I was asked to contribute an article for February to the Chicago-based art blog, Bad at Sports, giving an idea of what is going on in the Kansas City art scene currently. My contribution takes six shows, all from January 2014, and discusses how they form a conceptual Moebius strip of the "correlation between pictures of things and picturesque things."
This is the first time my writing has been featured in a major, non-KC publication, so I'm extremely excited. Check it out!
a unique piece basically tackling my relationship, over time, to the artwork of my favorite living artist, focusing on my journey to his three concurrent retrospectives over the summer of 2013
The reason
My roommate Jeremy nailed it when he half-joked that if aliens came to Earth and said “take us to your dopest art” then we would show them Turrell’s Aten Reign.
Really, though.
I’m not going to pretend to be objective here: I feel as strongly as I do about James Turrell’s artwork for the specific reason that his way of using technical magic to explore big-picture ideas is actually mesmerizing. That may not seem like too bold of a way to end my opinionated statement, but keep in mind I come from a generation that missed out on most artistic movements that weren’t opposed to being laughably trivial, uninteresting, and/or ugly. My education often affirmed an ‘anything goes as long as you can defend it’ mentality toward artmaking in general. So it is a big deal when I see art, especially brand new art, that makes my jaw hit the floor, because an overwhelming majority of new art that I’m aware of is unfortunately not only underwhelming but also annoyingly pointless apart from the art-speak board-game. Here I will hand this argument over to Jerry Saltz (who somehow seems to hate Turrell, though, I must note), with his recent crusade against what he calls “Neo-Mannerism,” because it’s honestly a-whole-nother topic from mine. All that really matters about what I’ve said is that Turrell is making the rare kind of artwork that gets me truly excited to be not only a viewer but also an artist in the 21st century, as opposed to doing the exact opposite. His best works manifest raw aesthetic phenomena right there in front of you that don’t politic outside the moment they’re in, and in this sense they possess a fundamental essence of authenticity (in spite of the mechanical trickiness) that is entirely of the moment: a poetic, precise science that radiates a supernaturally sexy aura.
Walter Benjamin, 20th century German philosopher and social critic, as well as our keynote speaker for the ‘aura’ idea, denotes a natural one as “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be,” which is coincidentally exactly how Turrell talks about the aim of his Skyspaces: as immediate mediators between people and the universe above. Such artwork presents an awesome opportunity to grasp Benjamin’s classic thesis without needing to conceptualize about an abstract essence implacable in physical reality. Scientifically, a visual aura is a type of perceptual disturbance that afflicts some epileptics before seizures, descriptions of which also sound pretty damn similar to the experience of looking at a Turrell work for more than a minute-or-so.
Derek Porter, chair of MFA Lighting Design at Parsons, pointed out to me once in a cafe near the New School that light is entirely contextual, defined only by how it defines other stuff. But can light define itself?
During his September lecture at the KU Spencer Museum of Art, Turrell humored a related thought, asking, “with no image, no object, no place of focus, what are you left with?” Well, not a thing, but also not nothing. Rather than stuff with irreproducible auras, his installations are their auras, objectively, perceptibly.
Look at an image of a Ganzfeld room (a title meaning ‘complete field’ in German, used by Turrell to name his edgeless, empty enclosures of ambient, colored light) and no matter how badass the photographer or how nice the Nikon, the photo’s nothing like submerging your state of mind in a limitlessly absorbent hue… To walk into and out of pure pinkness(except not even pink because it’s so vivid it needs a new name)–the color of summer sun through closed eyelids, the color of pure information beamed into a schizo Philip K. Dick’s brain by the cosmos in VALIS–a color that wraps itself around and transforms everything in the space with its texture, its sound, its smell. A color you feel like you’re breathing in. Afterward you might exit back into the totally lime-sherbet gallery space and after a minute suddenly realize the walls were white all along and that a work of art had continued to affect you physically after you had already broken connection with it. This is a surreal sort of experience that can only be feebly communicated third-person and thus must actually be sought out in the world.
The background
Before this summer, I had encountered two Turrells in person: first, a Ganzfeld at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and then a Skyspace, Knight Rise, at the Scottsdale MOCA. That fantastically plain Skyspace–just a slightly concave concrete cylinder with a continuous bench and a doorway–is one of the only types of contemporary art I can think to really call sublime (see: Kant). This might sound absurd, but humor me…
When you enter into the SMOCA Skyspace’s circle and lie staring into deep electric azure, sun just out of view, the sky appears initially to be much darker than the bright white rim of the structure. A cloudless ball inhales convexly and bulges into the open room, a hanging ocean of hue heating up rapidly to a boil until it becomes so unbearably blinding that your eyes pour tears and no matter how hard you try you cannot keep them open a second longer toward the light. This orchestrated presentation of the atmosphere (that we’re below and within every second of our lives!) that drapes over you like an infinite blanket the limits of perceptual distance, what else would you call it than sublime? Humans have a tendency to worship the sun for a reason.
That ‘natural aura’ of Knight Rise will always be one of the most vivid memories I have of a piece of art (there aren’t very many that have made me cry). It is basically the reason, catalyzed one early-summer afternoon over a lunch with Jeremy, Derek Porter, and his wife, artist Anne Lindberg, that I decided to travel the triangle of Turrell retrospectives. I came to the conclusion that such a trip might be one of those once-in-a-lifetime type-of-things. No shit…
The journey
Within weeks, I set out, first driving alone to MFAHouston’s The Light Inside. Titled after the museum’s permanent installation, an underground bridge, the phrase Turrell inherited from his grandmother refers to a variety of light you encounter in dreams.
The night I arrived, H-Town native Jen the ceramicist and I caught the choreographed sunset lightshow at Rice’s Twilight Epiphany: a templesque, two story, acoustically engineered Skyspace set inside/atop a pyramidal hill. For forty-five minutes or so, subtle and dramatic shifts in an ambient spectrum on the pavilion’s ceiling surrounded an overhead square, full of -B-’s then -I-’s then -V’s then deep darks, smushing it like clay into an airy tile. Lilac haze caught on fire, cauterizing into a velveteen black cube floating in creamy lemon. The razorlike edges of the aperture, the absent voluminousness of its perimeter’s confines, they frequently dissolved with a respiratory pulse, flickering between geometrical fixation and formless leakage. Like something in space.
Or like something-in-itself, to be more analytical. Meaning that every-once-in-awhile pieces like Twilight Epiphany offer this rare form of physically perceptible ontological gestalt–something that means what it is, how it is–that’s so insanely beautiful and nothing at all like words on a page. What happens with such pieces is slowly becoming aware of yourself being aware of yourself soaking something in through your senses, an induced level of consciousness that quickly evolves into a meditative trance. Striking an existential tuning fork. Being totally in rapture of something being, regardless of what it matters or if it means anything at all because simply in being there it is a mirror in which to reflect upon your own immediate existence. This kind of mystic, cosmically harmonious ontology, if you consider Roden Crater(watch Turrell’s Art:21 feature), I believe is what the artist is really seeking.
The next morning we hit the museum and saw extensive material related to the Crater project, the Ganzfeld I had seen a couple years before, and a ton of other full-room installations spanning Turrell’s career, most intriguing of which to me was his Wedgework installation for its implementation of a complex illusion that appears the way I imagine the inside of a mirrorless periscope might. The shadow of one jutting wall shaves a frosty mass of faint light sharply into a triangular prism, hypotenusing back into the furthest corner of the nearly blacked-out room. The spongy fluidity of the soft-lit, hard-edged wedge pressurizes against the dark around it, framed by dim, RB&G LED contour lines. Turrell spoke regarding his intentions with these “dark spaces, which are on the edge of actual seeing[:]… When you look into a space and it is filled with a different kind of light…the light actually begins to hold the space… It looks like the light gels up almost to a fog. To touch.” If we consider all MFAH’s works to be in relation to The Light Inside, this near-tangible luminosity is the common denominator. It is the fluid expanse of chroma churning beneath/beside TLI’s walkway, the last part of the museum to hold onto before exiting underground.
A month-or-so later, Jeremy and I flew cross-country to catch the rest.
Los Angeles’ show had everything Houston’s did and more. They were surprisingly similar in both structure and content. Most exciting of the ‘and more,’ though, was a series of many holograms, unlike anything of Turrell’s I’d seen before. Spectral platonic geometry extended deep into the glossy vacuum of the high-tech picture planes’ spaces or else jutted out into somewhere elusive between the object and my eyes. One shimmery triangle protruded several inches into the gallery’s air in an aquatic gradient, so that fixing my gaze directly on its corner, I could move closer and closer until my nose looked cross-eyed like it was grazing the angle that should’ve been there. It was ticklish, like goosebumps. Moving closer at all, the illusory solid evaporated, leaving only my hypnotized reflection as if in a black Mac screen that just died mid-movie.
The other highlight of LACMA was a cavernous installation titled St. Elmo’s Breath that focalized toward a gelatinous dark-grape rectangle seducing you to fall into its endless, depthless abyss. This opening was perpendicularly flanked by two smaller, peripheral ferrous glows. A silent storm could’ve been brewing in that crystalline violet vacuum, it was so fucking deep. Gravity seemed to change its course, pulling you toward an intangible planar mass–a feeling familiar from the behavior of Houston’s night sky. It is tremendously difficult to explain sensuously the sort of dichotomous oscillation that normally only presents itself in intellectual abstractions like Infinity or The Void, but I’ll try.
The true vivacity of pieces like Twilight Epiphany, St. Elmo’s Breath, Aten Reign, and Gard Blue actually exists not in the works themselves but in what happens gradually to our senses when we encounter them. They are situations designed to elicit abnormal physiological responses, akin to pre-seizures, and when allowed the brief time necessary, they are mostly successful. The flux between flat/dimensional, compressed/expansive, static/mobile, et/cetera doesn’t exist purely in our heads. It can’t, because everyday objects of perception tend not to confuse like that without hallucinogenic encouragement. This ontological mitosis certainly doesn’t exist in the work, alone, either, though, because it is only when time elapses under observation that the work becomes activated and begins to animate. To return to Walter Benjamin’s argument, “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place it happens to be.” The the aura, the actual art, exists in realtime somewhere in between ourselves and the piece, like illusions of holograms.
It could be said that the presentation of something that exists in different states according to our perspective in a sort of psychic anamorphosis begins to take on a theatrical character. At one point apparently criticized for the theatricality of his work by notorious douchebag, Clement Greenberg, Turrell recounted at KU his unphased reaction–that LA was obviously the home of entertainment, much unlike concernedly acculturated New York City. Though he was referring to criticisms made decades ago, the same contrast between the coasts’ attitudes toward his work was still prevalent this summer.
The Guggenheim’s show was far different–more divisive–than the other two. Divisive in terms of the curatorial decisions which ultimately split Turrell’s work between the newest, boldest piece he’s completed and some of his subtlest and earliest pieces. In this way, the show as a whole was slightly disappointing (though the prints were nice and well-presented) in that in pursuit of subtlety it lacked LACMA’s showmanship, this of course exempting its spellbinding centerpiece, Aten Reign.
In fact, the Ganzfeld-Skyspace hybrid that transformed the entire architectural core of FLW’s museum into a piece of art is probably the most captivating work of Turrell’s that I’ve encountered. Meaning: I think it’s pretty much the best piece of contemporary art I know of, or at least well-worth the cost of a plane ticket.
The enormous stack of scrims spanned the entire interior above, pulling in daylight to combine it with artificial LED ambiance in a weighty, phenomenal concoction–a whole museum’s atmosphere colorized vividly. Looking at first like an oblongated Looney Tunes conclusion, it doesn’t take long before its edges begin to flicker like a mirror-image on weak acid. Concentric rings of the ovular installation collapse and telescope into one another, overflowing each other’s boundaries, dilating like an eye in the sky or some brand-new life. These are both pretty obvious metaphors, but the work is so pregnant with this primal, matter-of-fact energy you can physically feel, it’s not like you are being told a story at all. You’re there, enveloped entirely in the aura.
Even the part I always hate about going to see Turrell’s works: other viewers, who normally disrupt the intensity of the entrancement with giggling, flash photos, etc; they really played a fantastic role here, all enacting the piece’s title, perhaps unknowingly, by gazing transfixed in unison on the mediated, magnificent light above. The heavy reverb on the crowd’s amused noises sounded almost as if in a cathedral, if you wanted to lean toward that kind of interpretation. The collective event of the spectacle offered a distilled moment of hyperfocused, meditational observation of the immediate, physical present. And not in a philosophically introverted, abstract way, but in concert with dozens of other people all sharing a similar real-life experience.
The pause
After returning home, I began to fumble around for days, then weeks, trying to communicate this complicated series of experiences in writing with little conclusive progress. This was only made easier by the handful of intimidatingly comprehensive and thoughtful essays in the pair of exhibition catalogues I purchased. But when a few weeks later I discovered that the artist himself would be traveling to Lawrence to open a small show at KU’s Spencer Museum, suddenly all my work up to that point became preparatory.
The present
Gard Blue, named after the exhibition’s featured piece, an early work on loan to the Spencer by a generous private collector, is essentially a mid-continental microbrew hybrid of the NY curatorial strategy of totality-via-old+new and the sensationalist LA sensibility where things are exciting to look at. Surrounding a central enclosure are several hologram pieces, adding up to a sort of inverted mini-Guggenheim-type show, where here a much earlier work is showcased, supported by more recent pieces.
These new holograms are large, about average human height. Turrell admitted that though he has been working with these since the eighties, he has only recently started to execute them well. Purely as technical objects they are fascinating.
Gard Blue consists of a mini-room projection installation presenting a sapphirine tetrahedron in the far-low corner that folds inside-out, back-and-forth, flattening then three-dimensionalizing in a placid, plasmic origami. The shape pulses and shines proportionately to your own level of concentration upon it. On Gard: Blue, Turrell commented at KU with regards to his process and discoveries:
“I started out with looking at the wall as a picture plane…like Plato’s cave… I wanted an art that takes place in between the actual limits of our perception…[and how we] have come to perceive without knowing… put just a shape on the wall of light and it won’t lie on the same surface. It’s either slightly in front of it or almost seems to make a hole through it… Like how we see light in a lucid dream where the colors are very intense, where they radiate off things and people and where light defines the space as opposed to concrete physical structures…Light that fills the space and resides in it and could be the predominant thing you see.”
In addition to explaining his work, Turrell wove together a variety of other subjects, ranging from his childhood years to the importance of persistence, from sixties-era NASA experiments to Quakerism’s appreciation of silence, from desert flora that bloom annually during a full moon to the ethical trappings of our militarily funded system of technological advancement. But one of the most recurrent themes was the importance of the journey aspect involved in aesthetic experience. He talked about the life-changing impression made on him by Machu-Pichu and the Pyramids, about traveling in his younger years unannounced to visit Georgia O’Keefe in the desert, and about building his magnum opus out of sight of any sign of civilization. In a slight sense, I identified, having spent weeks of my summer traveling across the country for art I care about.
The point
My pilgrimage was excessive, absolutely. I wouldn’t really recommend that anyone ever put themselves in debt to see artworks. I will, however, say to my fellow Kansas-Citians that I believe the hour-or-so drive to Lawrence is such a minor pain-in-the-ass that anyone failing to do so is very truly making a mistake.
Remember: no matter how well-written any descriptions might be, how hi-res any jpeg, unfortunately they are just monopoly money.
Especially for artists strapped for cash and time, we are incredibly lucky to be in such close proximity to a show of artworks of this caliber. Go see it. Soak it in. This is Vitamin D in an overcast art-era too often malnourished of wonder.
