David Ireland: 1930-2009

Over the weekend the San Francisco-based artist David Ireland died. Though his work is in the collections of many major museums, Ireland was not, to put it mildly, a career-driven kind of artist. He made a lot of his art out of refuse and he sometimes made work that involved very minor interventions on his part, like tossing a ball of wet concrete back and forth for a while, or just piling up old rubber bands in a jar. He was part of the aesthetic line of descent that flows from Kurt Schwitters through Robert Rauschenberg, Arte Povera, any number of "outsider" artists and down to Richard Tuttle, Judy Pfaff and Tara Donovan.

His lasting monument — at least I hope it's lasting; there's a local campaign right now to preserve it — was his own Victorian house in San Francisco's Mission District. Instead or renovating it, he excavated it, digging into its layers of history, preserving old torn wall paper under polyurethane and piling up old brooms into "sculpture" that prefigured the whole school of flotsam assemblage artists we have all around today.

Twenty years ago I wrote about him for Time's sister publication People. I hope I did him justice.