they can replace them.”

Irwin hopes that won’t be necessary. If it is, he’ll work around it. “For 30 years, I’ve been doing installations, not one of which has been maintained, and one reason I refused to let Meier run me off this project is that they’re willing to take care of it,” he says with determination.

Gratified that the Getty seems to understand his long-range vision of the garden, Irwin knows the general public may rush to judgment. So he’s quick to point out that the garden will debut at a subdued point in its cycle.

“The garden has some color now, but there’s not a lot,” he explains. “The soil is as visually there as the plants, so the color of the soil is important. The dirt that was there was a drab brown, so I prepared my own soil, using dirt from Northern California, combined with scoria, which I got from mining areas in Arizona, and worm castings.

“It’s winter now, and that’s when the skeletal structure of the garden moves to the foreground--the garden is designed to be quiet, mel- ancholy and sculptural during the cold months. Then, in the spring, it will become exuberant, and the plants will be allowed to ignore all boundaries and flourish,” he says, smiling at the thought of all that’s to come.