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James Turrell's Lifelong Dream of Desert Light
ART
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
LAGSTAFF, Ariz. -- RODEN CRATER, which James Turrell has been
trying for more than 20 years to turn into one of the biggest works
of art in the world, is a black and red volcano overlooking the
Painted Desert, at the edge of the Navajo reservation 40 miles
north of Flagstaff.
You reach it at the end of a dirt road that rambles for about 11
miles off a two-lane highway across open range, where Mr. Turrell's
cattle graze. There are a couple of trailers and cabins, ranchers'
houses, but mostly this is grazing land, within sight of an even
bigger crater called Marriam and a smaller one called Sunset. It's
not unusual to spot eagles and prairie dogs. Because Flagstaff is
7,000 feet in elevation, you also descend about 2,000 feet from
there to Roden. Aspens and ponderosa pines give way to pignon and
juniper, then to scrub like Mormon Tea and Apache Plume. The colors
are brown, green and pink.
Roden erupted 300,000 years ago, which around here makes it an old
volcano. A smaller cone, called a fumarole, is next to the main
cone. From the air, the two together resemble a snowman. The road
loops, and at a certain point the cones briefly align; then the
road rises toward the rim. From there, across the Painted Desert,
you see the Hopi mesas and the Grand Canyon.
Ask people around here about Roden and they probably never heard
of Mr. Turrell. But he and it are world famous in art circles.
Roden is the prime example of the unrealized dream, on a scale as
big or bigger than the nutty Crazy Horse sculpture in South Dakota.
In theory it has stood, like Michael Heizer's "Double Negative" and
Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty," for the idea of so-called Land
Art. Mr. Turrell, at 57, belongs to that generation of artists,
nearly all men, who started in the late 1960's to make art on the
scale of the west.
He likes to say that since he first flew his plane over Roden in
1974, landed it in the bowl and acquired the place for just under
$6 an acre during the late-1970's, his daughter was born, went to
college and married. His hair turned white. He has had more than
150 shows of his installations of light and other works around the
world. He became a rancher, to pay for the land, and regularly
shuttled to the crater museum directors, collectors, writers —
anyone who might help him raise money — to explain exactly what he
had in mind. There he would be, a bearded cowboy in his 10-gallon
hat and jeans, escorting Japanese businessmen in their jackets and
ties around the rim, pointing out how a few million dollars would
be awfully useful to move hundreds of thousands of tons of dirt for
the tunnels and rooms and pools of water he wanted to construct
inside the crater. No luck, basically.
Until now. The first phase of Mr. Turrell's project has almost
been finished, and a second phase is already under way. The place
still won't be open to the public for at least another year or two.
But after more than two decades, it is finally possible to see what
he has been talking about all this time. And the results turn out
to look even more beautiful than he said they would be. Even if it
goes no further than the second phase (he has several in mind,
including one to build an amphitheater), Roden will almost
certainly turn out to be the first great, enduring work of the new
century.
With more than $7 million from the Lannan Foundation, Mr.
Turrell's construction crew opened up the top of Roden about a year
ago, temporarily undoing his own labor in the past to even up the
bowl, and 1.2 million cubic yards of dirt was moved to make way
for, among other things, a huge tunnel, 854 feet long. The tunnel,
now built, gently rises 150 feet from one side of the crater toward
what looks like a circle of light, a speck in the distance, until
you near the top. There, the ground levels, the ceiling keeps
rising and the circle reveals itself to be an elliptical opening to
the sky in a pitched elliptical room (Mr. Turrell calls it the East
Portal) below the slope of the bowl. It is approached through an
immense keyhole-shaped doorway, spectacular like the entrance to
some pharaoh's tomb or Mayan ruin. Light through the opening casts
an ellipse on the curved walls.
By a different tunnel you descend from there back into the crater.
A fork leads either to a second, circular room called Crater's Eye,
with a circular opening in its roof underneath the center of the
bowl (Mr. Turrell describes all these sorts of rooms as
"skyspaces"); or, if you go the opposite way at the fork, you head
up into the bowl itself.
"We moved over a million cubic yards of cinder, and the crater
looks pretty much the way it did when we started," Mr. Turrell
says, joking, but that is the point: from the outside, Roden is
meant to look the same. Your experience entails moving through the
maze inside, then outside.
Mr. Turrell is not the kind of artist who makes objects to sit in
rooms. He creates ambient space. Roden is about the relationship of
the tunnels and rooms to the sun, stars and land. It's about the
time you spend, silently looking. It's about light, or the absence
of it, during day and night: you are meant to experience Roden over
many hours or, better, overnight in a little lodge he has built
into the side of the crater.
As Mr. Turrell likes to say, he sells colored air and blue skies.
His work consists mainly of bare walls, lamps and natural light.
His subject may be a nearly imperceptible light in an almost
pitch-black room, which, if you are patient and overcome your
tendency to panic or boredom, you notice after 20 minutes of
adjusting to the dark. Sometimes it is a light that looks tangible,
like a screen or a floating shape, which turns out to be a hole in
a wall or a misty scrim of raking light, an optical illusion.
Sometimes it is the light of a shifting sky through an oculus in a
roof and the way the oculus makes the sky look like a dome.
It's theater, partly. "Look, I come from L.A. where there's a
sense of show," Mr. Turrell says. "But that's not a bad word in my
mind. We say art `show,' don't we? Show implies entertainment."
In the 19th century, the photographer Daguerre painted dioramas
bigger than Mr. Turrell's skyspaces, with lights behind the
canvases that changed day into night. Daguerre didn't distinguish
between serious and popular art. Mr. Turrell doesn't either. For
the Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles a few years ago, he hid some
televisions behind scrims, with the volume turned off, the sets
flickering in the halls and elevators; it was a little joke about
Hollywood but also, because of the strange, shifting colors and
shadows the televisions cast, a serious light work.
"The wonderful thing about being an artist in L.A. is that there
is no taste," he says, only half-kidding. "There's anarchy of
taste, which seems good to me. Nowhere in the job description of an
artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste."
That said, his works tend toward meditative elegance. They explore
perception, the bottom line of all art; they're about our watching
ourselves look, becoming aware of how we see, not just what we see.
"I'm interested in the weights, pressures and feeling of the light
inhabiting space itself and in seeing this atmosphere rather than
the walls," is a frequently cited remark.
"I want to address the light that we see in dreams," he says.
"It's not about filling a space with stuff. And light is sensual.
Anything sensual, while it can attract you toward the spiritual,
can hold you from it, too; it can keep you in the physical world,
and that's an explicit part of my work, which I think is sensual
and emotional in the way that music is sensual and emotional." He
likes the music analogy. Music, while you listen to it, can seem to
occupy a space bigger than the room you hear it in, as can a book.
And at Roden there are deliberate sound effects: midway up the
tunnel your voice projects, as if by ventriloquism, to the
elliptical room 400 feet away or, if you turn around, back to the
room at the low end of the tunnel — the Sun and Moon space, as Mr.
Turrell calls it. Sound is as important as light: the sounds you
make as you walk around but also the near silence of being in such
a vast, remote place.
The second phase of the project extends the tunnel into the
fumarole to an opening aligned with the sunrise on the summer
solstice. Everything at Roden is oriented toward celestial
occasions. In the middle of the Sun and Moon space is a 15-foot
monolith for watching various solar and lunar events, some daily,
some not. Every 18.61 years, the moon will briefly align with the
tunnel, the next time in 2006. With only a dozen people or fewer
meant to be in the space at a time, don't count on seeing it.
It has not been lost on Mr. Turrell that a work based on
geological and celestial time has so far taken him eons — nor that
the work, which he began as a relatively young artist, has
influenced everything he has done later, all of which now precedes
it. "It's like trying to write the great American novel," he says.
"You're continually doing it, never finishing, and meanwhile out of
it come all these short stories."
He knows what critics say: he's arrogant to expect people to trek
to an extinct volcano, which is costing millions of dollars to
reshape and then will be accessible to only a handful of visitors
each day. But he also thinks in eons: Roden will be around for
ages, he hopes, so those handfuls will add up over the millenniums.
And of course, remoteness and exclusivity are attractions. The
pilgrimage, the privileged view. Chances are there won't be a
shortage of customers. Anyway, what's the point of art if it isn't
about dreaming big? There aren't enough big dreams in art today, or
artists who think they can shape the world to their vision. Now
that it is being built, the logic of Mr. Turrell's plan is as clear
as its connection to one of the most basic and eternal of human
desires: to commune with nature, light and the stars.
Arizona is a place where artists have come to dream before. Frank
Lloyd Wright came here. So did Max Ernst. The pioneer spirit, the
outsider mentality.
Mr. Turrell left Los Angeles in the 70's and lives here in a house
on his 155-square-mile ranch. This is his home, far from the center
of the art world. His brother, David, lives here, as well. An
indispensable assistant, Michael Bond, an actor from Los Angeles,
moved here with his wife
Skystone, a foundation Mr. Turrell set up in Flagstaff in 1982,
now in conjunction with the Dia Center for the Arts in New York,
raises money for Roden and deals with the politics of building the
project. The plan needed county approval, for example, and an
ordinance was amended to the uniform building code for Land Art.
Mr. Turrell keeps several small airplanes in a hangar in
Flagstaff, including one, a Harlow, from the 1930's, designed at
the technical school his father ran in California. Writers about
Mr. Turrell always stress that he flies. For a while he supported
himself crop-dusting and delivering mail to small towns around the
far west. As a conscientious objector, he enlisted for alternative
service during the Vietnam War and flew monks out of Tibet. (He
then went to prison for counseling draftees — including an
undercover F.B.I. agent — not to serve, but that's another story.)
Talking about flying generally seems to come to Mr. Turrell more
easily than talking about art, at which he is articulate but
sometimes canned and a little impatient. If you ask him, he can go
on about optics and astronomy, or about perception at high
altitudes, but the art is, in the end, what you see. It doesn't
need explaining. You get it or you don't.
He says, "My interest in space and light came about the way it
does for most artists. Friedrich, Vermeer, Turner, Constable,
Rembrandt, Seurat, the Impressionists. Perception and light have
always been the basic issues." He adds the 18th-century French
architects Boullée and Ledoux as influences, and a bunch of
Californians: Richard Diebenkorn, John McCracken, Robert Irwin, Sam
Francis, all of whom knew him when he was a young artist in Santa
Monica puncturing holes in his studio walls to test light effects.
"You know, for years I was a lapsed Quaker," he says. "I always
tell people that my grandmother, who was Quaker, said to me, `Go
inside and greet the light.' But whether that caused me to make art
out of light, or whether it affected how I think about light, I
can't say. If you think of all the cathedrals and sacred places in
the world, there aren't many that don't involve light as a
spiritual element. We also have a physical relationship to light —
we drink it as Vitamin D. Our health has to do with light.
Psychologically, light is important."
On a recent afternoon he walked around the crater. The tunnel to
Crater's Eye was pitch black. You had to feel your way along the
wall. Darkness alarms people about Mr. Turrell's work. You give up
control when you enter it. "My spaces are dim because low light
opens the pupil and then feeling comes out of the eye as touch, a
sensuous act," he says. "Sure, you surrender. You surrender when
you go to the doctor. A doctor's office is a body shop. We're
talking about healing the soul."
From the tunnel, the darkness yielded to light in Crater's Eye,
like an empty bull ring, silence filling the whitewashed space. The
room seemed the most peaceful, expectant place on earth. The usual
metaphor of a Quaker meeting came to mind while minutes passed.
Something about Mr. Turrell's art, even when it consists just of
sitting in a room, switches on a kind of internal light, triggering
intangible pleasure.
From the tunnel to the rim of the crater: about 600 feet above the
desert, it is high enough to make the land below seem to curve, a
phenomenon Mr. Turrell knew from flying, which he wanted when he
looked for the right crater to buy 25 years ago. On this clear,
late afternoon, the San Francisco peaks in the distance were
covered with snow. Navajo Mountain in Utah was visible 140 miles
away. A jet passed overhead, trailing white plumes.
IN the bowl are four plinths: low, tilted platforms around the
oculus of Crater's Eye. Lying supine on one, you are meant to
register the sky as a half- sphere with the rim as its edge,
another optical effect, or that's the idea, anyway. It doesn't
always work — if your head isn't in the perfect place or the
light's in your eyes — but it's satisfying to lie there in the way
that most of Roden is ultimately satisfying: you take the time to
look. You stop to listen to your heart beat. This is what good art
does.
"If you're not an optimist, forget being an artist," Mr. Turrell
said. "I've been lucky. I never felt any entitlement. I'd hoped
interest in this work would get going sooner because it wasn't
meant to occupy my whole career." The sun was going down and the
sky was red and purple. "But that's fine. I have nothing better to
do."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/08/arts/08KIMM.html?ex=988043002&ei=1&en=4aa76104eb1b797f
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