David Ireland

“You can't make art by making art,” David Ireland once said, and this statement can be understood as one of the guiding principles in his life and work. Sculptor, architect, installation artist, urban archeologist and much, much more, Ireland is impossible and unnecessary to label. Why label something that aspires to include most everything--or at least to not exclude the possibility of something? Mid-life, Ireland, who was born in 1930, decided to pursue his passion for art, and he went on to produce a body of work so idiosyncratic that it defies definition. Like his life, his working methodology is paradoxical, absurd, ironic and uniquely enriched by humor and humanity. The result of some 80 interviews with the American artist and his friends, family, collaborators and art world colleagues, Touching Time and Space offers an engrossing portrait of a deeply private but unfailingly generous iconoclast. His art practice, teaching, and wry philosophy have profoundly affected many. Beginning with a description of the radical transformation of his home--the legendary 500 Capp Street in San Francisco--author Betty Klausner provides an insightful and often moving narrative that illuminates Ireland's process, work and life.