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If you didn’t know about James Turrell before, you most certainly heard about him recently. James Turrell seems to be unavoidable this summer. He also appeared to be the artworld’s 2013 American superstar. Well… until Jay-Z decided to become a performance artist anyway. Still, with three simultaneous retrospectives this summer and loads of other locations to be seen, you can’t really avoid him even if you’re trying.
James Turrell doesn’t paint, sculpt, or shoot photographs. He works with light. To be more specific, his art is light. And this is the only sure thing I can say about his work since I soon found out that there is certainly no easy way to explain his art. Putting his work into words is almost as difficult as capturing it in a photograph or even more disturbing, as simply observing it. As a viewer, you can’t just look at his installations, you become immersed in them.
In most of his projects Turrell manages to show us something we rarely see: light as a physical presence, a material in its own right, not just something that illuminates the rest of the world. This is also the case of his famous Aten Reign installation at The Guggenheim rotunda in New York. Here, Turrell transformed the space into an enclosed, light-filled cone where colors seem to change in a pattern similar to the light in the sky during a 24-hour period: dawn, mid-day, afternoon, evening, dusk, and night. The top circle allows daylight to mix with Aten Reign‘s LED lights and will change depending on the time of day and the weather.
Some of his works can be highly disorienting. Take his Perceptual Cells for example — a large sphere where a person can lay down and be bombarded by lights so bright you can see the biological structure of your own eye. Or his recent Ganzfeld effect work at the Louis Vuitton store in Las Vegas titled “Akhob,”. This installation consists of two chambers, each with a circular opening, and a pattern of slowly changing light, which repeats every 24 minutes. The rooms flood the retina with high pigment fields of light that can make you feel like you’re in a different realm.
But one have to know that he won’t find James Turrell’s most impressive work in any museum but somewhere in Flagstaff, Arizona. Here is his thirty-five-years-in-the-making (and counting) Roden Crater, an extinct volcano consisting of a labyrinth of rooms turned by the artist into massive celestial observatories. It will be your perceptions and interactions with the space and the ever-changing nature of light created by the light of the sun, moon, stars and other celestial events that will drive the art.
Here is a map with some locations where you can see James Turrell’s installations. So… if you’re anywhere near them, get your act together and go check out his pieces in real life. https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=2017896932121689914 54.0004c25e698154ec9d9a1
If not, then take a break from whatever you’re doing and take a look at this massive article NewYorkTimes wrote about him. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/magazine/how-james-turrell-knocked-the-art-world-off- its-feet.html?pagewanted=all
Current exhibitions:
/ Houston Museum of Fine Arts: April 7 – August 18
/ LACMA, Los Angeles: May 26 2013 – April 6 2014
/ Guggenheim, New York: June 21 – September 25 2013
/ Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles: May 25 – July 20, 2013 / Louis Vuitton City Center, Las Vegas
/ The Shops at Crystals, Las Vegas
by Geo Fita
Geo Fita is an art & internet enthusiast living in Bucharest.