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TURRELL, AND THE LIGHT THAT BECAME THE WORK
On James Turrell, nearly sixty years of treating light as a physical material, and a forty-eight-year excavation of a volcanic cone in the Arizona desert.
James Turrell, Green Mountain Falls Skyspace, 2022
Turrell has spent nearly sixty years demonstrating that light is not a condition for seeing other things. It is the material of the work itself. No other artist has sustained this claim at this level for this long.
James Turrell was born in Los Angeles in 1943, studied perceptual psychology at Pomona College in the 1960s, and has been working with light since 1966. He is eighty-three. He has been making the same argument for sixty years.
The argument is simple to state and almost impossible to reproduce in text. Light, in a Turrell work, is not illuminating anything. The light is the object. A viewer inside one of his installations is looking at light the way a viewer at Serra is looking at steel, or a viewer at a Brancusi is looking at bronze. The medium is the subject.
This was not how light had been treated in art before him. Painters had painted light, from Caravaggio forward, as a depicted condition in two dimensions. Photographers, from Nadar onwards, worked with it as the thing that made the image possible. Architects used light, from Gothic glass onwards, to shape the experience of interior space. In each of these practices, light was a medium through which something else was seen. Turrell asked a different question. What happens if the light is not revealing anything, and is simply there, in space, as a physical thing the viewer can encounter?
Light Work by James Turrell
The first answer came in 1966, in a studio in Santa Monica, where Turrell had rented an old hotel called the Mendota. He took a single projector, aimed it into the corner of a darkened room, and shaped the beam so that it produced what appeared to be a solid, three-dimensional geometric form hovering there. A cube, a wedge or a rectangle. The form was not there. It was light, shaped by the corner and calibrated to the eye, producing the illusion of solidity. These were the Projection Pieces. A viewer standing in the room saw a thing that was not a thing. The thing was the light, and the light was the work.
From the Projection Pieces forward, the question became how far this claim could be taken. Over nearly 60 years, Turrell has worked in every available direction.
In 1974, he began building the first of what would become the Skyspaces. These are enclosed rooms with a precise aperture cut in the ceiling, open to the sky. The interior is lit by calibrated artificial light that shifts slowly during the hours around sunrise and sunset. A viewer sits on a bench, looking up through the aperture. What happens, over forty minutes, is optical. The sky, which normally reads as a distant volume above the head, appears to descend into the room and assume the density of a solid surface. It acquires colour that it does not have. It becomes, for the duration of the sequence, a material. When the transition is complete, the sky is a ceiling, a flat plane of coloured matter hanging inches above the aperture, and the viewer is inside a room with a painted ceiling that happens to be the actual sky.
James Turrell, Dividing the Light, 2007. Pomona College Skyspace © James Turrell. Photo by Florian Holzherr
Turrell has built more than ninety Skyspaces around the world, each calibrated to its specific latitude, orientation, and architectural surroundings. The demonstration is the same in all of them. The sky is a material. You can bring it down into a room if you know how to shape the aperture and the surrounding light.
Alongside the Skyspaces he has produced, from 1976 onwards, the series of Ganzfeld installations. These are rooms filled with uniform light of a single calibrated colour, so uniform that the viewer loses the ability to focus or to measure depth. There is nothing to focus on. The colour is everywhere and at no particular distance. The viewer does not look at the colour. The viewer is inside it. This is a different version of the same argument. If light is a material, it can also be a medium a body can enter. A Ganzfeld is a room in which the visitor walks in, colouring the way a swimmer enters water.
The Projection Pieces, the Skyspaces, the Ganzfelds. Each is an experiment in the same claim, under different conditions. Light shaped into an apparent object. Sky was brought into a room as a surface. Colour is a physical medium that surrounds the body. By the 1980s, Turrell had demonstrated the claim at the scale of the room and the installation. The question that remained was whether it could be taken to a larger scale, over a longer duration, inside a site the artist did not build but had chosen.
In 1977, Turrell flew over the Painted Desert of northern Arizona and identified an extinct volcanic cinder cone about 40 miles northeast of Flagstaff. The cone is roughly 400,000 years old, rises about 580 feet above the surrounding plain, and is shaped, at its summit, by a naturally symmetrical bowl left by the last eruption. He bought it. He has been working on it since.
Roden Crater Bowl
What Turrell has been doing at Roden Crater, for forty-eight years, is converting the volcanic cone into a naked-eye observatory. He has excavated tunnels and chambers within the cone's body, each calibrated to specific celestial alignments. One chamber is aligned to the southernmost moonrise in the lunar standstill cycle, which occurs every 18.6 years. Another aligns with Polaris. A third frames a precise section of the solstice sunrise. The chambers are not decorations. They are optical instruments, built into the body of the cone, calibrated to events on timescales that exceed a human life.
The project is not finished. It may not be finished in Turrell's lifetime. Parts of it have been accessible to invited visitors for years. Other parts are still under construction, funded through Turrell's own resources, grants, philanthropic contributions, and the sale of editions of his other work.
The scale of the undertaking is closer to an ancient astronomical site than to a contemporary art project. Stonehenge was built over centuries. The Egyptian solar chambers, built for cycles the builders knew they would not live to see. A contemporary analogue does not exist.
What Roden Crater is demonstrating is the same thing the Projection Pieces demonstrated in 1966, at a different scale. Light is a material. The light of the sun at a particular solstice moment, falling through a specific aperture cut into the body of the cone, is not illuminating anything. It is the work. The chamber is the frame. The light that arrives on cue, across cycles of years, is the work itself. The viewer who is present at the alignment has come to see the light, not to see something lit by it.
Alpha Tunnel at Roden Crater
This is what Turrell
has been demonstrating for fifty-nine years. Across projectors in hotel rooms,
apertures cut into ceilings, rooms saturated with single colours, and a
volcanic cone in the Arizona desert being converted into a naked-eye
observatory. The medium is light. The subject is light. Nothing the work is
about exists outside of the light itself.No other contemporary artist has held a single material claim across this duration. Turrell is eighty-three. Roden Crater is not finished. The argument the work has been making since 1966 has not changed, and the work continues to make it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Turrell, James. Mapping Spaces: A Topological Survey of the Work by James Turrell.New York, Peter Blum Edition, 1987.
Adcock, Craig. James Turrell, The Art of Light and Space. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990.
Govan, Michael; Kim, Christine Y. James Turrell, A Retrospective. Los Angeles, LACMA / DelMonico Books Prestel, 2013.
Birnbaum, Daniel, editor. James Turrell, The Other Horizon. MAK Vienna / Hatje Cantz, 2001.
Roden Crater Project, near Flagstaff, Arizona.
James Turrell Studio, Flagstaff, Arizona.
Guggenheim Museum, New York. James Turrell. Exhibition, 2013.
LACMA, Los Angeles. James Turrell, A Retrospective. Exhibition, 2013 to 2014.