Go inside and greet the light. That is what James Turrell’s grandmother told him before he attended his first Quaker meeting. And visitors to Yorkshire Sculpture Park should probably bear it in mind as they wander through the undulating folds of the landscape towards his latest work.
Turrell has been mulling over the making of this piece for some years. But next week — thanks to a grant of £800,000 from the National Art Collectors Fund — it finally comes to fruition. An old brick chamber built into a hillside that slopes down to a lake and was originally intended to shelter the park’s deer herd during inclement weather has been turned into one of Turrell’s famous “skyspaces”.
Visitors enter through an archway and, making their way along a dark corridor, find themselves entering a chamber excavated out of the hill. It has a concrete floor and heated concrete seats. A single, unglazed, rectangular aperture has been cut into the ceiling. And through this you gaze upwards, watch the drifting clouds and the crows that flap across them, the odd aeroplane crossing and the endless expanses of light, deepening and paling, thickening and dissolving, endlessly changing with the days and the seasons as they slowly pass.
It sounds simple, and in a sense it is. Turrell’s aim is quite simply to make you look up at the sky, to gaze into it and to be aware of the sort of cosmological phenomena that have fascinated humanity since Ancient Britons first raised Stonehenge’s myth-shrouded monoliths, since the Mayans and Aztecs constructed their pyramids, since tribal Tibetans defined themselves as a race that belonged to the heavens.
Belying the simplicity, then, is a mystical complexity. This piece is about nothing less than the linking of our lives to the heavens. It is about man’s place within the vastness of the wider universe. Turrell’s work has a visionary power.
Turrell was born in 1943, the son of an aeronautical engineer, in Pasadena, California, and his first memory, apparently, was of joyful light playing upon a ceiling, presumably above his crib. The Quaker faith in which he was reared, and to which he has now returned, had “a straightforward, strict, presentation of the sublime”. This apprehension was enhanced when, at the age of 16, he began to fly aircraft.
Soaring above the world of the “bottom-dwellers”, the earthbound who trudge their terrestrial maze, he discovered that rapturous “space within a space” that the great French pilot- poet Antoine Saint-Exupéry evokes so entrancingly. “As you fly,” Turrell has said, “you see space which is not so much determined by physical confines but by atmospheric and light phenomena . . . Up there in the cockpit, I’ve seen so many things that reminded me of this other way of seeing, where light is the material and makes the space.”
Turrell decided to read mathematics and perceptual psychology at Pomona College — “I needed to go somewhere where they dealt with what seeing actually is; perceptual psychology has to do with how we form reality” — before studying art at the University of California. He turned to light as his medium.
This is the light of universal experience — the light that has fascinated artists from Vermeer, through Rembrandt and Monet and Turner, to Rothko. But where his predecessors used light to illuminate things, Turrell looks instead to the “thingness” of light; to see light not as it illuminates objects or colours but as it becomes a revelation in its own right. “I don’t want something to be about light,” he has said. “I just want to use light. I want light itself.”
As a painter speaks of colour tones, he speaks of light’s qualities: of its clarity or its hardness, of its crispness in places where there is low humidity, of the beauty that smog can create from the sunset, of that ethereal softness that comes with a fresh fall of snow.
This is light that he paints with. Though at first he experimented with flames, the heat and gases they gave off led him to look for less noxious versions of the medium, to seek out that light with which we have a direct, primal connection: which is a nourishing force both in the physical — we absorb it through the skin as Vitamin D (“they put it in children’s milk; but of course they have forgotten to put it in whisky to keep adults away from depression”) — and in the spiritual sense.
In his first show he directed light into the corners of a museum. “Just light on the walls,” the critics complained; but the immaterial glow created cubes which, seemingly solid, altered spatial dimensions. Light played with perceptions, and this was what Turrell went on to explore, beginning a movement in the late 1960s with his compatriot Robert Irwin in which the processes of perception, rather than the object perceived, became the key to experience.
Turrell’s ethereal installations involve light in all its mystical manifestations. Sometimes indoor pieces create an illusion of infinite, diffused light. Sometimes they make something which appears almost tangible, but which, when you reach out to touch, is only a space. Once he was sued by a woman who fell over in a gallery. He had created a blue wall, she complained, but when she leant against it, it wasn’t there; it was made of light. Sometimes, as in his new Deer Shelter or the sky space project he built in the West of England, a little construction on a hillside overlooking St Michael’s Mount (designed as an ideal platform from which to view the eclipse), he creates an aperture — like an oculus — through which to gaze up.
The apotheosis of his art is the incredible Roden Crater, an extinct volcano that he bought in 1977 in the Painted Desert in Arizona, where he now lives and ranches. There he has been working for almost 30 years, carving tunnels and chambers out of the rock face, creating an astonishing celestial observatory, a place where visitors will be able “to feel the presence of gathered starlight”.
But it is not necessarily the vastness that has meaning. Turrell often compares his work to “music that makes a space bigger than the room that you listen to it in”. His pieces have an introspective subtlety. They are meant to be experienced slowly and peacefully and cumulatively over time. They are about space and the light that inhabits it.
But they are also about how you confront that space. They are about your way of seeing. “I am interested in seeing ourselves seeing,” Turrell has said. “I take seeing down to the sight level, where the iris opens. The eyes feel, like touch, like when you look into the eyes of a lover and experience that intensity of touch with your eyes.”
“The point of his work,” said the art critic Robert Hughes, “is as much about what is in front of your eyes as it is about what is going on behind your eyes.”
The experience feels like some spiritual awakening. The visitor slips into a state between a dream state and consciousness. The connection with the light is not just physical but spiritual. Going into the Deer Shelter, we become much like the animals that we might once have discovered there by the beam of a torch. We are the deer poised in the light of a lamp, utterly captivated. Like an animal that stares mesmerised into the headlights, we stare up into the face of God.
James Turrell’s Deer Shelter opens on April 27 at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield (01924 832631; www.ysp.co.uk). Admission free.
