James Turrell

James Turrell was raised a Mormon in California. His father was an aeronautical engineer, so young James flew planes the way kids on farms drive tractors. James Turrell was raised a Mormon in California. His father was an aeronautical engineer, so young James flew planes the way kids on farms drive tractors. He was a natural and became a test pilot for Lockheed before he was twenty. When the CIA decided to fly secret missions over China and the Soviet Union they outsourced the job to Lockheed. James was flying missions out of Norway, covering the vast Red Empires from 150,000 feet. Light in that part of the world is different from light here. Apparently it's more aliveâ, by which I mean it's clear to anyone who has spent a lot of time at that altitude that light is substance. Anyway, it did something to James and he picked an obsession, or sickness one might say, for light.

When James finally got out of the service and landed in LA in 1966. Turrell rented the former Mendota Hotel in Ocean Park, California: sealing the building from the sound and light outside, he experimented with projected light, gradually introducing shafts of moon and sunlight into the spaces. He blacked out all the windows, taping out every beam of light so as to better control the way the light did enter the space. This is what I mean by, he had a sickness. He then spent many months experimenting and this is where he made is first art pieces.

Like all sicknesses, at least the ones that really make an impression, James's light obsession got steadily worse. From this humble beach cottage, James eventually graduated to a volcano in the Painted Desert of Arizona, The Roden Crater. Now that's what I call a sickness.

Along the way, James has made some of the most mindblowing art of twentieth century. In the Mondrian in LA there are Turrells outside the elevators. As you walk out you see a very sharply curt rectangle in the wall, behind that aperture, a few feet away, is a white wall. James uses a lot of white in his work and he only uses Roscoe white, a brand he has settled on after a lot of experimentation (more sickness.) Inside this space, on the floor below the aperture, with its screen angled up and towards the wall, is a television. The light cast by the screen hits the white wall and the glow one sees through the aperture is the strange ethereal glow of that TV light. James tunes each one to a different channel. The Weather Channel creates soothing blues and greens, while porno channels create sensual pinks and reds. This is small potatoes compared to the piece he made for a Tokyo skyscraper. All the offices are open plan in this huge glass edifice. James created a screensaver that cycles through blues and greens and magentas. At a certain appointed time, in the middle of the night, all the screensavers come on and cycle in synch through these colors. From several blocks away the whole building looks possessed by spirits.

My favorite piece of James' is a sphere about twelve feet in diameter with a hole cut in it. A table extends out of the hole like the thing that sticks out of PET Scanning machine. The viewer lies on this table and is inserted into the sphere. The inside is painted completely white, Roscoe white. The viewer's field of vision is completely filled with this whiteness and it is impossible to discern any depth. James then plays a typically James-like cycle of colors, blues, pinks, yellows, magentas and so on. At the end of the cycle are a few flashes of light and then one sees a dazzling honeycomb of light. A canopy of hexagons twinkles and hovers there in a kind of miraculous suspension. The geometry of it has a kind of celestial, divine quality that is just very very very trippy. It's only later that one discovers that this otherworldly pattern is actually the structure of one's own retina. In other words one is seeing oneself seeing. Pretty trippy, pretty cool. Apparently the inability to discern depth means the eyes frantically try and focus but then give up and settle into a kind of equilibrium, whereupon James hits them with the light and reveals them to themselves, so to speak.

None of this, though, compares to the vast crater of the dead volcano in Arizona that James has turned into a monumental celestial observatory. It's the kind of place that a benign Bond villain would cook up (remember You Only Live Twice?) There's one major chamber for sky viewing, but there are sub-chamber that are angles to particular stars. James explains that in these rooms he's working with photons that left their birthplace several million years ago and have taken all this time to reach Earth and cross the membrane into the pupil and then hit the retina and send pulses of data along the optic nerve. It's all a bit overwhelming. The Roden Crater is scheduled to open shortly after more than thirty years of construction.

Anyway, all of this is to say that James Turrell is in the pantheon of living sickness. If Itsasickness ever does an awards show, James will get a nomination. I think he will win because James also flew rescue missions out of Tibet into Laos when the Chinese invaded Tibet, delivering planeloads of monks to safety. He went to jail for flying conscientious objectors to Mexico during Vietnam. In case there is any doubt that he will win, he also owns the plane that Ingrid Bergman escapes on at the end of Casablanca. That's just sick.