"The debris is just debris, but it's not just debris, it's art in its finest way, it's reductive and it's positive, it's got all that thing that you want to have in a sculpture." -David Ireland

Is there a better example of "conceptual art" than David Ireland's debris pile at his 2003 Oakland Art Museum show? It's everything that many fine art lovers hate: a simplistic, insulting elevation of the most mundane to the status of fine art. But there is some material at work here in the backstory of Ireland's methodologies of utilizing found materials that have significance to place. In this case, all the junk of the pile came from less than a hundred yards away, in the very same room it is assembled. As the accumulation of the previous show's structure, the debris pile serves as an open-ended question. Some might see the wastefulness of contemporary art exhibit, others might ruminate on California's propensities for earthquakes reducing everything to rubble. And of course, there is the fundamental aesthetic, the minimalist coloring, the shadows, the texture.

In thinking about Ireland's famous expression "you can't make art by making art," I have been recently questioning the place of intention in artwork, how the mind open to the possibilities of chance and accident might have a more fertile field of potential than one that is rigorously premeditated. The problem, as always, is one of recognition. When do you stop? And when do you save something that might otherwise be thrown away to re-purpose it as a new incarnation of artwork that challenges a viewer's perception? And when is it just junk? For a cascade of questions like these to pour forth from a pile of trash in a gallery, I claim Ireland's concept to be profoundly effective for at least this one viewer.