“Look within yourself and welcome the light”, was once the parting advice of James Turrell’s Quaker grandmother, scarcely suspecting where it would lead him. Born in Los Angeles in 1943, Turrell is now the leading artist of light, someone who has produced a series of light installations that open up to the boundlessness of the firmament, indeed to spaces that seem to be made of the light of the firmament - what he calls ‘skyspaces’. The light-space installation called Knight Rise forms part of this series which was begun back in the 1970s, and it is characteristic of the Californian artist’s work as a whole. Knight Rise dates from 1991, and is now in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Scottsdale/Phoenix, in the state of Arizona. Where, in the Painted Desert in the vicinity of the small town of Flagstaff, Turrell’s so to speak largest skyspace, the Roden Crater Project, is under way. It is an extinct, inactive volcanic crater that James Turrell is “breathing new life into”, providing it with corridors and rooms (partly underground) that are lit almost exclusively by natural light from the heavenly bodies, thereby lending this ‘airy’ medium form, structure and materiality. The Roden Crater is James Turrell’s life’s work, and he has now been working at continuously for 30 years. In Turrell’s work, light and space mutually condition each other, coming to an organic unity, one shaping the other. For Turrell, light is not an extraneous feature of an independently conceived architecture. It is something that activates space, filling it with atmosphere. In skyspaces, you can see clearly that internal space is directly connected with external space. Turrell’s idea of architectural space is a “changeable, ephemeral appearance through light”, not, as he also says, a “functional, impermeable body”.
In 1997, he and Berlin architectural firm Becker Gewers, Kühn & Kühn developed a permanent exterior installation for the administrative tower of Verbundnetz Gas AG’s head office in Leipzig, Germany. The idea of the illumination scheme is that it works directly with the power control system of the building. The system is capable of reacting automatically to stimuli from the external environment such as climate, weather and not least light conditions. Consequently the power requirement and especially the lighting in the building are coordinated with them. The result is an illuminated glass façade that is permanently in direct interplay with conditions outside. Once dusk begins to fall, the play of light starts to produce varied colour effects of soft pink via orange and red to a wide range of blues. The facade of the building is not a partition wall but a quasi-permeable ‘membrane’ receptive to certain external stimuli that is transformed inside into light etc and ‘emitted’ to the outside. It is almost as if the varying lighting effects are a form of the energy that is released in this permeation, this fusion of exterior and interior spaces. Light-architecture of this kind breaks up the orderliness and dimensionality of architectural volumes. Moreover, architecture should not ignore the need for greater spatial sensations nor impede psychological access thereto. Skyspaces do justice to this need: they open up a view to the sky and the stars. Installed as far as possible in less densely populated districts, they reveal to human perception - mainly at night - the great dimensions of depth in the universe that today’s over-extravagant, insensitive use of light blocks out to the human eye. The ease with which electric light is generated clearly leads to a kind of excess of lighting, and the universal presence of light in cities at night means we no longer look out into it, i.e. the darkness.
Too much light hampers our ability to perceive space and spatial depth and blunts our senses to the light accordingly. So how can we find our way back to an alert, intense perception of light? “Look in yourself and welcome the light” was the opening thought. What can this acceptance of our own inner light mean in the face of the question posed above regarding our capacity to perceive the light that is present outside? Another series of light installations by the Californian artist provides an answer to this. Since 1983, Turrell has been working on his ‘dark spaces’. For example, he set up installations of this kind in the mattress factory in Pittsburgh/PA and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The common feature of all these works is that visitors are led into a room in which absolute darkness appears to prevail. It is only after a few minutes of adjustment that they perceive a faint zone of light in their field of vision. ‘Light excited’ areas appear to move through the space, but often these are images conjured up by neural impulses in the retina of the human eye, i.e. the after effects of visual stimuli brought in from outside. In visitors’ perception, therefore, their own inner light lights up and interacts with the visible light that is actually present in the (external) space but is kept at an absolute minimum. The viewer may experience unease - that is the consequence of the enhanced sensibility to both inner and external light in darkness. Thus Turrell ‘enlightens’ us that, as the antithesis of light, darkness can be experienced as a primal requirement for it. The light artist attaches particular importance to darkness, because it is in darkness that one specially feels the presence of light.
Marco Ludwig from Berlin studied Science of Art and Scenographie in Paris, France, and at the Center for Art and Technologie of New Medias (ZKM/HfG) in Karlsruhe, Germany. He got a grant to study in Arizona, USA, where he did researches for his thesis-paper about James Turrell. Actually, he is working as a lighting designer and prepares his doctorate about philosophical aspects of Light.
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