JAMES TURRELL IS a key figure in the light and space school, a movement in which perception is key to experience of the artwork, and the artwork is a mere light conduit for experience. His sculptures, light pieces and models form part of a forty year study of the science of light resulting in works which affect the viewer’s perceptual sense and brain activity. The desired phenomenon being that the immateriality of light creates works in which the viewer truly becomes an eye.

‘My desire is to set up a situation to which I can take you and let you see. I am interested in light because of my interest in our spiritual nature and the things that empower us. My art deals with light itself, not as the bearer of revelation, but as revelation itself.’

Turrell has developed an artistic persona as bearded guru of light phenomena dealing with – the religious, spiritual, transcendental, meditative and mystical aspects of light. His artwork experiments with fleeting sensation of light and space – effects that he describes as being :

like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire or something that directly connects you to a thought that is wordless, a thought that doesn’t have a story line.

Turrell’s fascination with the phenomena of light is connected to a personal, inward search for self-awareness and mankind’s place in the universe. His ethereal installations communicate feelings of silent contemplation, patience, and meditation ultimately leading to transcendence and the Divine.

Part new-age thinker, part artist and part scientist/technician/engineer, Turrell merges the objective world of the scientist and the creative autonomy of the artist. He first studied psychology, astronomy and only afterwards moved towards the visual arts. Born in California in 1943 to Quaker parents, he maintains his Quaker faith, which he characterises as having a straightforward, strict presentation of the sublime. The son of an aeronautical engineer, he is an avid flyer, gaining his pilot‘s license at 16 and continuing a lifelong passion for flying. This alternative experience of reality, cosmological phenomena and tricks of perception offered by the different effects of light and space in the upper atmosphere has significantly informed Turrell‘s work. The activity was also practical as while still in his late teens, following the 1959 rebellion, he was flying Tibetan monks in single-engine planes across the Himalayas on ‘alternative service’ missions and later flew high-altitude spy planes for the Central Intelligence Agency.

The experience of flying has been a continuous source of inspiration and provides a key for his epistemological studies of perception and the understanding of reality. The metaphor of flying echoes the image of the sparrow mentioned in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England :

‘The present life of man, O King, seems to be, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein You sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are entirely ignorant.’
His work in light is surprisingly diverse and he has created a range of work which deals not only with the experience of light, but also as a medium in which sculpture is created. Indoor installations with artificial or natural light present television monitors in a motel or perception cells - mobile single rooms which can be entered for personal experience. Outdoor skyspaces use light to make sculpture and architecturally inspired buildings in natural surroundings are artworks for the purpose of viewing, creating an empty space from which to look out.

Turrell is best known for his ongoing 30 year project at the 7,000 feet high Roden Crater, 70 kilometres north of Flagstaff in the Painted Desert of Arizona, not far from the Grand Canyon. His most significant magnum opus, decided upon after viewing it from the air during 500 hours of flying time. A Gulbenkian Fellowship supported the project, with most of their budget reportedly spent in fuel costs. The creation of the natural light sculpture involves the excavation and transformation of an entire extinct volcano into the Roden Observatory, the world‘s largest sculptural artwork. Likened to a one-man, modern-day Stonehenge, the creation of seven sky-lit spaces forms a celestial observatory or great geological eye to experience the changing ambient qualities of sun and moonlight and making music with a series of light.

When completed, the isolated Roden Crater will be visible through arranged art tours with guests staying at a four-bedroom lodge, placed half way down the side of the volcano. This is reminiscent of the organised tours arranged to view Walter de Maria’s Lightening Field. A key time to visit would be for the lunar standstill event in 2006, predicted to project an image of the moon directly into volcano’s central Sun and Moon Space.

Turrell has been active in the British Isles, with current commissions at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Houghton Hall, Norfolk, and a forthcoming exhibition and intervention at the Sir John Soane Museum, organised by Michael Hue-Williams at Albion, who are developing art and architecture projects as a major gallery activity. He was responsible for the lighting in the Millennium-Dome’s Chill-Out-Zone, the central area of the Eva Jiricna designed Faith Zone and the uncompleted and now abandoned Thames Light Project, a £3 million scheme to create a work of light art within 500 metres of the River Thames, London’s own Heart of Darkness. This would have defined the area by highlighting river frontages and landmark architectural features. The Square of Light would have linked buildings on both banks of the river from Somerset House, across Waterloo Bridge to the South Bank Centre site, encompassing Jubilee Gardens and the Royal National Theatre. Turrell’s idea was to choreograph an integrated lighting scheme installed in the water, under bridges, and on tops of buildings to be seen by aircraft passengers.

Attracted to the soft Northern European light of Caspar David Friedrich, Turner and Constable as well as the architectural archaeology and legacy of prehistoric henges, circles, menhirs, tumuli and mounds, he has developed a special relationship with the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the current exhibition (5 November - 14 May 2006) will transform the new 600 sq. m. Underground Gallery space with a series of light and colour projections and installations. It features Wide Out, originally created for MAK in Vienna, Austria in 1998, which envelopes the entire gallery space and viewer in a blue radiance, recreating a ‘ganzfeld experience’ where atmosphere diversity and the powerful mass of light gradually become physically felt. A new site-specific commission to be unveiled in Spring 2006, The Deer Shelter, involves the renovation of a derelict folly in the Bretton Park landscape.

Other works include a temporary skyspace, The Elliptic Ecliptic, 1999, at Tremenheere, Cornwall constructed as a platform from which to view the solar eclipse. In a field overlooking Penzance with a view of the coastline and St. Michael’s Mount. The chamber with a hole in the ceiling framed a moving, constantly changing image of sky. Using the sky as the canvas the colours changed from light blue, deep blue to black at sunrise and sunset and the experience was described as if the sky had been framed and brought closer.
The Irish Sky Garden, 1992, initiated by the Liss Ard Foundation in Skibbereen, West Cork, was not necessarily meant to observe the sky but rather to reproduce the order of the universe. Inspired by the existing topographical features of the area – promontories, monolithic stones, circular mounds and subterranean passages, the constantly changing sky and weather – the resulting garden consisted of a crater, a tumulus-like mound, a truncated, four-sided pyramid, and a rectangular enclosure with a network of passageways and outdoor rooms which framed landscape, viewer and sky, fostering new perceptions and interactions.

Turrell said of his Kielder Skyspace at the Kielder Forest Park in Northumberland:

‘I wanted this low cloud, maritime environment, to work with, this beautiful soft light that I don’t get in Northern Arizona where we have this very crisp, but sometimes quite hard defining light. These are the skies of Constable and Turner and this space works a little bit that way too. So there’s a lot of debt to people who have gone before and looked at these qualities of light, and I am happy to be amongst them.’

Sited at Cat Cairn, a rocky outcrop commanding spectacular views, a couple of miles from Kielder village and eight miles from the Scottish border, the Skyspace is a buried cylindrical chamber entered through a tunnel and capped by a roof with a 3 meter diameter circular opening in its centre. Continuous seating is placed around the base of the inside wall with a white, visually uninterrupted surface above. Illumination from low-energy light sources gives a continuous ring of ambient light on the walls and ceiling. Visitors find themselves in the middle of a precise manipulation of interior and exterior light causing the sky to seem an almost solid form and appearing isolated from its surroundings.

However, it is in the time immediately before dawn and following sunset that the effects of Turrell’s art are most apparent. As these times approach, the inner lighting system becomes active and illuminates the floor of the tunnel entrance. A visitor entering the tunnel automatically switches on the lights in the main chamber, which appear to give a low level of illumination at first but as the light levels outside fall, this inner lighting comes to fill the space with a warm, ambient light illuminating the upper walls and ceiling. Through the roof opening, the sky - that during the day seemed clear and focused - now becomes a circle of constantly changing intense colour. Appearing to be at the same level as the ceiling, this circle of light bears little relation to colour of the sky outside. The expectation that the colours we observe in our surroundings are constant, provides us with compelling evidence that we constantly modify and in some cases create colour within our own minds as a response to our surroundings.

‘I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some way gather it, or seem to hold it. So in that way it’s a little bit like Plato’s cave. We sit in the cave with our backs to reality, looking at the reflection of reality on the cave wall. As an analogy to how we perceive, and the imperfections of perception, I think this is very interesting.’

Turrell is preparing intriguing exhibition collaboration with the Sir John Soane Museum (31 March - 26 August 2006). This will include models and drawings for new works including the SIWA Skyspace, Egypt; Houghton Skyspace, Norfolk; Craigenor skyspace; and the Deer Shelter, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The exhibition will include limited interventions within the museum space through lighting and coloured gels over some of the roof lanterns.

Jeremy Hunt is a curator, writer and the editor of Art & Architecture Journal

LINKS
James Turrell is represented by Michael Hue Williams at www.albion-gallery.com
Sir John Soane Museum www.soane.org