James Turrell

This minimalism causes his audience to experience the reality that they may be missing with the busyness of in their everyday lives, almost forcing them to stop, observe, and be immersed in something beautiful and close that was once seemingly bland and far away.  He was quoted saying, "The sky always seems to be out there, away from us.  I like to bring it down in close contact with us, so you feel you are in it. We feel we are at the bottom of this ocean of air; we are actually on a planet. We have spent billions to go to the moon — we go to this lesser satellite called the moon and say we are in space, but we are in space right now; we just don't feel ourselves to be in space. Some forms of art and some forms of spirituality do give us that sense"  (Douglass).

This really is a beautiful notion and I would go as far as to say that Turrell is dealing much with the subject of beauty.  It seems as though he had a passion for slowing down and noticing the simple yet beautiful things in life, which is something that is very hard for our accelerated culture to do.  There is a beauty to light that we do not necessarily notice because we don't stop to appreciate it for what it is.  In a way I think he is revealing that we are going to great lengths trying to manufacture experiences that already exist all around us, and all we need to do is just stop and acknowledge reality.  Sarah Douglass from Art Info tells us that Turrell loved the idea of having places where people could go to contemplate and observe reality and believed that museums should exist for this very act.  This passion is something that I personally believe can be seen clearly manifested in almost all of Turrell's works causing me to believe that this is what he is all about. 

James Turrell was born in 1943 in Los Angeles, California.  He went to Pomona College in Claremont, California to study psychology and math,  and surprisingly  It was actually not until an MFA in art at Claremont graduate school that he finally decided to pursue art (Art:21).

His earliest "Projection Pieces"were made by projecting light across the room onto a specific part of a wall, such as my favorite piece of the series "Munson (1967)."  These displays really mess with the audiences perspective of a space as they make light look like a floating object that is something  to be grasped.  It's really not until one closely interacts with the piece that they realize that it is indeed light on a wall instead of the perceived object floating in space (Noever, 59). 

Soon after his interest in projections, Turrell started making "Shallow space constructions" in 1968, transforming the emphasis from the illusion of space to actual space by creating backlit wall segments in front of an existing wall.  This gives the audience a much different experience than His previous pieces in the way that it takes three dimensional space and gives it the appearance of two dimensions (Noever, 73).  Still we can see a lingering interest in human perceptions of light and space. 

Although the medium changes through his art, I believe this really sticks with him and is apparent in everything that he creates.  After his Shallow space constructions, Turrell created closely related works such as the "Wedgework series," "The Mendota,"and "Structural Cuts."  The exploration of these series brought him to making "Skyscapes" (Noever, 96). 

“Live Oak Friends Meeting House,” my favorite Turrell piece and one of his more commonly known pieces,  is a Quaker meeting house located in Huston, Texas.  I think it is an interesting piece because Turrell himself was a Quaker.   When asked in an interview by PBS if this held any significance he answered that this was something he simply wanted to see in a meeting house.  People are always interacting with light in so many ways that are almost unnoticeable, but light was something that Turrell wanted to experience physically (Art:21).  This was done by essentially cutting a hole in the top of the meeting house in such a way that all you can see is the sky above interacting seamlessly with the ceiling.  This minimalist view of the sky in a sense brings it down closer to us.  Turrell says it best, "The sky's no longer out there anymore, but it seems to be brought close in touch with you and space where you sit" (Art:21). 

There really is beauty in what Turrell is trying to do.  He is causing his audience to slow down and actually make observations about a reality.  We are so used to the concept of light and even the sky, that we tend to have less of an appreciation for it.

His work with skyspaces caused him to want to work at a much larger scale.  The current skyspaces were small and limited to the environment that the audience was in, opposed to getting to appreciate the full sense of how we perceive the entire sky.   He found that even the perception of the atmosphere itself has a feeling of closure known as "celestial vaulting." In effort to increase this natural visual effect to increase the impact of the sky, Turrell flew around the country looking for the Ideal location that is known today as "Roden Crater," once a volcano in the painted desert, located just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona.  Positioned at the rim inside the volcano, celestial vaulting is expanded to the horizons, allowing you to experience a vast amount of space (Noever, 156).

Although still very similar to his other works pertaining to light, space, and dimensionality,  Roden Crater adds a aspect of the sublime due to the sense of the awe that one must get positioned at the rim overlooking the land all the way to the horizon.

I do think it is ironic, however, that Turrell talks about how we spend billions of dollars in effort to go to space when we are in space already while at the same time he is doing the same thing by financing this giant volcano to achive an atmosphere that we are already in.  But perhaps this is a question that he is proposing.  How far must we go before we realize what we were looking for was there all along?

Turrell Had other works throughout his lifetime including numerous "Space Division Constructions," "Ganzfield Pieces, " "Dark Spaces," and more, even including five performance pieces, showing the incredible capacity of his artistic ability (Noever).  However regardless of these different mediums, the subject matter seems to always remain the same:  light and space.

Turrell was asked in the interview by PBS why light was so important to him and he said, "In thinking of light, if we can think about what it can do, and what it is, by thinking about itself, not about what we wanted it to do for other things, because again we've used light as people might be used, in the sense that we use it to light paintings. We use it to light so that we can read. We don't really pay much attention to the light itself" (Art:21).

It seems as though he wants to explore what light is, and let it speak for itself rather than causing it to be constrained by our limited perception of what we think it is.

"Art:21 . James Turrell . Interview & Videos |." PBS. Web. 11 Dec. 2009. <http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/turrell/>.

Douglas, Sarah. "In Their Words: James Turrell and Andy Goldsworthy." ARTINFO. 24 Oct. 2005. Web. 05 Dec. 2009. <http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/1365/in-their-words-james-turrell-and-andy-goldsworthy/?page=1>.

Noever, Peter, ed. James Turrell: The other Horizon. Vienna: MAC, 1998/99. Print.