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. Turrell has had over 160 solo exhibitions around the world since 1967. This summer, he has the remarkable distinction of having three simultaneous retrospectives: at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (May 26, 2013 – April 6, 2014), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (June 9 - September 22), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (June 21 - September 25).

“The works of previous artists have come from their own experiences or insights but haven’t given the experience itself. They had set themselves up as a sort of interpreter to the layman…Our interest is in a form where you realize that the media are just perception,” Turrell says of his goals in molding perceptions.

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Everything You Need to Know About James Turrell's Light Art Installations Through His Greatest Works

This is quite literally a crater—a dead volcano outside Flagstaff, Arizona, that Turrell acquired. Since 1974, he's been working on this project, a kind of a naked-eye observatory focused on the viewing and contemplation of celestial bodies. It's considered the world's largest art piece and an admirably ambitious work, at times compared to Stonehenge and the Mayan Pyramids. Critic David Cohen has described it as such: "a multimillion dollar earthwork of tunnels, elliptical chambers, and a perfected rim—it is designed for enhanced contemplation of the heavens, a kind of natural telescope that will use the laws of perception in lieu of lenses."

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This is one of Turrell's most famous Skyspaces, his works of enclosed spaces with holes cut directly into the ceiling so that viewers may appreciate the color of the sky. Meeting is at New York's Museum of Modern Art annex, PS1, and has been since 1986. It uses carefully controlled orange lights inside to increase the intensity of color outside the aperture. "There's this four-square seating that's inside, seating toward each other, having a space that created some silence, allowing something to develop slowly over time, particularly at sunset. Also, this Meeting has to do with the meeting of space that you're in with the meeting of the space of the sky," Turrell said of Meeting.

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These series of demonstrations on the outskirts of Ocean Park, California proved that light could be used to direct not just the external experience of the viewer, but also internal phenomena and the absence of stimulus. Turrell spent two years sealing off an abandoned hotel and making every surface in each room perfectly smooth. Then he would direct diagonal beams of light around the darkened rooms. Near the end of one performance for an audience, he completely obliterated the light source. However, audience members insisted they still saw light beams. There were none.

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Action represents the formation of Turrell's "Space Construction" series. In these, Turrell had rooms specially designed into two parts, the viewing area and the sensing area. The viewing area is where the observer of the work would stand. The sensing area is the area beyond a partition that appears to be a solid wall, though there is an aperture in it. Because of specially designed, diffused lighting in the sensing area, the partition appears to be solid. If viewed long enough, the illusion dissipates, and the viewer can take action, reaching into the sensing area.

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In this piece, the viewer is put on a sliding table and rolled into an orb, similar to the process of receiving an MRI. It's his most recent of the isolated Ganzfeld experiences, one thought to be so intense that Turrell included a panic button.

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There comes to be a strange kind of disappointment in some Turrell works, particularly in his monochrome Ganzfelds. This moment usually comes when the viewer's perception flips, realizing that what one is gazing at is not solid, or even material; trying to place a hand on a field of light and passing through it is a disorienting experience. Open Field is one of the most encapsulating of these.

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This work is an entire house in Niigata prefecture, Japan, lit carefully by Turrell, including a Skyspace made specifically for viewing sunrise and sunset. As expansive as Turrell's works are, this is the only one that's livable.

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Unlike many of his other Skyspaces, Twilight Epiphany changes the color of the light on the inside of the aperture to correspond to the sun's position in the sky. Due to this, and the huge size of the overlaying barrier between viewer and sky, the color observed in the opening can be totally astounding—trying to take a picture of it is futile, as the color viewed does not actually exist, though it is a view of the natural sky.

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Another of Turrell's tangible-intangible projections, Juke Green might be his most convincing.

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Turrell's installation in a tunnel linking the Caroline Wiess Law Building with the Audrey Jones Beck Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Light Inside, uses the walls of the space as the canvas for the light. A space that, unadorned, could have simply been a passage becomes a destination.

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Turrell wanted to give as much worth to light as people give to material objects. In his efforts to make light recognized as a medium, he's also meant to make it material and tangible. Afrum (White) set the precedent for the perception-straining light "objects." Two projected beams of light came together to create what appeared to be a floating white cube. Turrell would become so good at this practice of creating seemingly material things out of light that, during an exhibition at the Whitney in 1980, a woman leaned against one of his "walls" of light, thinking it would support her. She fell backwards, breaking her wrist. She eventually sued the artist.

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In the late '60s Turrell studied what's called a Ganzfeld effect with artist Robert Irwin and psychologist Edward Wortz. The Ganzfeld phenomenon is that which pilots experience when trying to navigate dense fog; they begin to lose perception of direction, color, and even gravity. Though the trio's original conception of recreating a Ganzfeld effect was stopped short. Turrell returned to the idea later this one as part of a 2011 exhibition called See! Color! in Jarna, near Stockholm. As this work shifts from red to blue, the viewer becomes disoriented, as that range of color disrupts the retinas.

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Turrell turned his Ganzfelds into something more intrusive and personal. This started with the sci-fi referencing Alien Exam, where viewers were subjected to a series of examinations while gazing into a volume of color.

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Created in a specially-built octagonal room, this pair of installations uses precise amounts of light and specific temperatures of color to distort depth of field. Though the installation is built in 3 dimensions, the confluence of angle and shade flattens the viewer's perception into two dimensions through prolonged viewing. This meddling with perception is central to Turrell's practice.

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City of Arihit is one of nine permanent works at the only museum dedicated to Turrell, in Colomé, Argentina. It's also the eeriest and darkest, utilizing a lack of light as much as light itself. It was a Ganzfeld so convincing that more than one person tried to lean on the illusionary wall, falling to the ground.

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Named for a portmanteau on the famous golden-era Hollywood icon, this Ganzfeld work is notable for its totally disorienting pinkness—a work where form and surface dissolve into an overwhelming and still referentially comical installation.

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When Turrell began painting with light, it was with aggressive, obvious strokes. But as time went on, he realized that by hitting the dimmer switch, he could trigger a different kind of perceptual sensation. The "Milk Run" series might be the most successful of his subtler works. Enclosed in a dark room, this projection gives the illusion of a portal, visible only after the eyes adjust to the (absence of) light. Darkness becomes visible.

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Among Turrell's simplest constructions is Ronin. A single fluorescent bulb was placed at the intersection of two perpendicular walls. This act was confounding and wonderful, creating the illusion of a shroud, of depth, and of open space—all with a single white light.

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Turrell has been creating what he calls "Skyspace" pieces since 1975, starting in Villa Panza, Italy in 1975. These works use interior lighting calculated for the atmosphere to create the illusion that the sky is on the same plane as the ceiling. This work, at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, is the world's largest.

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Turrell's site-specific piece for his upcoming Guggenheim exhibition uses both natural light and filtered LEDs to create this graduated effect, with the mechanism of the work hidden from view. Named after an Egyptian sun god, Aten Reign will be Turrell's first site-specific showing in a major American museum. The show opens on the summer solstice.

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