An Interview with James Turrell. Interview: Kathy Halbreich, William Porter and Lois Craig On January 23, 1983, just after completion of Batten, his new installation in the Hayden Gallery at MIT, James Turrell talked with Kathy Halbreich, Lois Craig, and William Porter representing Places. For James Turrell, space, objects, the materials of the earth, distance, and even time are not only revealed by light, they are illusions created by light. For nearly two decades, he has explored light through site-specific installations in California, New York, and Italy. He also has carried out a series of explorations involving how people perceive light, with a background that includes an undergraduate major in psychology and an avid avocation of flying small aircraft. His most ambitious current project is the transformation of the Roden Crater near Sedona, Arizona, that will include a “sun and moon viewing room.”
Roden Crater Aerial View (Courtesy Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona) Turrell: What do you mean by transcendent? Egyptian structures and light events. Profiles: Flying Into the Light. PROFILE of artist James Turrell, and his Roden Crater project... At the crater, he has built nine underground chambers and one huge outdoor space (the crater’s bowl) "to capture and apprehend light" from the sun and the moon and the stars-and also to demonstrate how we create and form our perceptions of the visible world...
The first phase of construction is virtually complete as a result, but a great deal remains to be done, and the future of the crater, whose total cost will probably exceed twenty million dollars, is far from assured. As obsessions go, this one could outlive Turrell. The crater is about half an hour’s drive from Turrell’s modest ranch house and studio, which makes it an hour from Flagstaff... Writer describes a tour of the crater... Writer describes his experience of the perceptual phenomenon called celestial vaulting... Tells about his early life, including work with the C.I.A. as a pilot in Tibet...
Peter Schjeldahl: James Turrell at the Guggenheim. Imagine this summer’s show at the Guggenheim Museum as air-conditioning for the eye and, if you’re gamely susceptible, the soul. The show presents a number of works by James Turrell, the veteran wizard of installations that involve illusory effects of light, both natural and artificial. For the centerpiece, Frank Lloyd Wright’s great rotunda has been fitted with six evenly spaced, concentric ovoid rings, smoothly clad in white plastic. They increase in size from the top, where a translucent membrane of the plastic admits light from the skylight, to the bottom, where the last ring fills the space, about ten feet above the floor.
An orchestration of slowly shifting colored light, from unseen L.E.D. fixtures between the rings, suffuses the atmosphere with one ravishing payoff after another: breathable beauty. The range of colors, from white to charcoal and from peach to plum, feels limitless: every tone, hue, and saturation that you know and some that seem minted for the occasion. Everything You Need to Know About James Turrell's Light Art Installations Through His Greatest Works. Perhaps the easiest way to explain the artwork of James Turrell is to say that he’s interested in the qualities of light rather than what light can illuminate. That is to say, since the 1960s, Turrell has been manipulating, controlling, displaying, and molding light to toy with how we evaluate it.
That might be understating his works’ ability to truly alter human perception: disorienting, confusing, and illumining. “I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing…like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire,” Turrell has said. Through his art practice, he became the central figure of the California light and space artists of the ’70s. “The works of previous artists have come from their own experiences or insights but haven’t given the experience itself.
RELATED: 20 Things You Didn't Know About Jean-Michel BasquiatRELATED: 20 Things You Didn't Know About Picasso. Wordless thought. James turrell retrospective at LACMA. Jun 14, 2013 james turrell retrospective at LACMA james turrellbreathing light, 2013LED light into spacedimensions variablelos angeles county museum of art, purchased with funds provided by kayne griffin corcoran and the kayne foundation, M.2013.1© james turrellphoto © florian holzherr james turrell: a retrospectivelos angeles county museum of art (LACMA), los angeleson now until april 6th, 2014 james turrellbreathing light, 2013LED light into spacedimensions variablelos angeles county museum of art, purchased with funds provided by kayne griffin corcoran and the kayne foundation, M.2013.1© james turrellphoto © florian holzherr james turrellbridget’s bardo, 2009ganzfeldinstallation view at kunstmuseum wolfsburg, germany, 2009© james turrellphoto © florian holzherr james turrelltwilight epiphany, 2012a james turrell skyspacethe suzanne deal booth centennial pavilionrice university, houston, texas© james turrellphoto © florian holzherrsee more about this project on designboom here.
James Turrell Plays With Color at the Guggenheim. James Turrell: Looking Back at 50 Years of Illuminating Light as Art. Ten years before the brutal genocide, a religious fervor gripped Kibeho as dozens claimed the Virgin Mary had appeared to them. One of the chosen recalls her disturbing prophecy. Before Kibeho, a village spiraling up one of the area’s many hills, became a notorious killing ground during the Rwandan genocide, it was the country’s most celebrated holy spot.
For nine years in the 1980s, it gained worldwide fame after a streak of schoolgirls claimed the Virgin Mary appeared to them with messages, including one that foreshadowed the country’s devastating genocide. The road south to Kibeho, paved until it slides into dirt for the last hour stretch from the capital of Kigali, is peppered with signs pointing to “Kibeho Holy Place.” They lead through the sleepy town, where pairs of nuns can be spotted walking the streets in white-and-blue habits, to a stately brick church situated in a back clearing, crowning the village. Ruhinguka unlocks the memorial shed. But the visitors are still coming. Sky and light effects. Warning: art that will blow your mind | Art and design. Dhatu by James Turrell; (inset) the Bindu Shards perceptual cell. Photograph: Florian Holzherr I am writing this in a state of immense wellbeing. If I was asked to take a happiness survey right now, the results would make Britons look like the most blissful nation on earth.
Outside, the London sunshine is cool and the trees finally look wintry, but in here, in my head, it is California. And I did not have to drop acid in the Mojave desert to break on through to this other side. I have just experienced the artist James Turrell's work Bindu Shards. Opting for the hard version, I am placed on a sliding medical bed, counselled some more and locked in the sphere.
Then I see a cityscape of vertiginous skyscrapers, with no earth below. But the most important part of the experience is that you do not know what is inside and outside your head. But I can see that sceptical readers will be harrumphing at this point. One critic has already claimed he had a mental orgasm in the chamber. Greeting the Light, by Richard Whittaker.
Art is to challenge. Interviwer felt love. Streetlights fear universe disconnect. Photos are created reality. Awe & different states. Need to 'enter' art. Religious quality. Equal experience. Light as a wall. Religion and light eating. Truth in light - it shows what's burnt. Lack of language for light. More primative. James Turrell. GOVAN: That’s one of the things that I always come away with. We often forget we are making all of this—all that we see in the world and in your work. Your work is very viewer-centered. Turrell: Yes, otherwise it doesn’t really exist. GOVAN: You studied psychology when you were in college in the 1960s at Pomona College in Los Angeles. TURRELL: The psychology of perception. GOVAN: When did it make sense to bring that psychology of perception into art? TURRELL: I had an interest in art through several friends, [artist] Mark Wilson and Richard White, both of whom went to Yale [University School of Art].
GOVAN: Was that the moment it clicked for you? TURRELL: Again, I had an interest in art, but my first interest was actually in light. GOVAN: By doing that in the field of art, you just take the middle man out of it, right? TURRELL: Yes. GOVAN: Is it fair to say that this interest in light had something to do with growing up in Los Angeles? TURRELL: Yes. TURRELL: Yes. James Turrell Interview - Artist James Turrell Quotes on Upcoming Exhibitions. Incredible Lightness o r wReplay the Gallery Related Stories The Hot List: April 2013 The Fashionable Life: Her World of Art See More Photos more Culture Sign up for our weekly emails and stay in the know on style.
Top Stories Connect with Us hairstyles & cuts for 2014 30 short hairstyles hairstyle handbook daily horoscopes Sex Tips & Relationship Advice b. EGG: interview. Light is primal. Nature. Bring the cosmos to us. Just use light. Different visual space. Behind the Cover Story: Wil Hylton on James Turrell's Magic. Wil Hylton Wil S. Hylton, a contributing writer for the magazine, wrote this week’s cover story about the artist James Turrell. His last article for the magazine was about Belgian tobacco.
When did you first hear about James Turrell? It was about 20 years ago at a museum in Pittsburgh called the Mattress Factory. You spent more than 100 hours with Turrell, chasing him to different cities. I think every story wants to be reported its own way. Does his work seem like one thing — perhaps a machine — during installation, and another thing during exhibition? I’m amazed by the gap between his materials and his effect. His “perceptual cells,” in which the viewer is blasted with blinding light, sound like an absolute nightmare. The names of his series sound as if they come straight from a Silicon Valley pitch meeting: “Skyspace,” “Ganzfeld,” “Wedgeworks.”
The names can be silly. He definitely plans to open the crater. Turrell is 70. What does it feel like to experience the crater? Gabrielle Selz: Considering Perception: Robert Irwin and James Turrell. Many years ago, in a land far, far away (Los Angeles in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy has just been assassinated and Apollo 8, the first manned space craft to leave the Earth's orbit has beamed back images of "Earthrise" from the far side of the moon) two young men set off on a journey to portray the experience of perception.
These two men, Robert Irwin and James Turrell, joined the psychologist, Ed Wortz who conducted experiments in ergonomics (how humans interact with technology) for NASA missions, in order to collaborate on an experimental artwork. They wanted to design a Ganzfeld sphere, a chamber that would deprive visitors of sound and reduce light to mere grey field. They wanted to use art to alter the way an individual perceived his or her surroundings, bringing them into an experience where it was virtually impossible to differentiate between seeing and imagining. By 1970, a few years after the Ganzfeld chamber, Irwin wrote. James Turrell, Afrum I (White), 1967. Can't touch a possibility. He imbues empty space with a presence. Irwin: concrete world.