by Marco Ludwig

Regarded as the King of the Light Artists, Turrell's work explores the relationship between light and space that speak to viewers without words, impacting the eye, body and mind with the force of a spiritual awakening. "I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing," says Turrell, "like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire."

"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". (Turrell is also an architect of light.) In 1997, he and Berlin architectural firm Becker Gewers, Kü:hn & Kü:hn 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 co-ordinated with them. The result is an illuminated glass facade 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. "There is never no light, even when all the light is gone, you can still sense light," says Turrell.

Turrell's very preference for reduced, indirect light confers an extraordinary importance on the medium. Feeling light, bringing it to the point of a tactile experience indicates that Turrell is interested in light as such. What does that mean? Just as he does not degrade light into a design feature added post hoc, he also does not use it merely as a means of illuminating objects. "My art deals with light itself. It's not the bearer of revelation - it is the revelation," is how he once put it. Turrell's handling of light as an autonomous design resource can be experienced in a very special fashion in light-spaces called the Wedgework Series. In these, partition walls are pushed into the room and at the same time truncated in such a way that, because of their wedge-shaped arrangement and the fluorescent lights installed at the corresponding angles at the end of them, light shines out bundled, and a transparent wall of light results. This wall of light is perceived as a permeable film with a glazed surface. The gaze passes through it into a shimmering space. It is a magic attraction for visitors. Filled with atmosphere by nothing except light, it gives visitors the feeling of experiencing light physically and being able to touch it. Light becomes a physical presence. It loses all familiar decorative purpose and meaning and thereby - and because of its sublime, finely adjusted tuning - seems even to pass beyond the confines of the room. Spatial frontiers that normally appear clear and fixed dissolve in human perception, and spatial surroundings are no longer clearly definable. What is a boundary, and what is only a threshold like a bank of fog leading to a new space opening up beyond? What certainties can my perceptive faculties give me, one wonders in confusion. Where does the room begin or end - outside, or in me?

Questions of this sort are the subject matter of Turrell's skyspaces in quite a specific way. Once again it is the encounter between internal and external space that is focused on. It takes place here instead of those spatial openings to the sky. The latter are always above the line of the horizon. In the case of Knight Rise, the opening is oval, in accordance with the ground plan of the room. Visitors to a skyspace sit on benches placed along the bare concrete walls. Otherwise the room is equipped with no other 'object' except light itself. This enters the room from above, and during the day sometimes casts a geometrical shape on the wall surfaces depending on the state of the sun and shape of the ceiling aperture. But this 'spot' is more of a secondary phenomenon - it has nothing to do with illumination. So what does catch the attention now? What do visitors to a light-room installation of this kind now notice, once every illuminated object has been removed from their optical senses? Opening and shutting, boundaries and distance - these are the pairings and ambivalent perceptions that constantly recur once you succumb to Turrell's management of light and space. An installation such as Knight Rise offers an experience of a room that, though wholly open to the sky, conveys a feeling of claustrophobia to the visitor. This is the phenomenon that results from the way Turrell treats the edges of the aperture cut into the ceiling and roof. You notice a transparent film that appears to span the aperture and so defines a spatial boundary. The infinite space of the sky looks as if it lies on the plane of the surface of the aperture, i.e. is brought down to the surface of the ceiling aperture, and is thereby made 'tangible' or at least 'approachable'. And yet distance appears to open up again - an indefinite spatial depth stretches out beyond this transparent layer. Obviously the sky allows itself to be made 'tangible' or to be possessed only to a limited extent, and during the transition from day to night, i.e. the twilight, it denies visitors any view into Knight Rise - the ceiling aperture looks impressively like an opaque painted surface. "This is similar to when local city light at night illuminates the atmosphere and obscures the stars, or perhaps more closely analogous to the daytime lighting of the atmosphere which allows vision of no star save our own," explains Turrell. Once the spaces of the Roden Crater Project are completed (this is planned for 2005), visitors will see the sky and its manifold light phenomena in a unique manner, like a huge eye rather akin to an observatory, bringing it within reach from 'far away up there'. It will be a very special experience of light and space. We shall thank James Turrell for it.

Marco Ludwig studies Scenography at the Hochschule fü:r Gestaltung / Zentrum fü:r Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) (Centre for Art and Technologie of New Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany and his main interest is the subject of Light. He has written a thesis paper about James Turrell which involved trips to Flagstaff, Arizona.