James Turrell: Knowing Light
Henry Art Gallery, 543-2281.
Through Oct 5.
There is much to say about James Turrell, and much of it has been said already. The story of Roden Crater, his ongoing great work, has taken on the dimensions of mythology. Roden is the inactive volcano in northern Arizona that Turrell is minutely calibrating–by creating a network of tunnels and stairs and elliptical rooms and a perfectly even crater’s rim–in order to see celestial events with new eyes, to return the vaulted shape to the sky, to bring, as the artist has said in various interviews, the sky down to Earth.
There is something very nearly divine in the arrogance of this project, Manifest Destiny’s frontier rocketed skyward and beyond. But this arrogance has been tempered by the humility, and the pace, of actual life: problems of funding, of land acquisition, of the real-time grunt work of moving tons and tons of rock and dirt from here to there. Turrell has been working on Roden Crater since 1974–its projected end date continues to recede into the future, but is currently set in 2006–and it is thought that the work’s total cost will go over $20 million. Prometheus, of course, was punished for stealing fire from the gods (another light brought down from on high); arrogance, Greek tragedy tells us, has a grandness that modest ambitions never knew.
The spiritual associations, of whatever religion, are ongoing. It is possible, I think, to make too much of the relationship between light and revelation, but it is also possible to dismiss it too quickly. Turrell’s current exhibition at the Henry includes three installations that offer experiences of optical phenomena–Roden Crater in miniature–without trying too hard to demystify them, so that what you come away with is an empirical feeling for the irrational.
What I mean is, these are not simply optical tricks. When you enter Spread, a long room filled with blue neon and fluorescent light, it’s like stepping through a screen, like one of those sci-fi moments when a solid wall dissolves to allow you to pass from one dimension into another. The room, it turns out, is much longer than it seems–Spread is what’s known as a Ganzfeld, or a field of light that flattens depth, removing all the usual orientational cues that humans depend on–and toward the back of the room the light turns into something gaseous, approaching solidity, nearly swirling around your legs.
But your own eyes have created this situation. It’s been said that although Turrell uses light, the medium of the work is really perception–the act of viewing it. In a New Yorker profile a few months ago, Calvin Tomkins quotes Turrell saying, “My art is about your seeing.” My feeling is that the spiritual dimension of Turrell’s work has to do with this re-creation of the irrational, with creating something close to a miracle through scientific inquiry. The use of science doesn’t drain the work of wonder, only enhances it, and leads us toward some interesting questions. For instance: If seeing something with our own eyes is not (as we have thought) the final test for the rational, isn’t it possible that our grip on the division between real and unreal is not as firm as we thought? If we can’t believe what we see, can we perhaps believe in things we can’t?
In a way, Knowing Light insists on the division between analysis and perception, like a magician showing off his trapdoors and hidden pockets, but then doesn’t insist on it. There are plenty of drawings and models–many of them of Roden Crater–for the analytical mind to devour, but then it remains for you as a viewer to have the experience for yourself. These are not brainless exercises in receiving light; the optical elements of Schaffner, another large-scale installation in an almost completely dark room, are harder to see, and you’ll want a good 10 or 15 minutes in there to parse out what’s in front of your eyes.
In fact, I’m not done with Schaffner, nor with Spread. As it turns out, lingering in the gap between the knowable and the irrational is addictive. And this is a revelation.