Lighten our darkness
Andrew Lambirth
Lately I have adopted Word from Wormingford by Ronald Blythe as a bedside book. Composed of weekly bulletins from a Suffolk village, it combines observations on the countryside with reports on the spiritual welfare of Blythe’s parish. In its gentleness and generosity, it is the perfect antidote to the strain of London life, and cools the mind after anxiety-ridden days. (In this, it has the same welcome effect as the glorious novels of Alexander McCall Smith.) Cools the mind but doesn’t dim it, for Blythe mixes in comments from his wide reading with a deft hand, and leavens the brew with the wisdom garnered from a long life devoted to looking and pondering.
Here he is, writing about light:
There has never been so much light in the world as we have now, such instant dismissals of darkness. As for half-light, gloaming, we are not allowed to know what it is. This was when we used to do our thinking.
Someone who has thought long and intently about the psychological significance of light is the leading contemporary artist James Turrell (born 1943), who makes sculptures and installations which engage directly with our perceptions of light.
Turrell is an American and a Quaker who has been making light-works since 1962, and who has the distinction of having worked on the light effects of such films as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars. He is also a keen aviator, and much of his work is informed by his experiences of flying. (He gained his pilot’s licence at the age of 16 and has flown for the CIA, taking highlevel photographs above China and Russia. The wonder of his descent through the Northern Lights continues to delight and inspire him.) Turrell studied perceptual psychology as well as mathematics and art history before graduating in fine arts from the University of California; he subsequently became part of the California Light and Space Movement of the 1960s and 70s. His work with light employs both artificial and natural sources: his rooms of ambient coloured light have been likened to American colour-field painters such as Rothko. His natural-light pieces make us look anew at the sky.
The Yorkshire Sculpture Park is currently hosting a temporary Turrell exhibition (until 3 September) of three remarkable but unsettling light installations in its elegant new galleries (shortlisted for this year’s Gulbenkian Prize for museums and galleries), and has just unveiled a permanent ‘Skyspace’ designed by Turrell elsewhere in the grounds. Commissioned by the Art Fund (the NACF as was) to celebrate its centenary in 2003, the James Turrell Deer Shelter is a magnificent gift to the nation, the most significant Art Fund project since Rodin’s ‘Burghers of Calais’ was handed over in 1911. It is a hypaethral building, a shelter open to the sky (think of the Pantheon), from which to survey the passing parade of cloud. Its purpose is to change our perception of the sky, to help us reshape our visual experience.
I last interviewed Turrell in 1993 when he was staying in a lodge at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, at the time of his exhibition at the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust in Halifax. He had then been commissioned to produce a piece called ‘The Gasworks’, a domed perceptual cell into which you were slid lying on a couch, shut in like the drawer of a filing cabinet. I thought it would be terrifyingly claustrophobic, but the infinity of light which opened up above your head was mesmerising: the small space was forgotten, transformed by lambent colour. Talking afterwards to Turrell in the grounds of YSP, we ranged over projects past, present and future, and he told me of his plans for a disused deer shelter nearby, a 19th-century brick building with sandstone pillars built on to the face of an old quarry. Thirteen years later, those plans have finally come to fruition.
It has taken YSP that long to find the money to make Turrell’s vision a reality. The original plans for transforming the deer shelter have been modified slightly, but the overall design remains unchanged. Originally, Turrell had wanted to access the square inner chamber, which had to be dug out of the hill behind, from a single central entrance. This, however, would have meant doing too much violence to the Grade II-listed structure, so two side entrances were substituted. And Turrell’s first thought had been to make a circular aperture to the sky; this was later changed to a square one. The construction has been carried out immaculately: the cham ber is lined with concrete seating (warmed from within during the winter months), against which the viewer can recline and contemplate the frame of sky cut into the ceiling. The walls are painted white, Turrell’s usual white which has just a trace of yellow in it. A constant artificial light glows softly from behind the top of the concrete seating slabs, but appears to change as the daylight alters. The resulting skyspace is a viewing station of considerable presence, an underground vault from which we may watch the celestial activity with new attentiveness.
As Turrell says, ‘Basically, I’m very interested in direct experience — as with the pieces in the other part of the exhibition, that you actually feel the light, feel its physical presence — and here I’m interested in this work about the sky and different skies, and also the relationship of inside to outside.’ This is perfectly suited to YSP, which displays sculpture in a combination of open terrain and dedicated galleries. Turrell, who lives in the dry atmosphere of Arizona where he’s busy transforming Roden Crater, an extinct volcano, into a vast earthwork and observatory, relishes Yorkshire’s ‘maritime skies’. The ‘Skyspace’ is less invasive or threatening than the gallery pieces, which may cloak you in exquisite lavender light but make you doubt the space you’re standing in. Seeing, constantly taken for granted, is too often considered a passive activity; not by children or poets or naturalists, but by most people. Turrell makes it active.
Ronald Blythe, definitely a man who knows how to use his eyes, writes tellingly of the little-acknowledged beauty of the skies, and their power to get the spirit moving:
Chinese businessmen used to invite a few friends back to clouds and a drink after a hard day in the counting-house. Freshly robed, they would sit on the terrace in silence and allow cloud patterns to fill their heads for an hour or so. No one was permitted to comment, as we did as children, ‘There’s a giant! There’s an elephant!’ One must eventually make a grown-up response to clouds.
James Turrell’s ‘Skyspace’ helps us to do just that.
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