ART

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

James Turrell's Roden Crater

By Zhihao Wang

The great piece of unfinished art of the 21st century

James Turrell (born May 6, 1943) is an American artist who eschews traditional artistic materials for more ethereal ones, primarily light and space. Turrell won the MacArthur Genius award in 1984. In recent years, Turrell has become famous for his striking installations in large, prestigious museums and there is a great amount of interest in his work-in-progress, Roden Crater, a natural cinder cone crater located outside Flagstaff, Arizona, that he is turning into a massive naked-eye observatory.

Turrell was born in Los Angeles, California to Quaker parents. His father, Archibald Milton Turrell, was an aeronautical engineer and educator. His mother, Margaret Hodges Turrell, trained as a medical doctor and later worked in the Peace Corps. During the Vietnam War, Turrell registered as a conscientious objector and flew Buddhist monks out of Chinese-controlled Tibet. Some people have suggested it was a CIA mission; Turrell called it "a humanitarian mission" and that he found "some beautiful places to fly.”

Turrell in his medium

He received a BA degree from Pomona College in perceptual psychology in 1965 (including the study of the Ganzfeld effect) and also studied mathematics, geology and astronomy there. Turrell enrolled in the graduate Studio Art program at the University of California, Irvine in 1966, where he began making light projections. His studies at the University of California, Irvine were interrupted in 1966, when he was arrested for coaching young men to avoid the Vietnam draft. He spent close to a year in jail. He later received an MA degree in art from Claremont Graduate University (1973).

So, culturally, Turrell is an odd mix: an aviator who might have worked for the CIA, a humanitarian whose roots in non-violence go all the way back to his parent’s religious beliefs, and, of course, an artist who works with the sketchiest of materials, light and space.

In 1966, Turrell began experimenting with light in his Santa Monica studio, the Mendota Hotel, at a time when the so-called Light and Space group of artists in Los Angeles, including Robert Irwin, Mary Corse and Doug Wheeler, was coming into prominence. By covering the windows and only allowing prescribed amounts of light from the street outside to come through the openings, Turrell created his first light projections. In Shallow Space Constructions (1968) he used screened partitions to create an artificially flattened affect within the space.That same year, he participated in the Los Angeles County Museum's Art and Technology Program, investigating perceptual phenomena with the artist Robert Irwin and psychologist Edward Wortz.

In 1969, he made sky drawings with Sam Francis, using colored skywriting smoke and cloud-seeding materials. From 1969 to 1974, Turrell created The Mendota Stoppages. He sealed off several rooms in the former Mendota Hotel in Santa Monica and using apertures on the window controlled the way light entered the darkened spaces. Turrell’s early experiments tell us a lot about the type of artist he is and his later ambitions. It’s as if he takes the world as it is and somehow manipulates it into something new.

The inside of a hole?

Perhaps the most exciting Turrell work is his still work-in progress, Roden Crater. He acquired an extinct cinder cone volcano located outside Flagstaff, Arizona in 1979. Since then he has spent decades moving tons of dirt and building tunnels and apertures to turn this crater into a massive naked-eye observatory.

Although Roden Crater is in the American desert, Turrell does not consider himself an earthworks artist like Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer: "You could say I'm a mound builder: I make things that take you up into the sky. But it's not about the landforms. I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit." He added: "I apprehend light — I make events that shape or contain light." Turrell couldn’t be more direct. What he’s doing is creating an artistic event that comes out of materials as hard to define as light and air. It is both as natural as you could imagine and in a strange way, an incredible piece of artistic manipulation.

A vision of heaven?

The completion date for Roden Crater has been pushed back several times for funding and construction reasons after several announcements in the 1990’s promising its completion. The last time Turrell or his team went on record talking about a completion date, the goal was 2011; but according to a 2013 article in the Los Angeles Times, "nobody volunteers a date anymore."

As anticipation has built over the years, Turrell fans have attempted to sneak in without the artist’s permission -- some have succeeded. But actual access to Roden Crater is limited to friends, though devoted fans can gain access by completing the "Turrell Tour,” which involves seeing a Turrell exhibition in 23 countries worldwide. During May 2015, Roden Crater was open to a select group of 80 people, as part of a fundraiser. Over the course of four days, eighty people in groups of 20 visited, at a rather pricey $6,500 per entry.

Where are we now with Roden Crater?

Even in a tunnel there's light

Roden Crater is situated in Northern Arizona in the Painted Desert area. The first thing Turrell and his workers did was move 1.3 million cubic yards of dirt and rock to shape the Crater Bowl and allow for the creation of the 854-foot East Tunnel. Along with the completion and organization of six spaces, this was the first and the most difficult task. These included the formation of the entire bowl and the Eastern Tunnel known as the Alpha. And the tunnel that connects the Alpha, the Crater's Eye, East Portal, and the Moon Chamber. Upon completion, the project will have six tunnels and 21 viewing spaces that open to the sky.

Turrell has refined the natural shape of the crater bowl and that allows viewers to immerse themselves in the perception of natural light and how it changes. Several chambers within the crater allow the measurement of time through the movement of planets and stars. Further, other spaces illustrate the subjective nature of the relationship we have to space, light, and time.

The beauty of time and space

While it was developed in conception and scale as a monument, Roden Crater is not a monument in any conventional sense. It does not commemorate achievements or document the presence of great historical moments, at least for human beings. However, the crater harnesses the drama of the celestial landscape, and awakens our subjective understanding of the universe. The crater is a monument that commemorates human perception, and it does so by getting rid of human achievement, cultural history, and except for the act of watching, people.

In 1974 Turrell began to think about a project that involves the use of light in a natural setting. His idea for Roden Crater is to extend his ability to manipulate light in the studio to the manipulation of light in the Western landscape. He was inspired by observatories that were used during ancient times (Maes Howe, New range, Old Sarum, Herodium, the pyramids of Giza, Mayan Pyramids, Macha Picchu, Pagan, Angkor Wat, and Borobudur) and the way these spaces focused on visual perception and a sense of the vastness of the world. Let us hope that Turrell basically unseen masterpiece will one day be open to everyone who wants to see and understand how small we are but how far our sight can go.

©Zhihao Wang and the CCA Arts Review