What Was the Thought That Turrell Had Which Ultimately Spurred His Art?
The railroad train rounds a corner (all images courtesy Station to Station)
Editor's notation: This original essay was commissioned by Station to Station and provided to Hyperallergic as an exclusive. Station to Station is an artist-driven public art project conceived by Doug Aitken and made possible past Levi'due south.
I accept been in the presence of the Yard Canyon four times so far, have been downward the lip of the One thousand Coulee a couple of miles, have seen information technology in a variety of seasons — spring, summer, and fall — in a variety of weather conditions — snowfall on the rim and desert heat downwardly below — among a throng and in a stupefied solitude, and so far I have non depleted the Thousand Coulee. Indeed, I have non notwithstanding made a start on information technology.
One reason the Thousand Canyon defies consumption is to be found in the interaction of light and geology in the Chiliad Canyon. On the one mitt, there are the layers of time, the earth cut through by the river, earlier geological strata farther down. And on the other hand, there is the way that the light illuminates these layers. How the coulee looks at noontime is not how it looks at sunset, and how it looks at either time is dependent on weather and season.
And at that place are also the different rims, north and southward, and the unlike viewing spots along the rims. These interactions are and so dynamic that they are impossible to predict, meaning that you volition never know which Grand Canyon you are going to see. In fact, there are probably no Grand Canyons at all of the particular, detached sort, because the procedure of modify and the dynamics of context prevent the consumption of a stable entity known as the Thou Canyon.
The canyon is in motion. Over the course of millions of years. You cannot know about the Grand Coulee until y'all make the journey to the 1000 Canyon, and you probably cannot know nigh it even and so, except to say that in the first beholding yous know a bit more about what you will never exactly know.
* * *
Immature people are sometimes not sophisticated enough to understand this about the Grand Canyon, that it looks back into you lot, that y'all are emptied out in it, because of scale and dynamics. Or at least I was not sophisticated enough to understand and take frequently misunderstood. This might besides be said about other natural phenomena in the American Southwest, which are less celebrated, but just every bit powerful, Monument Valley, Canyon de Chelly, Flaming Gorge, Mesa Verde, etc.
The desert, by creating an idea of scale that is all its ain, mocks the ready-to-be-consumed qualities of our motion-picture show postcards, makes its features impossible to be consumed, except equally object lessons in time and lite and geology.
In this way, I learned about the natural world by looking at visual fine art, precisely backwardly, the real world more than influenced by the art than vice versa, and in a fashion, I learned about the natural world by looking at James Turrell (at that place were others, too, who had a similar issue, the effect in which they taught me about the natural world, and a fractional list of the others would include: Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko, Donald Judd, La Monte Immature, John Cage, Brian Eno), and because the process was astern, equally with watching the stars hurtling away for traces of the Big Bang, I want to catalogue my experiences with Turrell in reverse chronological style, so that the conversion and its epiphany come at the end.
* * *
Recently: I saw the Turrell retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. I went a few days after it opened. I wanted to get there chop-chop because I didn't want to be told nearly the show, though somehow it was leaked to me, perchance through a devious New York Times headline, that Turrell had managed to transform the entire museum.
This sounds fine as a piece of rhetoric, transforming the entire museum, and one can imagine a museum curator getting excited by the line of statement or the ensuing printing release, and, aye, part of what is heroic about sculpture and installation work after the seventies is when it traffics in calibration, and this is especially true of the piece of work of male artists — when they seem equally grandiose equally urban center planners. Nosotros are lucky to show to this ambition. Simply this doesn't describe the work in question for me.
True, the museum is transformed, and what was Frank Lloyd Wright before now seems somehow every bit much similar James Turrell as it does like Frank Lloyd Wright (the "blank" sections of wall equally premeditated as the installations, and very about as meaningful), the ligamentary passages non at all ligamentary but function of a creation in its entirety.
And the "onetime" Turrell pieces, the way stations in the retrospective, seem somehow like constituent pieces of a museum-wide human action of cosmos (in the same way that the silences between performances of La Monte Immature works are part of the works themselves), rather than like discrete units of "early work" to exist consumed in some sort of amuse bouche.
* * *
Withal, it is the archway to the helix of the Guggenheim, the chief floor,[one] that is the epicenter of the Turrell retrospective, in which, in a spousal relationship of natural and artificial light, Turrell has made some kind of pulsing, flowing, spasmodic drama of sunset, a simulacrum thereof, that comes over the entrance to the retrospective in silence like a front line squawling across the desert in monsoon. I watched this piece, if that's what information technology was, though it is less episodic, less consumable than a "piece," in two xl infinitesimal audiences, and throughout I was amazed as much by the context of Turrell, by the population attempting to come to grips with the work, every bit with the work itself.
Turrell e'er involves a debate about how to perceive Turrell. Is information technology ever the aforementioned experience for the people who wrestle with it? Is the experience non in constant motion? Never was this more true than on that day, for me, in the Guggenheim. Information technology was June, information technology was summer in NYC, it was tourist season, it was hot. Fully ii-thirds of the audition were non native English language speakers, just travellers to the city from Europe and Asia, who were probably seeing the Guggenheim because that museum is a manner station on whatsoever thorough trip to New York Urban center. And many of the patrons likely knew nothing about Turrell, or only what they could find in Time Out New York on their fashion uptown. Is the experience the same for them? Is the experience stable and predictable in any mode? For the traveller?
* * *
I did not stay the longest — I would like to stay for four or v hours and camp out on the section of the banquette where you might prevarication on your back—but I stayed at some length, while a good many of the young people came and went, chattering the whole time — or texting —before moving on. They got a good look at i color —the pink/salmon/red as it convulsed through the concentric rings in a higher place them — just they were too much in motion to practice more. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel to criticize this 21st century approach, but the Turrell experience is a midrash of responses, a sum total of all possible audiences.
Many of the visitors to the gallery were wordless, were stunned into a space outside of prevailing art historical channels, because being outside the language means that the viewers are complimentary to create their own metaphorical relationship to the work. The best moments, for me, were when the space abruptly became darker, as with the experience of eclipse, with all the spiritual terror that we used to bring to the eclipse, back before in that location was any understanding of the heavenly bodies. In the early days of linguistic history, one had to concoct an angry god in lodge to draw an eclipse.
And this is my metaphor for Turrell, at least for the time existence: that he summons the awe of the eclipse.
Role of the revelation of the Turrell retrospective was about the semantics of museum itself. The tourists were trying to care for the Guggenheim every bit though it were reliably a museum, merely the very notions of ingress and exit were fabricated uncertain by the placement of the Turrell at the offset of the Guggenheim helix, rendering further investigation of the museum secondary, making it difficult, somehow to go out the infinite.
If the museum had left out a piffling food for the people on the footing floor, I'm sure there would be Turrelistas who would camp for days. The trouble with this arrangement is simply that the light should be nourishment plenty. The light is the conversation, the light is the nourishment, the calorie-free is a consummate argument, the light doesn't need any supplement to do its job.
* * *
Four or v months ago my partner, Laurel Nakadate, convened a sort of a performance issue at MoMA PS1, in which she invited people to confess anything they regretted. In the genesis of the operation I had volunteered to call my mother and admit to the fact that I had skipped my ane and only piano recital, as a child, to go to the town off-white in New Canaan, CT.
I had instead eaten a lot of cotton candy, popcorn, rode several centrifugally spinning rides, gotten a migraine, and thrown upward. I never confessed, at the time to my female parent, and I never confessed to my pianoforte instructor. I kept the whole story wound inside, in some inglorious ball of shame. I intended to tell my mother this, by prison cell phone, from the lectern at Laurel's performance consequence. Information technology turned out a bully many other people likewise showed up at MoMA PS1 for the privilege of detailing regrets.
Laurel had been blessed with a retrospective at MoMA PS1 a yr or and then earlier, and somehow, through sheer stupidity, while there we had never had a take chances to see the James Turrell installation also on brandish at MoMA PS1, entitled Meeting. This was for me a cause for regret, because of the extremely warm feelings I harbored (and harbor all the same) about Turrell's work. On the 24-hour interval of the confessional functioning, though, we had an hour to kill earlier Laurel went on, and the Turrell installation, Meeting, was open. It was ane of the Skyspace constructions, which I knew well, both from reputation and from personal feel.
This piece made fantabulous use of the elementary school interior of MoMA PS1, but with the usual luminous qualities of the Skyspace pieces. Amidst the audience, many of them people who would momentarily be confessing to significant regrets, at that place was, too, a public school vibe, a lack of loftier-art reverence, a slacker/hipster prove-it-to-me vibe, and while I loved the piece from the beginning instant of beholding it, I besides understood how the PS1 interior prompted a public-school substitution of energies.
Information technology is part of school that you take to deny school, only to embrace it retroactively. And: though it would be ahistorical to suggest that I had already begun thinking well-nigh the fact that Turrell came from a Quaker family and that the layout of the Quaker church building was integral to the design of the Skyspaces, I felt some of this idea in a chrysalis country, the relationship betwixt the Quaker model, and public school, the sense of community in each. Which means that the piece, precisely, had begun to instruct me.
Best at the installation chosen Meeting— besides the exquisitely framed borders of a bluish sky somewhat mitigated past cloud encompass — was the moment when a pigeon flew through the sky above us at MoMA PS1, mocking the often perfect abstraction of the Turrell piece. I don't know if the other viewers at that moment understood the dove in the mode I was thinking about it. It may have been but a pigeon, from their signal of view, not a trivial eruption of realistic painting in the field of abstraction, non a reductive metaphor for the holy spirit, not an indication of the idea of visual fine art, the transformative metaphor of visual art, but as I say the tutorial weight of the slice, and the burden of regret, was on people'due south minds.
I found myself fabricated brave by the Turrell piece, since information technology rendered what was about the world, and not the panic of inchoate and unrealized anxieties, the panic of otherwise. Of form, my mother absolved me of skipping my pianoforte recital, because and so much fourth dimension had passed (40 years), and if anything depicts the immensity of space and fourth dimension in art it is the Skyspace pieces, wherein time is dramatized but in a stillness and gravity.
* * *
When I got out of graduate school in 1986, I had worked my fashion up to a pitch of alcoholism and youthful delusion, I thought I knew what literature was supposed to exist, and I was willing to pronounce as such, fifty-fifty on occasions when I hadn't actually read the work nether discussion.
And I thought I knew what music was good, and I idea I knew ethically what was what in the world, and you couldn't tell me anything. That was the situation when I went to Santa Atomic number 26 with my friend Dan, whose family — a family unit of existent estate magnates from Dallas — had a great collection of modern art, and a remarkable understanding thereof. That was the state of affairs when I fabricated it my business to see the Southwest for the first time. Dan introduced me to his family and some friends down there equally his token liberal friend.
The 2d day or so at his family's summer compound in Santa Atomic number 26 — an incredibly unusual town that you could only imagine with a completely different set of influences than the ones that give you New York, Boston, or Washington — he said at that place was an installation nearby that the museum had deputed, and information technology involved sitting in a room for ii hours, one hour before sunset to one hour afterwards, and, he said, nosotros should go, and I said, Really?
I didn't recognize the need to commit to a piece of work of art in this way, I wanted to be a tourist of artworks, and I already thought I knew what I needed to know, which is a sign that I didn't know very much at all. I didn't know anything near this artist, Turrell, because, excepting the Northern Renaissance, I didn't really need anything from art. And I had a chip of a resistance to not-representational art, excepting maybe Kandinsky or Mondrian.
Still, we went out to this installation that in retention seems to be in an empty lot, by itself (Blue Blood, the slice in question, no longer exists), and we went inside, and information technology was just this little adobe space, appropriately shine and Key American in its inflections, equally if information technology were a church for penitentes. Perfectly site-specific. I idea: there is no manner I'one thousand going to last the two hours.
The interior was part schoolhouse, role spa, function church building, part funerary space, and none of these at all. The ceiling was missing, of course, and our attention was directed upward, and the operation of sunset was about the relationship to the colors of the heaven to the walls of the space, and these were in some constant dance with one another, and then that zilch was permanent, simply was, rather, ever unstable, permanently impermanent.
In that location were a few others there who were making the journey, and I realized how the sense of customs played into the thing, like in a Quaker meeting, where the sense of mutual delivery to silence is essential to spiritual experience. The frame in the ceiling, made the functioning of sunset into a pageant, an 8th wonder of the globe.
Instead of beingness told to admire the natural earth, considering the natural world is worthy of admiration, an appliance for pursuing this admiration was synthetic, in a mode that did not require undue amounts of engineering. You go in the room, you wait up at the heaven. The sky performs its unspeakable beauty. (And in this way the heaven is both natural and man-made.)
* * *
I'g non certain that nosotros stayed the whole two hours. I recollect we stayed an hr and a one-half or then, until orangish and indigo were the colors I remember all-time, and there was never a moment when I was distracted, and never was there a moment when I was less than enraptured by the brilliance of the conception, the frame of sky, the play of lite, the simplicity of the slice, and its concealment of its conceptual grace. Never less than dazzling.
Every bit I have said, a whole way of making art that had been somewhat lost on me, until so, only now I was like a convert. The apprehension of the bogus created the apprehension of the natural, and this led to esteem for the natural, every bit information technology too led to more esteem for certain conceptions of the artificial. It should become without saying that I had to travel to see the Turrell, also, and that was role of the feel. I had to put in the endeavour to be pried loose from my routine to see what was happening all around me every mean solar day: the light in the sky.
Then not long after I went for the first time to the G Canyon …
[1] I had this odd experience throughout and afterward the show in which the discussion atrium would not occur to me, though I might otherwise have referred to this space in the Guggenheim past that word. Information technology was as if the prove imperiled word choice in some style
Source: https://hyperallergic.com/82618/james-turrell-the-natural-and-the-artificial/
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