The Unbearable Beingness of Light

Guggenheim curator Carmen Giménez claims Turrell to be the first artist to confront light without mediation. Through gallery-based installations made of strategic cuts in walls or ceilings to frame both natural and artificial light, light projections that create the appearance of floating planes or cubes, immersive environments of mysterious darkness or luminosity, and the decades-long continuous transformation of Roden Crater, an extinct Arizona volcano into an intricate multi-chambered celestial observatory, Turrell has devoted nearly five decades to using light as structure.

While the Turrell viewing experience may be ethereal, the process of creating such ephemerality is monumentally concrete. “I’ve never seen the amount of sheet rock, studs, fabric and wood produced in the service of nothingness—of the immaterial,” muses Lacma’s director, Michael Govan. Indeed, preparing the combined 92,000 square feet that the three institutions have devoted to his work has proved an incredible feat of engineering. “It’s very different than putting together a Picasso show,” explains Guggenheim curator Nat Trotman. “We knew conceptually what the Turrell show was going to be five years ago; it was about figuring out how to accomplish what James had in mind that became such a long process.”

The Book

James Turrell: A Retrospective Michael Govan
Christine Y. Kim

Although the Los Angeles show includes 11 complex installations, the most of the three national shows, the standout is the Guggenheim’s Aten Reign. Designed for the museum’s iconic rotunda, the 79-foot tower of light is Turrell’s largest installation to date outside of the ongoing Roden Crater project. Five concentric rings containing over 1000 LED fixtures rise like cosmic lampshades towards the central skylight, creating tiered chambers of shifting gauze-filtered, colored light that New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl likens to “air-conditioning for the eye.” “We usually get one exhibition out and the next one in within three weeks,” Trotman explains. “This took six weeks, which is unheard of, and even with that, engineers built sections for two and a half months in a warehouse in New Jersey that were then re-assembled in the museum.”

Spend time with Turrell and you quickly come to understand why fellow artist Chuck Close calls him an “orchestrator of experience.” “One of the problems I have with contemporary art,” Turrell explains, “is that people don’t enter it with the same kind of discipline that we enter the literary world of the book.” A master craftsman, Turrell is nothing if not meticulous. “He is as focused on the details as he is on any of the big-picture stuff,” Trotman affirms. As anyone who has heard Turrell discuss his work knows, the artist’s bearded and burly, salt-of-the-earth appearance belies a man who can wax eloquent on the behavioral differences of neon versus LED, physics and perceptual psychology. The result is work with a tantalizing seamlessness that coaxes the viewer to dive in headlong.

A visit to Aten Reign will find its reclining benches overflowing into pools of bodies, soaking in the Turrell experience. “Museums don’t often get to have these moments,” beams Trotman of the installation’s performance-art feel. In an age that is evermore socially mediated, Turrell’s self-described “non-vicarious art” requires the viewer to show up and tune in. “I think we are starved for these kind of moments of pure physical experience,” he adds, confirming that the momentous effort of mounting the show has paid off. He concludes, “Working with Turrell has both changed the way that I see him and his work, and also changed the way I see. Period.”