The Art of Light & Space
Artist James Turrell may change your perceptual reality
By Jane Wilson
Aspen Times Staff Writer
December 10 & 11, 1994
Perceptual artist James Turrell remembers as a boy standing in his California backyard at 4 a.m. and observing the effects of the Nevada bomb blasts in the sky.
He also remembers, at about age 4, making an entire galaxy with pinholes in the black-out room of his home.
Later, as a college art student, Turrell recalls sitting in a darkened art-history class viewing slides, and being more impressed with the light reflected from the projector than from the actual images on the screen.
Light has always held a fascination for Turrell, who has created pieces about the expression of light and space, time and timelessness, loneliness and beauty, all over the world.
That he has now created a special installation of his art to grace the whole lower gallery of the Aspen Art Museum is something of a coup, and the realization of a dream for museum executive director Suzanne Farver, who began pursuing Turrell for an exhibition here two years ago.
“Every time I’ve experienced a Turrell installation, I’ve been moved. I hope it has the same effect on our visitors,” said Farver.
Turrell’s piece for the museum is part of his Wedgework Series, a handful of pieces, one of which is owned by the Museum of Modern Art. Turrell said he began the series some time ago, left it for awhile, and recently came back to it.
The museum piece
The entire lower level gallery space at the museum has been darkened for the Turrell piece, as yet untitled. Walk into the room and you encounter light, palpable, like dry ice, only motionless. It is timeless, perpetual, and has a definite density to it. The source of the light is a mystery.
It bounces off the flat planes of the walls, the ceiling and the floor. Wait for a time, and as your eyes adjust, you begin to see and feel the light in different ways. Is the light source the greenish vertical band at the juncture of the two perpendicular walls? Or is it coming from around the corner? It just is.
Turrell said his work “gives thingness to light. These blushes of light for me are like precious liquid.”
Calling the bright light of the upstairs gallery “brutal,” Turrell said, “We were made for twilight, it’s quite clear, because our eyes don’t open until we’re at this reduced level of light. You don’t feel any physicality to light until your eyes open.”
Also a pilot
Turrell is also a pilot, and he uses the experience of light at extreme altitudes in his artwork.
He explained, “As you approach a cold front, there is a change in visibility. When flying, this differentiation of vision happens through weather and water vapor. In Wedgeworks, similar qualities of opacity, translucency and transparency are created by light simply inhabiting space.”
Turrell regards time spent flying as time spent in his “studio.” In fact, in the mid-’70s he used money received from a Guggenheim Fellowship to buy fuel for his plane.
It was during that period that he found the Roden Crater. Forty-seven miles from Flagstaff, Ariz., the last 19 off-road, the crater is wider than Manhattan and taller than the Chrysler Building.
Eventually, Turrell talked the crater’s landowner into selling the acreage to him, and his life’s dream now is to make it into a “naked eye observatory,” one of the few in the world, like Stonehenge.
Turrell built a landing strip in the crater and lived there for 19 months in a mobile home. To date, 438,000 cubic yards of earth have been moved from the crater in preparation for Turrell’s $10 million “skyspace” museum, which he hopes to open during the summer solstice in the year 2000.
The crater museum will feature 12 spaces, each fixed to particular sites, and buried in the mountain. The earth’s natural light play, in the form of sunrise, sunset, and moonlight, will be Turrell’s light sources, instead of the fluorescent or halogen lights he uses in his indoor museum pieces.
“We’re bottom-dwellers in the sea of air … Jim wants us to look up,” said Michael Bond, Turrell’s assistant. After spending much time at Roden Crater in the past several years, Bond said, “I’ve never seen anything quite the same again.”
Turrell plans to return to Aspen Friday, Feb. 10, for a free public lecture and slide show at the Isis Theatre on his Roden Crater project.
Not about object
There is no object in Turrell’s art. Instead, he is interested in the moment of perception. It’s up to each individual viewing his work to make the art.
Turrell once described his intent thusly: “That place between the awake and the dream state. That special quality of consciousness is what I’m really interested in. It’s what I want to get into my art.”
Bond likens viewing a Turrell piece as when you stare into a fire, and after awhile, you’re thinking not in terms of words but perceptions.
You become mesmerized, transformed.
Turrell creates works that deal with light’s untouchable essence. He wants to make it tactile. People often reach out as if to touch the light at his exhibits.
Turrell, who rebuilt vintage aircraft and autos as a youth, received a B.A. in perceptual psychology in 1965, and a Masters Degree in art from Claremont Graduate School in California. He was attracted to the California Minimalism movement of the ’60s, which involved such artists as Larry Bell, Ed Ruscha, Kenneth Price and Robert Irwin.
As a graduate student, Turrell created light sculptures using flames. Later, he graduated to high-intensity projectors as his light sources.
Leaving school, Turrell rented the entire Mendota Hotel in Ocean Park, Calif., closed it off completely, and experimented with creating sculptural light.
Out of this was born his Single-Wall Projections and Shallow Space Constructions.
In his latest series, Wedgeworks, Turrell said, “The light actually occupies the space as opposed to being seen to shine on the surface of the wall. The color should arrive with the light and not be painted on the wall. The surface of the wall is so well finished that you spend no time looking at it, but instead you see the space. The three different qualities of opaque, translucent and transparent light are present in the space.”
Quaker background
The simple austerity of Turrell’s work is directly related to his Quaker upbringing, said Bond, noting that the Quaker “search” is for the “inner light.” Turrell is still a practicing Quaker.
Turrell’s artwork has been called sculptural, but he prefers to be included in the painterly traditions rather than sculpture, because painting is so much about light too.
But, unlike walking into a museum and looking at a painting for a minute or two, Turrell’s work requires “more of a commitment,” said Bond. “He wants you to ‘journey’ to the art, and to see yourself seeing.”
Turrell loves the idea of a journey to get to the work – certainly that will be the case with his Roden Crater project. He once installed a project at the isolated edge of the North Sea.
Aspen is somewhat similar, one could surmise, in that it is not a mainstream, easy-to-get-to locale. “It’s always a little bit suspect to look at something really beautiful like an experience in nature and want to make it art. My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience … ,” said Turrell.
The James Turrell exhibition runs through April 9. In order to fully experience the installation, please allow 20 minutes in the gallery. The museum is at 590 N. Mill St.
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