ames Turrell was born in Los Angeles in 1943. His undergraduate studies at Pomona College focused on psychology and mathematics; only later, in graduate school, did he pursue art. He received an MFA in art from the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California. The recipient of several prestigious awards such as Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, he now lives in Arizona. Turrell’s work involves explorations in light and space that speak to viewers without words, impacting the eye, body, and mind with the force of a spiritual awakening. “I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing,” says the artist, “like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.”
Informed by his studies in perceptual psychology and optical illusions, Turrell’s work allows us to see ourselves seeing: “First, I am dealing with no object. Perception is the object. Secondly, I am dealing with no image, because I want to avoid associative, symbolic thought. Thirdly, I am dealing with no focus or particular place to look. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking.” Whether harnessing the light at sunset or transforming the glow of a television set into a fluctuating portal, Turrell’s art places viewers in a realm of pure experience. In his works the artist combines natural and artificial light through computer-controlled sensors to create captivating optical effects that evokes our most profound contemplation of light. What unfolds next is the illusion that the architecture of the space slowly vanishes as it becomes saturated with light and color.
In Raemar, as in other Shallow Space Constructions, a secondary wall is constructed in front of the back wall of a room revealing a sliver of fluorescent light. Raemar was the first piece in which the slit was extended all the way around the secondary wall, so that it appears to float in the space. By isolating light within a specific architecture, the Shallow Space Constructions play with the viewer’s perception of space and seem to alter the perspective of the room. In this treat for the senses, the artist seizes a universal concept – perception – and presents it’s most individualistic, personal nature. His obsession with light and space was inspired by his father’s career as an aeronautical engineer, and his mother’s Quaker lifestyle.
The aeronautical theme makes sense of someone working with infinite space, but less obvious is the Quaker link until he explains: “My grandmother used to tell me that at Quaker meetings, you go inside – behind the eye – to greet the light”. “Art has always been in the service of religion,” Turrell says. “I’ve already made two Quaker meeting houses with Skyspaces for viewing light.” Influenced by his Quaker faith, which he characterizes as having a “straightforward, strict presentation of the sublime.”
Turrell’s art prompts greater self-awareness through a similar discipline of silent contemplation, patience, and meditation. His ethereal installations enlist the common properties of light to communicate feelings of transcendence and the Divine. It’s not easy to explain Turrell’s work, but he stresses that there’s no need to understand the science of light or perception; the point is to be open to the potentially transformative experiences. There’s nothing to touch or smell; the light is as nebulous as sea-mist or smoke.
In a typical installation called Alta Green, you enter a dark room and see a green pyramid standing brightly in one corner. It looks as though it’s made of plastic and lit from within. Only when you come close do you see that the “object” is actually pure light, projected across the room from a corner of the ceiling. “We all use light to illuminate things,” Turrell says, “but I like the thing-ness of light itself. So, here you’re actually looking at light rather than looking at something that light illuminated.”
Another typical example of his work are Skyspaces : quiet rooms which allows people to sit peacefully and observe, through an opening in a wall or the ceiling, a limited section of the sky, making it appear infinitely deep and closer to us – an effect Turrell refers to as “bringing the sky down”. With heads tilted up and eyes fixed on the sky above, visitors can simply sit, relax, and experience the extraordinary. Many are located in galleries, museums and private buildings; some are in natural locations: Roden Crater is a much larger, much more complicated version of this kind of work Turrell has been doing on a smaller scale for years.
THE RODEN CRATER PROJECT
Situated near the Grand Canyon in the Painted Desert of northern Arizona, northeast of Flagstaff, the Roden Crater project is Turrell’s most challenging project and perhaps the world’s most ambitious work of contemporary art: an extinct volcano the artist has been transforming into a celestial observatory for the past thirty years. Working with cosmological phenomena that have interested man since the dawn of civilization and have prompted responses such as Stonehenge and the Mayan calendar, Turrell’s crater brings the heavens down to earth, linking the actions of people with the movements of planets and distant galaxies.
The Crater, a mile in diameter at its base on the desert floor and rising 700 feet to its rim, is only one of many such cone-shaped craters in the middle of a 1,800-square-mile volcanic field. Turrell first saw it from the air nearly 30 years ago while piloting his own plane, looking for a place to make art out of light. It stood in the outback of a ranch that wasn’t for sale, and Turrell had no money to buy it even if it were, but these were mere details to a visionary artist arriving from the sky. After convincing the owner to sell him the ranch in 1977 and scraping up enough for a down payment, he has had to excavate and move 1.35 million cubic yards of dirt, install 660 tons of steel and pour 5,500 cubic yards of concrete, mixed onsite from volcanic cinder and rock, to transform Roden Crater into a space whose art is as much in the light of space and objects as it is in the spaces created in the underground of the crater. It will be your perceptions and interactions with the space and the ever-changing nature of light created by the light of the sun, moon, stars and other celestial events that will drive the art. Though Roden Crater is often described as Land Art, Turrell feels his antecedents are the ancient architects who built structures that brought light in from outside to create an event inside. Modeled after ancient naked-eye observatories, the design for Roden Crater consists of more than 1,000 feet of tunnels leading to seven viewing chambers, each one built into the side of the crater.
An additional space called “The Eye of the Crater” is located 38 feet below the floor of the Roden bowl. The skyspaces look out through classical archways and are situated around the huge crater at different elevations. One of the spaces operates like a pinhole camera, projecting images of both the moon and sun onto a stone slab in the center of the room. Another isolates the light of stars more than one billion years old. The Crater is ideally suited for observing the sky because it’s located in an area with incredibly low light pollution. “When there’s an event in light on the horizon or in the skies, there’s an event in light in the Roden spaces that I am creating,” says proudly Turrell, who can rhapsodize for hours about the quality of light at Roden Crater. “It’s possible to mix this light that is older than our solar system,” he says, referring to the light of old stars that will be visible from a skyspace on the north side of the crater, “and have it bottled in a space so that you feel it physically present. You can touch it.” In the underground rooms he manipolates the light in a way that alters our comprehension of its perception. “We’re not very aware of how we create reality,” he says. “My work is just a gentle reminder that we’re making this world, that we shape it, literally, we color it, literally. We give the sky its color; it isn’t something that is just received.”
The interior spaces, keyed in varying ways to the sky and celestial events, are being constructed with attention to auditory qualities as well. Sounds echo in the unseen distance. A light-catching cistern is linked to radiotelescopic equipment aimed at the sky, so viewers who wish can immerse themselves and hear and feel electromagnetic waves emitted by the sun, moon and stars, or by distant quasars that may be the oldest observable objects in the universe. It is estimated that the crater project, about one-third complete, will require $12 to 15 million (maybe more) to finish. In addition, an endowment will be needed for maintenance. Key supporters of the project have been the Guggenheim Foundation, the Dia Art Foundation of New York, now known as the Dia Center for the Arts, and a well-known collector and patron of contemporary art, Giuseppe Panza di Biumo of Italy. Dia will help manage the site when it opens. Visitors are expected to be limited to 14 a day when the crater opens. Eight of them will be able to stay overnight: some of the most striking effects occur around sunset and in twilight, at night, and just before and during the break of dawn. No one is sure what the demand will be. If necessary, a waiting list or lottery is envisioned. The Roden Crater experience is so directed toward the individual viewer’s perceptions and thoughts that in spite of the volcano’s enormity, two people can seem a crowd there. “The sense of being alone in the vastness – care has to be taken about that,” says Turrell. “Yes, visitation will be limited, but the work is not elite in the sense that collected artwork often is. Rather than being elite, the intent is to be protective of the experience.” The opening date, many times set and later postponed in the past years, is now scheduled in 2011.
www.iuav.it/dpa/video/2007/turrell_animazione/turrell_animazione.html
