In 2005 I had my first encounter with the work of James Turrell at The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. There he has two permanent installations, one a room without light in which he asks the visitor to sit in the darkness until the eyes are adjusted to the lack of light and then try to determine what they see or what they think they might be seeing. In the other, also a dark room, a large luminous blue rectangle faces the visitor. Upon investigation the rectangle is discovered not to exist: it is merely blue light …framed. I was very favorably impressed by these two art works and I can still recall them vividly.
Later that same year, I visited his installation at the Gray Art Museum on the campus of The University of Washington in Seattle. There one sits in a white room and looks up through a round opening at the blue sky overhead. I found this less interesting than the Pittsburgh work. While it was a calm and meditative experience, I was uncertain exactly what Mr.Turrell wanted me to experience there: because I have been something of a Buddhist in the past that blue circle of sky was always just a blue circle of sky.
James Turrell has been making these installations and art works since the 1970’s and although I lived and worked in New York City during all these years, until going to Pittsburgh I had never heard of him or his work or remembered his name if I had heard it.
In preparation for my recent trip to Houston I discovered that there are three James Turrell works in Houston and I made plans to see two of them. The third, an installation at the Friends Meeting house suggested to me something very similar to the room at the Grey Art Museum in Seattle. I didn’t care to repeat that experience and so I did not schedule it for this trip. If one has not been to Seattle, I would recommend seeing this one in Houston for whatever its value might be.
Sunset Epiphany.
This is an installation on the lawn at Rice University which has seating for 120 guests. It is free but reservations are required. The viewers sit beneath a large flat white ceiling in which there is a square opening through which we see the sky. The forty minute program occurs every evening timed to coincide with the sunset…as the earth turns toward the darker east, the blue of the sky overhead appears to grow correspondingly deeper blue.
In a video interview, see the link below, Turrell states that he wants us to be aware of the light in which we live, not as something …“out there”…but as something in which we are immersed. Not too long after this program of colored lights projected on this white ceiling begins, we do in fact become aware that the blue square is not just air but that in reality it is a viscous substance with physical properties…it is, after all, that part of the light spectrum that we see reflected off the water molecules in the atmosphere that surrounds the planet.
Knowing that the program is to run for forty minutes and having understood the concept so soon, one begins to wonder if there might not be something else the artist wants us to see. There is. But I think this part of it is not addressed so much to the layman as to those who make their livings chit chatting in the art world. Just as the attention begins to wander, just as one is about to look at his watch to see how much longer he is expected to sit there, one notices that the sky is turning pale gray. Has it suddenly grown cloudy or is this a mirage? That square of sky then progresses through a nine point gray scale to black and before one can begin to try to figure that out that black square turns brown. And I was absolutely confidant that if those lights on the white ceiling were to be turned off, that square of sky would still be blue. So what was happening?
Well, I’m not certain that I know, but I was reminded of the work of Josef Albers and his Homage to the Square, in which he shows us that the perception of a color is altered by the colors that surround it. But whereas Albers worked with pigments, which have red, yellow, and blue as the primaries, Turrell is working with light wherein the primaries are magenta, cyan and green. All the pigments mixed together produce black, all the light mixed together produces white, no color in pigment is white and no color in light is black…or darkness… or lack of light and color.
The control of the perception of the color of light has to do with major and minor …the white ceiling, the major, is many times larger than the square opening, the minor, and so the color projected on the larger would greatly influence the perception of the color of the smaller. The color we think we see is mixed in the brain according to the recipe we have been given in agreement with the laws of physics…just as it is in divisionalism, or pointillism, or impressionism.
Despite this description the experience is rather exciting…although after about thirty minutes the attention begins to lag and falter. Many of the guests left long before the end. One feels that he has seen something momentous, that he has been pleasantly hoodwinked, and that a good time was had by all, or at least among those who stayed to the end. I was certainly happy to have seen it but I think there was not much more to it than what I have described …nor was I inspired to delve deeper into a study of the physics of light.
The Light Inside.
The Houston Museum of Fine Arts is situated in two large buildings joined by a passageway under the city street. James Turrell’s The Light Inside is an art installation through which one walks from building to building.
From either direction one approaches a dimly lit corridor with a facing wall, passes around the wall and finds himself confronting a brightly lit space as seen in the photograph, see the link below. Initially there is a perception of a very strict one point linear perspective making the floor below and the ceiling above black trapezoids. The bright colored light gives the impression of being a palpable substance through which one is expected to walk, as if to swim were it water.
Unfortunately, as soon as you begin to move through the passageway, you realize that the floor is raised, that the black ceiling is dropped and that those hide the lights which are being reflected off the white ceiling and floor and the walls about four feet away. And because this is a public passageway as well as an art installation there is a lot of foot traffic here …especially groups of school children. So I suspect that during normal museum hours this is less engrossing than it had been hoped it would be.
Sometimes the lights here are red and sometimes they are blue and my friend and I stood to one side to see if we could ascertain the tempo of the light change but it appeared to be so slow and the foot traffic so high that we gave up the effort. Thus this is an attraction that gets very limited attention and as such I suspect that it appeals to and seems quite normal to those who watch a lot of big screen HD TV moreso than to those who believe that easel painting is not dead and for whom the admiration of local color is not an embarrassment.
The Museum owns seven other works by James Turrell which will be shown opening in June of this year as part of a three museum retrospective of his work, the other two museums being the Guggenheim in New York and LACMA in Los Angeles.
Sunset Epiphany:
http://skyspace.rice.edu/about-skyspace/
The Light Inside:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjRMs0izHSE
James Turrell video:
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/james-turrell
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