Every hue throughout your work is
altered by every touch you add in other places.
—John Ruskin
The work promotes
a state of contemplation in a communal viewing space, rekindling the museum’s
founding identity as a “temple of spirit”—Guggenheim Museum press
release for James Turrell’s Aten Reign,
on view through September 25, 2013.
For the past several weeks I’ve been trying to make sense of
my profound underwhelm with James
Turrell’s otherwise much-touted light extravaganza at the Guggenheim. I love the Guggenheim; the
architecture makes any reason to go there a special event, and now one of my
most-admired artists has filled the atrium with a giant hollow cone of light
and color which, ovoid and tiered like a wedding cake, floats over a seating
area like a flying saucer. Gently diffused by the cone’s scrim-like fabric, LED
lights gradually shift from one gradated color to another, while muted natural
light filters in through the skylight. What’s not to like?
It should be right up my alley. Turrell’s permanent installation
at MoMA/PS1, Meeting (1986) is at the
top of my ten best list. In addition, I’ve spent a good part of my professional
life writing about Robert Irwin
and Olafur
Eliasson, who work with perception and light in similar ways. I also have a
special affinity with Turrell because I, too, come from Quaker stock and have
been a practicing Quaker. Meditation and contemplation are important parts of
my life.
However, seated in the atrium at the press preview, instead
of going into rapture, I began thinking about Eliasson’s circular 360°Room(s) for all Colors of similarly changing hues. There visitors are
highlighted participants, lit like fashion models against a seamless
background, where here they appeared to have little relationship with the piece
that hovered above them. I also thought
about how, in those Eliasson pieces, you can walk right up to the “wall,” which
seems to have no substance but that of color, and practically put your nose in
it—while the entire experience Turrell has created at the Guggenheim is “up
there.” Not significantly related to the scale of my body, it felt separate
from me, which meant I didn’t have the desired heightened awareness of my place
in it—I was not, to employ the overused phrase, “seeing myself seeing”—any more
than I would at a fireworks display. In every work of art the “here” and
“there” are important aspects; to be fully satisfying, I want even a painting
to tell me something up close as well as from a distance. In an installation,
it’s even more important, because if my situation as a visitor isn’t fully
developed, I don’t feel a connection with whatever else is going on.
Olafur Eliasson. 360°
room for all colours. 2002. Stainless steel, projection foil, fluorescent
lights, wood, and control unit, 126 x 321 x 321" (320 x 815.3 x 815.3 cm).
Private collection. Installation view at Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de
Paris. Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. © 2008 Olafur Eliasson
The most important aspect, however, of “seeing ourselves
seeing” is that our perception is challenged to the point that we no longer
trust our normal visual clues. This produces a particular state of
self-consciousness that merges with the work—and at this, Turrell has been a
master. In his Skyscapes, like the one at PS1, the sky becomes a “thing” you
feel you could almost touch, with the result that you find yourself
simultaneously questioning it and yourself. And looking at one of his early,
simple corner light projections, your brain processes it as a cube with actual
mass, even though you know it isn’t.
Nothing like that happens at the Guggenheim; while it’s beautiful, even
stunning, there’s no mystery. What you see is what you get—an indication that
the line between art and lighting design (which has become extremely
sophisticated through the influence of artists) is now very, very thin.
James Turrell, Meeting
(1986) MoMA/PS1. Photo: Carol Diehl, 2011
“He’s an orchestrator of experience,”
Chuck Close has said of Turrell—but what makes up that
experience? Where does it start and stop? Does it begin when you hear about it
from a friend, or read a review? Those are things the artist can’t control, but
he can influence what happens from
the minute you walk through the door.
And what’s that like? My friend, David, a
hospital administrator who made the mistake of visiting the Guggenheim with his
out-of-town family on a weekend, described it as…“Horrible. Like Disneyland. There were 4-5 lines squeezed into the walled-off lobby, and you’re trying to get in line and bumping into
everyone…and once you get your ticket and come into the atrium you’re trying to look
up but can’t because there are so many people. It was pretty, but hardly
transcendent. The architecture was all covered
up and you could have been anywhere. And then, still bumping into people, you
walked up the walled-off ramp, which felt like a missed [artistic] opportunity,
to stand in more lines. Not that we were looking to be entertained, but we were
looking for $20 worth of something.”
Another friend said the guards were
ordering people around, telling them to get off the floor if they tried to lay
on it….”It’s not their fault,” he said, “They were only doing their job, but it
could have been managed better.”
So how much of that has to do with
Turrell? I think it all does.
Much to the annoyance of painting
students when I refuse to overlook a warped stretcher (the perpetual question
being, “Is this intentional?”), I have always contended that everything that falls into my experience
is part of the piece—a view that has fueled my no-doubt tedious bloggy
diatribes against artists’ statements, wall text, audio tours, black-out
curtains, headphones, etc.
I was irritated when, a few years ago, I
found that entrance to a Turrell installation, required shedding my shoes and
donning floppy Tyvek protective booties. While surely an over-reaction on the
part of one who’s invested too much in her fashion statement, I interpreted
this as a power play on the part of the artist (“Really? Part of your piece is
to make me look ridiculous?”).
So yes, in my book, the queues, crowd
control, and the need for crowd control are all part of it. This is, after all, the same museum that, in
2010, featured relational aesthetics guru, Tino Seghal, whose piece
involved engaging visitors in conversation. After that and many similar, such
as Martha Rosler’s garage sale and Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present, both recently at
MoMA, it would be arbitrary to insist that personal interactions are
significant in one circumstance, but not in another.
Eliasson (who was largely inspired by
Robert Irwin, also my biggest influence, and now both have shaped my thinking)
was aware of this responsibility on the part of the artist back in 2003, when
he configured his monumental weather project at the Tate Modern. Approaching the institution as a whole, part of
his preparation involved talking to members of each of the museum’s departments
to discuss how their roles would impact his project.
Eliasson also configured something that could handle the
crowds it brought—which raises a related question: what is the artist’s
accountability to the social situation his work is creating and/or occupying?
For defenders of Richard Serra’s threatening Tilted Arc, which
after much controversy, was ultimately removed from a busy office plaza, the
answer was “None.” But much has gone on since 1989, with artists now more aware
of, and willing to embrace, the public nature of their work. If relational aesthetics has had a positive impact, it has been to
highlight the artist’s role in configuring the entire art experience.
All of this casts doubt on the decision to turn Frank Lloyd
Wright’s soaring masterpiece into a confined area that requires limited
entrance—and attempt to create a relatively intimate space in a public
institution whose most basic function is to accommodate large numbers of
people. Another power play perhaps?
I like to think of “generosity” in terms of public sculpture/installation,
as a measure of the number of ways a work may fulfill the artist’s intention to
successfully affect his audience. For example, few works are more “generous”
than Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium
Park. Installed in 2006 and nicknamed “The Bean” for its shape, this giant
organic structure of highly polished stainless steel is engaging day and night, from afar, up
close, and even underneath, involves light, reflection, and movement, and is as
affective in the presence of crowds as it would be in solitude.
Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate (2003-6), video: Carol Diehl (2012).
This is not to say that art has to be popular or even
pleasing, but that it fulfills its purpose on every level. Therefore, if the
intention of a piece was about the frustration of not being able to see it, say, then the question of its success
would be, was everyone sufficiently frustrated?
Frustration and contemplation, however, do not go together.
Frustration and contemplation, however, do not go together.
Meanwhile, the frustration at the Guggenheim continues even
after one leaves the atrium and attempts to see Turrell’s earlier works by
joining the crowds to ascend the museum’s curving ramps, now claustrophobic
tunnels with “walls” of opaque white fabric that block any view of the atrium.
As students know, one of the first questions one asks when evaluating any
sculpture is, does it perform equally well from all sides, or does it have a
“dead zone?” This is something sculptors like Mark de Suvero and Richard Serra have
obviously given a lot of thought to—as did the ancient Greeks. And especially now
that sculpture engages the scale and dynamics of architecture, just as with personal interactions, it seems arbitrary to insist that we shouldn’t
take the outside of Turrell’s cone into consideration as an integral part of the piece—it was, as my
friend, David, put it, a “missed opportunity.”
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
The ultimate frustration, however (or power play….?), has to
do with Turrell’s decision to spend untold thousands of dollars (the museum
won’t reveal how much) to build a complex apparatus that allows him to
completely shroud the building’s distinctive architectural assets in fabric.
Why, one wonders, would an artist want to make it something it isn’t, when the
thing it is offers so much? Surely most artists would leap at the opportunity
to “collaborate,” in a sense, with Frank Lloyd Wright as Jenny Holzer has done so
successfully—on the outside
of the building, with projections (2008), as well as the inside,
where her electronic LED signboards ringed and activated the atrium’s spiraling
balcony (1989). In both cases, with a minimum of intervention, Holzer
incorporated the building into her own artistic statement without
compromising—and even enhancing—its grandeur.
Jenny Holzer, Untitled (Selections from Truisms, Inflammatory Essays, The Living Series, The Survival Series, Under a Rock, Laments, and Child Text), 1989
Jenny Holzer:For the Guggenheim, 2008. Light projection. Guggenheim Museum, New York. (The irony of a Holzer piece being preceded by an ad for the US Navy should not be lost).
As if for comparison, at the Whitney
just a few blocks away, Turrell’s former compatriot, Robert Irwin, has
re-installed a work from 1977 that also involves light, perception, and iconic
architecture. But where Turrell merely riffs on Wright’s motif, Irwin goes
one-on-one with Marcel
Breuer’s Brutalist
geometry. Appearing to take the architect’s inimical trapezoidal window as his
starting point, Irwin has devised a situation where that jagged opening finally
makes sense.
Getting off the elevator you’re presented with a vast room, empty and dim. Illuminated only by the window’s natural light, it’s like being in a black and white photograph. Facing the elevators and horizontally bisecting the room end to end, is a three-inch thick metal black metal bar, five and a half feet from the floor, above which fog-like translucent scrim is stretched to the ceiling. The only other added element is a painted black stripe, the same height and thickness as the bar and matching the window’s black frame, which continues the motif around the gallery walls. You step forward, but your usual depth perception no longer serves. You see the bar in front of you and the stripe on the opposite wall…or maybe the stripe is in front? You cautiously advance toward it, not knowing whether to duck or not, and the whole room becomes activated; it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t, what has substance and what doesn’t. Meanwhile the gridded ceiling, stony cement walls, and dark, uneven stone floor—aspects of the gallery that used to fade into the background—take on new prominence, as if they belong equally to artist and architect.
Getting off the elevator you’re presented with a vast room, empty and dim. Illuminated only by the window’s natural light, it’s like being in a black and white photograph. Facing the elevators and horizontally bisecting the room end to end, is a three-inch thick metal black metal bar, five and a half feet from the floor, above which fog-like translucent scrim is stretched to the ceiling. The only other added element is a painted black stripe, the same height and thickness as the bar and matching the window’s black frame, which continues the motif around the gallery walls. You step forward, but your usual depth perception no longer serves. You see the bar in front of you and the stripe on the opposite wall…or maybe the stripe is in front? You cautiously advance toward it, not knowing whether to duck or not, and the whole room becomes activated; it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t, what has substance and what doesn’t. Meanwhile the gridded ceiling, stony cement walls, and dark, uneven stone floor—aspects of the gallery that used to fade into the background—take on new prominence, as if they belong equally to artist and architect.
While the museum told me the Irwin was laborious to install
and probably as expensive to mount as any exhibition, compared with Turrell’s
pyrotechnics, it appears effortless and economical. Of course, now that I think about it,
devising a way to make a fairly thin rod stretch 117 feet would be challenging,
but while I was there, how it was achieved never crossed my mind. With a
graceful efficiency of means that was absent in the Turrell, it seemed as
simple as a drawing.
PART II Robert Irwin on "Scrim Veil-Black Rectangle-Natural Light (1977)" recently at the Whitney
Further reading:
Roberta Smith on Turrell "New Light Fixture for Famous Rotunda" and Irwin "Ineffable Emptiness: From Dawn to Dusk"
Gabrielle Selz "Considering Perception: Robert Irwin and James Turrell": a look at their shared history.
Lee Rosenbaum: "Turrell's Skyspace Obscures the Sky"
Blake Gopnik: "Has the Sage Turrell Sold Out?"
ROBERT IRWIN: SCRIM VEIL—BLACK RECTANGLE—NATURAL LIGHT, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK (1977)
JUNE 27–SEPT 1, 2013 Photo: Carol Diehl 2013PART II Robert Irwin on "Scrim Veil-Black Rectangle-Natural Light (1977)" recently at the Whitney
Further reading:
Roberta Smith on Turrell "New Light Fixture for Famous Rotunda" and Irwin "Ineffable Emptiness: From Dawn to Dusk"
Gabrielle Selz "Considering Perception: Robert Irwin and James Turrell": a look at their shared history.
Lee Rosenbaum: "Turrell's Skyspace Obscures the Sky"
Blake Gopnik: "Has the Sage Turrell Sold Out?"
