ART-PRESENTATION: James Turrell-Into The Light
Since the 1960s, James Turrell has created an expansive body of work that offers profound revelations about perception and the materiality of light. Turrell’s work lies at the intersection of two ideas: that art can be made with non-traditional materials, and that an artwork might be an idea or an experience, as opposed to a thing. Turrell transforms light into art by manipulating the viewer’s experience of it, testing the limits of these two ideas, both of which are fundamental to Conceptual art.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MASS MoCA Archive
James Turrell’s retrospective “Into the Light” at MASS MoCA brings together light installations from every stage of the 74-year-old artist’ five-decade career. There are nine Turrell rooms to experience in the expanded exhibition space of the Museums newly opened, Building 6. “Perfectly Clear (Ganzfeld)”, a two-story installation, is the centerpiece of the retrospective. Early in his career, Turrell conducted experiments based on the Ganzfeld effect, where the viewer experiences a loss of depth perception caused by exposure to an unstructured, uniform field lacking aural or visual stimulation, as in a whiteout. The sensory deprivation experiment “Hind Sight (Dark Space)” guides the viewer through a dark corridor with the help of handrails into an even darker chamber. Devoid of any visual stimuli, it’s all at once disorienting. Once seated, the viewer spends 10 to 15 minutes waiting for their pupils to fully dilate, at which point they begin to notice the faint presence of a dim light. The space is not about what one is supposed to see but the experience of “seeing yourself see” as Turrell describes. “Afrum”, a projection on loan from the Guggenheim, is one of Turrell’s earliest works on view. The piece uses light as a sculptural medium. Light is projected from a corner of the room near the ceiling, casting a shape on the opposite side of the room, as a white cube seems to float in the corner of the room. In “Raethro II (Magenta)” cutouts in the wall filled with diffuse colored light provides the illusion of a three-dimensional floating object. Turrell refers to these types of pieces that use cut-out spaces to create such an illusion as Corner Shallow Space works. To view “Pink Mist” you must extend your trust to the artist and step into a short but winding and claustrophobic pitch-black hallway, then wait, blind and vulnerable, for your eyes to adjust. As the seconds pass and your pupils open, you begin to experience a floating sensation. When your eyes have adjusted at last to the darkness, a fuzzy rectangle of pale pink appears in front of you. Look longer still and it will seem quite visible, your perceptions having sharpened in the dim light. 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 mid-1960’s. “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. Turrell often cites the Parable of Plato’s Cave to introduce the notion that we are living in a reality of our own creation, subject to our human sensory limitations as well as contextual and cultural norms. This is evident in Turrell’s over eighty “Skyspaces”, chambers with an aperture in the ceiling open to the sky. In 1977 Turrell began a monumental project at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in northern Arizona. Continuing the practice begun in his Ocean Park studio, Turrell has sculpted the dimensions of the crater bowl and cut a series of chambers, tunnels and apertures within the volcano that heighten our sense of the heavens and earth.
Info: MASS MoCA, 1040 MASS MoCA WAY, North Adams, Duration: 25/8/2017-31/12/2019, Days & Hours: Wed-Mon 11:00-17:00 (Fall/Winter/Spring) or Sun-wed 10:00-18 & Thu-Sat 10:00-19:00 (Summer), https://massmoca.org
