David Ireland

Angel-Go-Round, 1996, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art

David Ireland was a latecomer to art. According to local legend, when an art student borrowed a taxidermied elephant’s foot from his African imports store for an installation, Ireland was so inspired that he enrolled at SFAI and threw himself into The City’s conceptual art scene. Perhaps this wasn’t such a radical gesture for a man who had already been an architectural draftsman, a carpenter, and an African safari guide; his many works involve the materials of daily life, especially the concrete and detritus of construction, and his best-known work is his three decade home at 500 Capp Street in San Francisco’s Mission District, a container for his art and an artwork in its own right. Ireland claimed that “you can’t make art by making art,” and indeed, his works challenge our understanding of what art is.

So, try this out: In 1987, for his Adaline Kent Award exhibition, Ireland poured three tons of concrete down a 19-step staircase at SFAI, blocking access to a second-floor gallery. This work, Smithsonian Falls, Descending a Staircase for P.K., is pretty much as challenging, as in-your-face and in-your-space, as art can be. Despite its homely material, the work has both metaphoric and art-specific resonance, referencing Robert Smithson, Marcel Duchamp, and Paul Kos in its title.

His Angel-Go-Round (1996) is more whimsical: a circular mound of concrete classical statues over which an angel suspended from a cord circles overhead, arm outstretched in a seeming benediction. It’s on permanent display at the di Rosa Center in Sonoma County.

No one knows exactly how many Dumb Balls Ireland made through a meditative practice that connects life routines and art. Ireland would toss a hunk of wet cement from hand to hand—sometimes for hours—until it dried into a ball. A group of them appear in Dumb Ball Box (1983), an elegant department-store-style display case filled not with Prada purses but with cement balls.

When Ireland bought a ramshackle Italianate house at 500 Capp Street from a Swiss accordion-maker in 1975, he first thought he would renovate it as a studio. Instead, the odd house captivated him, and he began a “maintenance action”—removing window moldings, stripping wallpaper, sanding surfaces, and finally coating the saffron-colored walls, ceiling, and floors with high-gloss polyurethane varnish. He began to see the house as a sculpture and his interventions on it as art.

The house was sold in 2008, just before Ireland’s death at 78, and in 2015 was opened to the public as a museum and exhibition space. It still features a jar of rubber bands from daily news deliveries, a chair affixed to a wall, a copper-plate covered window, and its shiny walls still reflect the world outside.

“I just live my life and my art occurs in the process.”