Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin

Lawrence Weschler's great and unique talent—and it's great and unique enough that it makes him one of my favorite writers—is as a conduit for the obsessive ideas of others, from cartoonist Ben Katchor to musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky to museum curator/parodist David Wilson to, in his upcoming biography, Oliver Sacks. And these two volumes show him off at his best, capturing decades of conversations with two committed and restless visual artists and beautifully reproducing much of the art they discuss. Their art and their personalities—Irwin's conceptual light constructions and his laid-back loner intensity vs. Hockney's painterly compositions and collages and his sociable experimenting—could hardly be more different, but Weschler is at ease with them both (and they clearly with him). I've rarely found books that capture artists' articulation of their work so well or, even more impressively, the transformations of their thinking and style over time. These are books to live with.