James Turrell

Creation of the World

Mark C Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual (Columbia University Press, 2012)

Roden Crater discussed at length - its combination of art practice and scientific experiment, its relationship to Hopi mythology.

'You create the world around you, but you are not aware that you are doing so. You generally do not see light filling space, we are not aware of the material nature of light. In my work you become aware that the act of observing can create color and space.  But it is never 'just' an impression that you get, your eyes actually experience light as physically present, and present it is.'

'At the crater, I make an architecture of space and I use these forms to capture the light, to hold it, in a way, give it form, give it the space to reside.'

'But the most interesting thing to find is that light is aware that we are looking at it, so that it behaves differently when we are watching it and when we're not, which imbues it with consciousness.'

[What does he mean by this?!!]

James Turrell: Spirit and Light

Lynn M Herbert et al (Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 1998)

JT grew up as a Quaker  'This is going into meditation and waiting for the light to come...It has to do with spirit, spirituality, thought'.  Clear influence on his aesthetic, its simplicity.

Called himself 'an intranaut', someone who explores inner space

She describes religion as 'man's total reaction upon life'

James Turrell: the other horizon

Ed. Peter Noever (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1998)

Skyspaces 1975 onwards

'light materialising into surface'

'the working of space and colour through light'

Essay by Georges Didi-Huberman:

'The artist is an inventor of places. He shapes and incarnates spaces which had been hitherto impossible, unthinkable: aporias, topical fables.'

Turrell enacts closure/privation - which then reveals light.  Architectural forms in which seeing takes place.  The frame as a rite of passage into another zone.

Essay by Daniel Birnbaum

'his art is light and perception'

He manipulates perception rather than presenting an art object.

Quotes Walter Benjamin on a dream:

'I was nothing but seeing.  All other senses had been forgotten, had disappeared. I myself did not exist, nor did my intellect which infers what things are like from the images presented by the senses. I was not somebody seeing but only seeing.  And what I saw was not the objects but only the colours.'

JT's work addresses appearance itself, light revealing itself.

'In his works Turrell has incorporated nature's immense dimensions: celestial light and the infinite spaces of the sky.'

His House of Light meditation guest house in Niigata, Japan (1998), inspired by Zen and traditional Japanese construction; incorporates a Skyspace in the roof which casts light through the second and first floors.

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