- James Turrell in front of Roden Crater, his monumental naked-eye observatory. “I’m very interested in how we perceive, because that’s how we construct the reality in which we live,” Turrell says, “and I like to tweak that a little bit. I make structures that arrest and apprehend light for our perception.” Photo: Florian Holzherr
Way out on the edge of the Painted Desert in Arizona, 70-year-old Californian artist James Turrell has spent the past three decades excavating a 389,000-year-old extinct volcano. Roden Crater, as it’s known, is Turrell’s magnum opus. Whenever it’s finally complete, this black and red cinder caldera will be a monumental naked-eye observatory to surpass any throughout history.
Inside, the crater’s naturally lit viewing rooms are precision-engineered to observe specific celestial events. While outside, Turrell has reformed the rim of the crater to create a beautiful “vaulting effect” of the sky in a way that we almost never see it.
“I’m very interested in how we perceive, because that’s how we construct the reality in which we live,” Turrell says, “and I like to tweak that a little bit. I make structures that arrest and apprehend light for our perception.”
His work is the subject of three major retrospectives this summer, opening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this past weekend, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston on June 9, and the Guggenheim in New York City June 21.
Even without Roden Crater, Turrell’s reputation in the art world is enormous—he’s one of the first visual artists awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. But what sets him apart is his multidimensional approach. He’s a true polymath, fluent in engineering, mathematics, astronomy, history, literature, aviation (Turrell is an avid pilot; it’s how he went looking for Roden Crater) and ranching (a necessary requirement of his bank loan on the crater’s land).
Witness him describing his favorite subject.
“We take light through the skin and create vitamin D,” Turrell says. “So we are literally light eaters. But then it also has a strong emotional quality, which is pretty much what I work with—the kind of situation that’s actually a theta state, which is thinking, but it’s not thinking in words. So this is an art that can be a bit difficult describing. And that’s also where people have always had that challenge with: [describing] the spiritual side of light.”
As an undergrad Turrell studied perceptual psychology, then pursued his master’s degree in fine art at UC Irvine. His revelation came in his first semester, when he found himself more interested in the projector’s light dancing in the darkness than the slides it was showing. He’s said that all painting, from Rembrandt to Rothko, is the study of light. But Turrell doesn’t make art that’s about light; he’s literally gotten rid of the object and made it the subject. His art is light.
Turrell’s gallery work—brilliantly colored walls, cubes, holograms, tunnels, seamless spaces of light known as Ganzfelds, mysterious voids of glowing geometric perfection—all force viewers to question how they are seeing what they’re seeing. Turrell wants us to recognize what he calls “the thingness of light.” In his hands, it can appear to occupy space in our world through shapes. Or it can conjure the colors of sunrise and twilight. Taking it away can evoke our primal senses, as if we’re back in our ancestors’ caves.
He can also change the color of the sky entirely. Turrell has built 82 Skypaces worldwide—including at a Quaker meetinghouse in Houston. (Turrell grew up in the faith; his grandmother used to tell him to “go inside and greet the light.”) When the sky that’s seen through a small cutout in the roof contrasts with varying colors projected inside, it appears to come down into the room imbibed with a beautifully foreign, inky black tint.
“We all know that the sky is blue, but many of us don’t realize that we give the sky its blueness,” Turrell says. “And it’s only because we do that that I can change it.”
And after 48 years of this perceptual study, what’s it feel like for him to look back on a life’s work so far?
“There are things that I enjoy seeing that I haven’t seen for a while, and others that I wonder what I was doing—what I was thinking,” he says.
Each of the upcoming exhibitions illuminates different aspects of Turrell’s work. LACMA spans his entire career, and features a new Ganzfeld and one of his epic Perceptual Cells, where viewers lie prone in an enclosed chamber and get bombarded with a furious medley of colors. MFA Houston displays seven of Turrell’s popular installations, while the Guggenheim will feature a giant original work inside the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda.
As for Roden Crater, like many grandiose works of art, its completion date is continually pushed back. In fact, it no longer has one—it may be the Sagrada Familia of the New World. But though funding the crater has always been stop-start since its beginning, Turrell remains upbeat.
“I committed to the fact that I was going to open it in the year 2000, and I stick with that,” he says, satirically.
Even art’s luminary of perception chooses to see things his own way sometimes.
All images: Courtesy James Turrell except where noted.
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