JAMES TURRELL
“My work has no object, no image and no focus. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought.�
INTRODUCTION
James Turrell, is considered one of the most iWmportant artists of the Southern California Light and Space movement. James Turrell was born May 6, 1943, in Los Angeles, California to a Quaker mother and a father who was a school administrator. He attended Pomona College, where his studies concentrated on art, art history, mathematics, perceptual psychology and astronomy. In 1973, Turrell received a master’s degree in Art from Claremont Graduate School. Turrell’s work has been widely acclaimed and exhibited since his first showing at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967,
which established him a leader in the nascent Light and Space movement. Turrell’s interests include creating art, studying science and religion. Also, he is an avid pilot who has logged over twelve thousand hours flying. Turrell considers the sky as his studio, material and canvas. “My work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing. I’m also interested in the sense of presence of space; that is space where you feel a presence, almost an entity — that physical feeling and power that space can give.”
ABOUT WORK
For over half a century, the American artist James Turrell has worked directly with light and space to create artworks that engage viewers with the limits and wonder of human perception. Turrell, an avid pilot who has logged over twelve thousand hours flying, considers the sky as his studio, material and canvas. New Yorker critic Calvin Tompkins writes, “His work is not about light, or a record of light; it is light — the physical presence of light made manifest in sensory form.” Informed by his training in perceptual psychology and a childhood fascination with light, Turrell began experimenting with light as a medium in southern California in the mid1960’s. The Pasadena Art Museum mounted a one-man show of his Projection Pieces, created with high-intensity projectors and precisely modified spaces, in 1967. Mendota Stoppages, a series of light works created and exhibited in his Santa Monica studio, paired Projection Pieces with structural cuts in the building, creating apertures open to the light outside. These investigations aligning and mixing interior and exterior, formed the groundwork for the open sky spaces found in his later Skyspace, Tunnel and Crater artworks.
“My work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing. I’m also interested in the sense of presence of space; that is space where you feel a presence, almost an entity — that physical feeling and power that space can give.”
GRANZFELD Breathing Light’, one of the artist’s Ganzfeld pieces, is currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Originally part of the larger ‘James Turrell: A Retrospective’, the installation is designed to entirely eliminate the viewer’s depth perception, and contains light that seems has no source, colors that have that has no fixed shade, and ‘floating shapes’ that stretch into infinite. When visiting the exhibit, one must go down the stairs, across the sidewalk path, into another building, wait in line, remove shoes and don white booties, before being allowed to climb stairs, as if into a temple. The room is painted entirely white, with all the corners shaped into gentle curves so that depth disappears. The main focal point is a lit pink rectangular orb, with its edges and corners non-existent. The piece’s colors slowly change, making it art to experience over time, and the all encompassing color allows the viewer to feel its
physicality. Although Turrell’s pieces are primarily tricks and optical illusions, you have no choice but to appreciate the realistic impact of his creations, our brains struggling to make sense of colors, objects, and edges. “Breathing Light” is now included in the cost of a general admission ticket at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It is limited to a few people at a time, so check in with the Ticket Office whn you arrive at the museum to reserve your timed entry. For more information, please visit www.lacma.org
“Turrell creates a similar experience of ‘Ganzfeld’: a German word to describe the phenomenon of the total loss of depth perception as in the experience of a white-out.”
“It’s about perception. For me, it’s using light as a material to influence or affect the medium of perception. I feel that I want to use light as this wonderful and magic elixir that we drink as Vitamin D through the skin—and I mean, we are literally light-eaters—to then affect the way that we see. We live within this reality we create, and we’re quite unaware of how we create the reality. So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing.”