JAMES TURRELL: THE ART OF DECEPTION
By NANCY
MARMER
[reprinted
from Art in America, May 1981, pp.90-99]
Perfect instances of what Emily Dickinson
called "sumptuous Destitution," James Turrell's bare space
and light installations demonstrate that an appeal to the senses is not
incompatible with austere means. It is their extreme austerity rather than
their muted sensuosity, however, that has seemed especially striking
this year [1980-81] in New York, where a number of extravagant environmental exhibitions
have recently been mounted. In such a context, Turrell's mini-retrospective
at the Whitney and his
single piece at Castelli this past winter
performed once again the ritually purifying
role that is one of reductivism's
great strengths. Indeed, compared to
Turrell's work, several of the season's
most elaborate environmental shows
were undone, their fashionable clutter
suddenly made to seem manic, over-embellished,
incurably frivolous.
Turrell's chaste New York installations were
vivid reminders of the schismatic, renunciatory mood of the late '60s, when
Californians first began constructing art out of nothing but light and space.
His 1966-67 light "Projection Pieces," his 1968-69 "Shallow Space
Constructions," and his 1969 "Mendota Stoppages" were among the earliest
examples of one of the few really distinctive forms of advanced art to have
developed independently on the West Coast during the past two decades.
Sometimes referred to as "perceptual environments," these lean
and parsimoniously equipped installations began making their first public
appearances in Southern California just as the style called "fetish finish"
(L.A.'s slick, plastically gleaming version of Minimalism) was entering its
decline. In fact, several of the West Coast's most notable exponents of the polished
object—e.g., Robert Irwin and Larry Bell—were prominent early
practitioners of the perceptualist mode. Other California artists at one time
or another associated with the form have been Michael Asher, Doug Wheeler, DeWain
Valentine, Maria Nordman, Hap Tivey and Eric Orr.
The typical California perceptual environment of the
mid-'70s was a silent and empty space, its unadorned interior inflected only
by minor alterations in architecture or by subtle rearrangements in
light: some unforeseen brightness fell from the upper air; a barely perceptible
scrim split a room in half; a thin streak of noon leaked arclike into an otherwise
darkened studio; a skimpy new wall interrupted an old, familiar vista; or
perhaps an old wall, newly dismantled, revealed an unexpected view of the
Venice beach. Such slight tamperings with the status quo gently marked the
artist's presence. They were also meant to rivet the spectator's attention,
to turn him into a super-esthete, or at least into one of James's preternaturally alert
people—those intense voyeurs for whom
observation is the most exquisite kind of pursuit. Addressed to the solipsistic world of the individual viewer's nervous system, the perceptual
environment revealed characteristic aspects
of the West Coast mentality of the 1970s, in particular its
hyper-attentiveness to the nuances of sensory
experience, its perfectionism verging on preciosity, and its oxymoronic
addiction to a hedonistic brand of purity. The perceptualist mode also reflected the fortunate freedom of Californians to be profligate with the resources
of natural illumination and space, a
birthright which may begin to explain the unbounded West Coast adoration of light and disembodied color.
Though there is no doubt about
the uneasiness of
the Southern California artist's
relationship to art traditions and to
traditional art materials, it is a moot
point whether the innocence of history often attributed to California artists
is real or feigned. The perceptual installation, for example, takes its
place quite naturally within the lengthy art-historical genealogy of the environment form, a Gesamtkunstwerk tradition that in our own
century has contained works as crammed
as Schwitters's Merzbau, as clean-cut
as El Lissitzky's Proun Spaces, as overdressed as Kaprow's
Garage, and as labyrinthine as Duchamp's Mile of String. If the West Coast
environment seems singularly emptied of
history, a deprived stepchild in
relation to its overprivileged antecedents—a
camera rasa, as it were—it is, among other reasons, because of
the intervening influence of Minimalism.
Without the prior existence of the denuded, "situational"
sculpture of Morris, Andre and
Flavin, it is virtually impossible to imagine the evolution of the
perceptual installation. But those precedents
scarcely account for the exaggerated
reductiveness—the hygienic
purification—to which West Coast artists
like Turrell and Irwin subjected the
environment form, nor for the extremes to which they took the already popular, phenomenologically justified idea
of defining art by the sensory
experience it provided and not by the palpable forms it took. Nor does Minimalism explain the unprecedented seriousness
with which the California artists
high-mindedly rejected what Morris would later (1971) label the "static, portable, indoor art object."
II
The intensity of
the California artists’ rejection has to be remembered within
a larger art-political context—the rebellious anti-object mood that swept through the
international art world during the latter part of the Vietnam War years. Though in no way overtly
political, perceptual installations were political
in spite of themselves. The supreme West
Coast version of the "de-materialization
of the art object," they quintessentially symbolized the idea of art striving to detach itself both from corrupt matter and corrupt money. If some dissenters (not irrelevantly) saw the mode as
yet another middle-class evasion, yet another pseudo-spiritual accommodation to temporarily exacerbated
political circumstances, perceptual
environments were nevertheless more widely
read as conscientious objectors to the "consumer fetishism" of the art establishment and as non-participants
in that establishment's system of distribution and validation. And during those politically charged years, the public exhibition of an unsalable room filled only with equally unmarketable
light did indeed have a piquancy and a
point that has become hard to recall
today, when all types of conceptual
projects, environments, earthworks,
performances, and other forms of
non-object, "post-studio" art have long been absorbed into the
system as smoothly as simple sugars.
Nor was the seemingly
fastidious disaffiliation of the perceptual installation from the
"cash nexus" the only radicalism of the mode. Without the support or
presumption of a dissenting ideology, West Coast perceptualists unselfconsciously
subverted a number of late-modernism's most tenaciously espoused theoretical
premises, among them the Romantic notion of the work of art as a self-enclosed,
self-referential microcosm and the Lessing-derived, modernist-endorsed
dictum that the visual arts must deal in spatial, not temporal, form. The
diachronic, sequential structure of the experience provided by perceptual installations was the exact reverse of orthodoxy's construct—that
autotelic form whose stable meaning grew out of synchronic relations. Viewer participation and duration were essential to California environments, and a colorful mythology of slow time—perhaps ultimately based on nothing
more than the sweet Angeleno preference for the laid-back life—grew up around
them. It was understood that such pieces
could be fully appreciated only after
the passage of hours, even days.
During that time, significant changes
(either actual or subjectively induced)
would have occurred in the light and
mood of a piece, and, if he or she were
properly responsive, in the psyche of
the spectator. The modernist's instantaneous moment of apprehension was
thus exchanged for the perceptualist's
instant of misapprehension—a first impression
that would be modified and remodified
by a patient viewer who was both a
participant in the piece and its beholder.
In retrospect, it now seems obvious that the
generic ambiguity of perceptual installations constituted a direct, if finally abortive,
challenge to the reigning orthodoxy of
'60s art. Hovering indeterminately between painting and sculpture, these new works impudently bypassed
late-modernism's increasingly restrictive
definitions of genre as well as the
rigid insistence of late-modernist critics
on the integrity of traditional mediums. Yet, the issues were by no means clear at the time. For many sympathetic viewers, the shift from the optic
emphases, the metaphorically deracinated
hues, of color field and stain
painting to the literally disembodied opticality of the light and color of
perceptual environments was not difficult to negotiate. "To
examine a work of art," says Rene
Girard, is "to attempt to
discover what the work omits as much
as—if not more than— what it
includes." Considered as direct descendants of "optical"
painting, perceptual environments
obviously omitted the matière of
paint. But since the paint of late-modernism was already so emaciated as to
mimic incorporeality, its transubstantiation
into light and air could be experienced in the late '60s less as a significant omission or a poignant sacrifice than as a subtle variation
on an already familiar, if anorexic theme.
From such a vantage point, the new
form could be (and often was) neatly subsumed
within the history of late-modernist painting as a further stage in the
Greenbergian reductive process—even a conservatizing trend, given the
extravagance of some more unruly manifestations of "post-studio" art—rather
than interpreted as an apostatic move that questioned the principles
of modernism itself.
Viewed within the history of sculpture,
however, the same environments revealed more readily their adversarial posture,
their clearly deconstructive role. For when considered as sculpture, even as
descendants of Minimalist sculpture, these works clearly omitted a great deal.
No matter how bare, how stripped-down, how "primary," how exceedingly
meager in surface interest Minimalist sculptures were, they still had an
incontrovertible, even aggressive, presence. They came in wood, in steel, or in
aluminum; they could be pushed or thumped; they could be shifted from
one indoor site to another. Perceptual environments, on the other hand,
dispensed entirely with the sine qua non of sculpture—the solid, movable object.
It is not difficult to read such a dramatic
omission as a schismatic gesture, a decisive moment, in the history of modernist
art. Benjamin Buchloh, for example, commenting on Michael
Asher's work, sees the reductive environment not only as a rejection of certain
modes of sculptural production, but as a challenge to the "material and
historical legitimacy" of the genre of sculpture itself; to him such works question the
very validity of "sculpture as a category," and thus, presumably, sever all
ties with the modernist tradition. The argument is cogent only to this extent:
what the perceptual environment preserved of the sculptural object's
remembered presence—i.e., its architectural container and the occasion that
the object had provided for the experience of art—was scarcely enough to link the
new form to the modernist tradition, unless "sculpture" itself were
radically redefined. But, of course, that is exactly what did happen during the mid-'70s.
Conveniently elasticized and generously expanded to tolerate all manner of
"post-studio" art, the establishment definition of
"sculpture" was pluralistically revised. In that recuperative gesture
the force of tradition was upheld, the dissident content of generic ambiguity
defused, and the palace revolution of non-object art was successfully
aborted.
III
During the decade-and-a-half since their
first appearances on the West Coast, a few California
perceptual environments have journeyed east to New York, most
notably those of Irwin, Bell and Asher. Now, James Turrell, in his first bid to
join what Angelenos like to call "The Mainstream," has arrived.
Before
this season, Turrell's installations were known on the East Coast only from
occasional references in national publications or by those who had visited
his West Coast studio, his Roden Crater project in Arizona (where the
artist lived from 1976 to 1980) or by those who had seen his work in
Europe.
Yet, in the late '60s in Southern California,
Turrell's career began in high gear. After studying experimental psychology as
an undergraduate at Pomona College, he constructed his first light
projection piece, Proto-Afrum (1966), while enrolled as a graduate student at
the Irvine campus of the University of California. Within a year, Turrell was
already being given his first one-man show at the Pasadena Museum.
Curated by John Coplans, whose article on the young artist appeared concurrently
in Artforum, the Pasadena show inspired Barbara Rose to label Turrell as
"the most interesting artist to come out of California since Ron Davis."
But, as a matter of fact, Turrell's work did not come out of
California for some years afterward. Though supported in the interim by a few grants and
later on by important commissions from Count Panza di Biumo and the Dia
foundation, Turrell's career during the next decade developed almost
exclusively within the privacy of the Southern California artists' community and
away from public view. Between the 1967 Pasadena show and his next
one-man appearance in 1976 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Turrell's
exhibition history lists only a few "formal exhibitions"—all
held at his own studio, which was located in an Ocean Park building formerly known as the
Mendota Hotel.
A significant event for Turrell, though the project itself would
never be realized, was Bob Irwin's
invitation to the younger artist in
the summer of 1968 to join him in planning
a collaborative proposal for the Los
Angeles County Museum's
much-publicized "Art and
Technology" show. Turrell is credited
with having introduced Irwin to many
of the perceptual concerns that the
older Californian had just begun to explore
at this time, and both artists were
evidently much influenced by a third member of their team, the psychologist Ed Wortz. An employee of a California aerospace research company, Wortz had been instrumental in developing life support systems for manned lunar flights; he was especially familiar with experiments on the visual perception of space under highly unusual circumstances. The three collaborators devoted their attention to exploring the effects of sensory deprivation on human perception; if implemented, their project would have isolated subjects in
anechoic chambers and submitted them to biofeedback techniques as well as to
the dislocating experience of ganzfields. (Wortz defined the latter as visual
fields in which "there are no objects you can take hold of with your
eye." A ganzfield is "entirely homogenous in color. ... Its unique
feature is that it appears to be light-filled" and that its
light seems "to have substance.") The team's stated goal—to create a
setting in which individuals could "perceive their perceptions"—
and
become "conscious of their consciousness"—has remained central
to Turrell’s own subsequent preoccupations.
IV
All
Turrell's pieces since 1966 have been concerned
with light as the fabricator of
illusion, or, more specifically, with the
way a manipulated light source can
control (and distort) a viewer's
perception of a given space. Turrell
works with both interior and
exterior space—with enclosed rooms
and with the open sky. Since his latter pieces require penetration of structural walls to gain access to
outside space, only interior works were constructed at the Whitney and Castelli. (An environment from the
artist's "Structural Cuts and
Skyspaces" series is, however,
now nearing completion at P.S. 1, and
the Roden Crater project, where
Turrell is currently building areas
for controlled viewing of the "size and the shape of the sky," was represented by drawings at
Castelli.) In his interior pieces, Turrell's means are the height of economy: using only the gallery's walls and several additional dividing partitions, he builds simple room-size environments which he coats with
pristine titanium white paint. Into these
spare settings, the artist introduces
a variety of light sources, ranging from argon, quartz, xenon and fluorescent tubes to commonplace tungsten bulbs and ordinary daylight. Unlike Flavin and many
other light artists, Turrell never
treats the bulb or tube as an art
object in itself. In his work such hardware is either hidden or
unobtrusive. Turrell's earliest installations use bright beams of projected light to create discrete, sharply edged
geometric shapes that seem to hover weightlessly in the gallery. In subsequent works, large open
spaces are partitioned and
variously illuminated, structured, and transformed by ambient or direct lighting.
Transplanted from their native locale and
shorn of their original and now almost forgotten polemical context, Turrell's
environments still make their basic appeal today on the somewhat dated grounds of the perceptual
experience they offer. Indeed, now that the art-political
radicalism of his pieces has in effect been extinguished by several turns
of art's wheel of fashion, the perceptual emphases
and the sensuous appeal of Turrell's
work may seem even more blatant. For
the artist deals quite openly in the
seductive visual appeal of luminosity.
His installations do not eschew
moods and atmospheric vapors, nor do
they fail to exploit the inherent potential
for mystery in the emptiness of a
dimly lit room. His work even verges
on evoking the extramundane symbolism of light. (Can any abstract Western art that takes light as its chief medium not remember all those centuries in which radiant energy was equated with divinity?) Illumination in Turrell's
pieces can range from the diffused glare of a smoggy morning to the brilliant
halo that rings an eclipsed sun. In his work,
vacancy can glitter or gloom, and
light is both occult substance and scientific phenomenon, both incorporeal essence and sensuous effect. Predictably, Turrell's installations in
New York have been interpreted as "doors
to perception"—i.e., as occasions
for a tremulous appreciation of exquisite light and color, as excuses
for belated excursions into Zen arcana, or as opportunities for a bit of ad hoc, midday
meditation. Nor are such uses of his
work altogether alien to one important
part of the artist's intention. (Turrell has described the experience of
his environments as "analogous to entering [a] dream" while still "in the conscious, awake state.")
At the Whitney, two installations in
particular exploited the sensuosity of light and its capacity to create a hypnotic,
quasi-mystical, meditative mood. Wedgework 3 (1969), the prettiest and most narrative work of the group,
consisted of a room containing a short dividing wall which sectioned off a small portion of the total space. The area behind that partition was hidden from view, but out of that secret corner streamed a mix of blue and pink fluorescent
light, producing what at first seemed to be a transparent, diagonally extended,
pastel-colored curtain. The effect was
somehow both theatrical and intimate.
There was an air of muted expectancy,
an annunciatory flavor— as if that
slant of light might be prologue to some majestic vision, some angelic arrival, though, in fact, the mood itself was the only (and sufficient) event.
The City of Arhirit (1975-76)
was a cooler, less
ingratiating, but even more hypnotic installation.
A partial ganzfield (a complete
ganzfield would have enclosed the
viewer on all sides), the piece
consisted of an empty cubicle—a smallish
room with a lowish ceiling, its five
sides painted an impeccable white, and
its corners gently rounded. During the day the work was illuminated by daylight filtered through a plexiglass sheet and entering the space from a window
behind the spectator. At night, argon lit
the room. Both made the air inside seem exotically blue-tinted, palpable, almost shimmering. At first the space
appeared endless and its peripheries impossible to locate. One's own equilibrium felt oddly threatened. Soon, however, the intensity of the color faded and it was possible to find an
interim balance in a field of spatial uncertainty. Nevertheless, viewers lingered, staring passively or pensively into
the emptiness, hypersensitively attuned to
a low-level humming sound (perhaps
generated by the air venting system),
and waiting for some flicker of change,
some nudge from the numinous.
Such non-verbal pleasures and/or mystical
experiences are freely available in Turrell's installations, but his work has
another more rigorous, even didactic, aspect to it that tends to be ignored—an
aspect that points to the future, rather than the past. What for me exempts
Turrell's installations from being simply exercises in pure '70s narcissism—from
being, that is, merely spaces in which to indulge in the "voluptuousness
of looking" or in the solipsistic calm of meditation—is their crucial use of the chilling
art of deception. The most startling feature
of his works is that they are never what they initially seem to be, and
his most interesting installations are those
that insist on the disjunctions and contradictions inherent in that disparity.
V
The spectator
approaches all of Turrell's works as if from the wings of a
stage; one feels drawn into them, feels solicited, as it were, to
move about in their hushed spaces and theatrical lights, and feels lulled into believing
one’s first impressions. "Everything
looks permanent until its secret is
known," says Emerson. The secrets of these installations are known fairly soon, in some cases abruptly.
It is characteristic of Turrell's works that after initially deceiving viewers, and subsequently demystifying them,
his installations finally leave viewers in possession of two irreconcilable visions—one illusory (or inauthentic)
and one factually accurate (or authentic).
Both visions are essential to the
piece, but cannot logically be entertained at once. That the gap between the two views is impossible to bridge, is beyond healing, lends a character of irony to the experience of Turrell's work, and, furthermore,
makes that experience paradigmatic of the
imperfections and discontinuities of all visual experience.
Let me trace, for example, the discontinuous,
diachronic, and finally ironic nature
of the viewer's experience of Laar (1980), a work in Turrell's "Space Division Series." The piece one entered as one stepped off the Whitney elevator, Laar at first seemed to be simply an untenanted gallery—an open space dimly lit, impressively large, and immensely
vacant. At the far end of the gallery,
however, was an oddity—a wall with,
apparently, a large, opaquely painted,
monochromatic gray rectangle inscribed on it. Late '30s decor? A Minimalist
wall painting? An austere backdrop for a
performance? It was impossible to determine the rectangle's purpose until one approached
the wall, at which point it suddenly and surprisingly became evident that the
gray rectangle was not an opaque
painting at all, but a windowlike
aperture cut into a very thin
dividing wall—an opening that gave
onto an inaccessible small inner space,
an unexpected interior room in which
the atmosphere was dense, grainy,
foggy, almost tangible. (Turrell
constantly frustrates the empirical, literalist side of us that, like Wallace Stevens's Nabob of bones, wants "imperceptible air," wants
"the eye to see/And not be
touched by blue.") It soon became
apparent that the interior room was
also initially deceptive—that there was no fog, but only the illusion of fog, that the empty inner space was atmospherically mysterious only because of reflections from the gallery lights outside. And, stepping back,
one was amazed to discover that, in spite of
what one now knew, the illusion of
opacity was perfectly recoverable.
Laar (and its sibling "Space Division" piece at Castelli)
elucidates the pitfalls
of trusting our normal sensory responses to
a given set of conventionally
interpreted spatial cues. Unlike our attitude
towards the illusions invoked by
perspectival drawing (illusions which
we in Western culture accept without feeling deceived, even though we realize
that such distorted drawings can be ambiguous and may, in Gombrich's words, represent "an infinite number of possible, if improbable, configurations"), we rarely expect such
ambiguities to occur in our experience of real space. We assume that, as
Gombrich says, "our eyes are eminently suited to guide us." But it is precisely that
easy and unquestioned assumption that
Turrell's installations refute. As we move about his rooms, our eyes seem constantly to deceive us, and we learn a new language of spatial tentativeness, a new doubt, a new feeling of distance about our immediate sensory reactions. In short, we encounter an experience that leads either to anxiety or—more acceptably—to irony.
In an art context, the latter reaction lends itself
more profitably to investigation. At the moment when Turrell's work
demystifies us, when it becomes clear that we were formerly deceived and that we
are now undeceived, at that disjunctive moment we experience a curiously vivid feeling of self-awareness, a condition that Turrell and
Irwin would no doubt describe as
being "conscious of consciousness." Baudelaire's label for that state was dédoublement, which he identified as an eerie sense of self-duplication, of detachment,
that occurred when the subject of an
experience simultaneously became its observer, a double who watched himself in the act of responding to a surprising event. The "other" who watches is inevitably an ironist ("Irony," says Paul de Man, "divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic"), a viewer whose mode of response significantly alters the experiential tone of the work.
Although tempered by the sensuousness with
which light is treated in individual
installations, that same sense of ironic distance is produced in varying
degrees by all of Turrell's works. In Afrum (1967), one of his earliest light "Projection Pieces," a high-intensity beam of light emitted
from a quartz-halogen projector is
directed into a corner. The light creates the illusion of a three-dimensional
object (it could be a floating Larry Bell cube) somehow attached to the two walls it touches. As we
approach the cube, however, its three-dimensionality
dissolves, and we know it for what
it actually is—a beam of light. Turrell describes his piece as seeming "to
objectify and make physically present
light as tangible material." But for the viewer, the decisive point is the moment when seemingly solid matter becomes intangible; at that
point, we become aware of our own
processes of perception and move into
an ironic mode.
Turrell's canny manipulations of illusory trompe-l'oeil effects and
his incorporation of disjunctive perception
into the fabric of his works finally provoke the viewer to question the way visual art in general is experienced. By demystifying the illusions his
installations create, Turrell provides
a paradigm for the viewer to
deconstruct all visual experience,
which is now seen to be a matter of
fragmentary, unreliable sensory
impressions and thus subject to doubt.
Furthermore, Turrell's environments
also introduce the disconcerting possibility
that discontinuity rather than unity characterizes art itself as well as
the viewer's experience of that art.
Modernist esthetics has alway insisted
on the organic unity of the individual work—on the healing wholeness in art that somehow compensates for the self-evident lack of integritas in
life. Parting company with that
nostalgic vision, Turrell's work pits
radiance against
wholeness and harmony, and makes
art, too, a matter of disjunction and
contradictions.
Admittedly, such an
interpretation of Turrell's perceptual environments is less amiable than
the artist's own poetic, though not necessarily privileged, reading of
his work as a magical union of dream and reality. Seen in their disjunctive aspect, however,
Turrell's installations have a compelling contemporaneity. They talk to us in the present, and not from their Western past
.
["James Turrell: Light and
Space" was curated by Barbara Haskell and
exhibited at the Whitney Museum from October
22, 1980 to January 1, 1981. The catalogue contained an essay by Melinda Wortz and commentaries by Turrell on his own work.]