Manipulating light as a sculptor would mold clay, James Turrell creates works that amplify perception. Unlike pictorial art that replicates visual experience through mimetic illusion, Turrell’s light works—one cannot call these shimmering events ”objects“ or ”images“—give form to perception. Each installation activates a heightened sensory awareness that promotes discovery: what seems to be a lustrous, suspended cube is actually the conjunction of two flat panels of projected light; a rectangle of radiant color hovering in front of a wall is really a deep, illuminated depression in the space; a velvety black square on the ceiling is, in reality, a portal to the night sky. With such effects, Turrell hopes to coax the viewer into a state of self-reflexivity in which one can see oneself seeing.

Turrell has consistently utilized the sparest formal means to perpetuate the consciousness of perception. As demonstrated by the projected geometric ”cube“ of Afrum I, in which light creates the illusion of volume, the artist’s work derives its power from simplicity. Turrell’s early inquiries into the psychological implications of perception involved sensory deprivation. In 1968 he participated in the Art & Technology program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. With scientist Edward Wortz, who was investigating the perceptual alterations encountered in space travel, he studied the visual indeterminacy of the Ganzfeld—an optical phenomenon in which there is nothing for the eye to focus on—with the goal of observing his own retinal activity.

Such phenomena are manifest in works involving structural cuts into existing architecture that allow outside light to penetrate and inhabit interior realms. Lunette is an opening to the sky at the end of a barrel-vaulted hall flanked by hidden fluorescent lights that accentuate the nuanced tones of dawn and dusk. This and all of Turrell’s skyspaces hark back to ancient building techniques that deployed natural light—and the cycles of the cosmos—to create symbolic architecture. In other spatial interventions, such as Night Passage, Turrell uses wall partitions with rectangular windows opening onto contiguous areas filled with pure, colored light. Standing in what Turrell has called the ”sensing space,“ the viewer encounters a Ganzfeld, the volume of colored light on the other side of the partition collapsing into what appears to be a floating, luminous plane with no surface or depth. The illusion is destabilizing yet mesmerizing; it is a tangible example of the artist’s endeavor to produce sensations that are essentially prelingual, to create a transformative experience of wordless thought.

Nancy Spector

Commissioned from the artist through Heiner Friedrich, New York, by Panza in 1974; gifted to Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1992; placed on permanent loan to Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano (F.A.I.) in 1995.

Adcock, Craig. James Turrell (exh. cat.). Tallahassee: Florida State University Gallery and Museum, 1989, pp. 30 (illus.), 31.

———. James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990, pp. 117, 118 (illus. of interior before window was installed) and plates 4, 5 in unpag. section.

Brown, Julia. “A Search for the Essential.” In Art of This Century: The Guggenheim Museum and Its Collection. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1993, 2d ed. 1997. Additional essays by Thomas Krens, Andrea Feeser, Lisa Dennison, Michael Govan, Jennifer Blessing, Diane Waldman, Nancy Spector, and Clare Bell; pp. 287, 288–89 (illus.).

Butterfield, Jan. The Art of Light and Space. New York: Abbeville Press, 1993, p. 74 (illus.).

Celant, Germano. Das Bild einer Geschichte 1956/1976, p. 329 (illus.; published as Sky Window).

Diacono, Mario. “Iconographia Coelestis.” In Deep Sky (a portfolio of the artist’s etchings). New York: Peter Blum Edition, 1985, p. 15.

Failing, Patricia. “James Turrell’s New Light on the Universe.” Art News (New York) 85, no. 4 (April 1985), p. 73 (illus.).

Gendel, Milton. “If One Hasn't Visited Count Panza's Villa, One Doesn’t Really Know What Collecting Is All About.’” Art News (New York) 78, no. 10 (December 1979), p. 48.

James Turrell: Light and Space (exh. cat.). New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1981. Essay by Melinda Wortz; p. 32 (illus.).

James Turrell: Spirit and Light (exh. cat.). Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1998. Essays by Lynn M. Herbert, John H. Lienhard, J. Pittman McGehee, and Terence Riley; pp. 52 (illus.), 60 (published as Sky Window I).

Knight, Christopher. Art of the Sixties and Seventies, pp. 132, 133 (plates 103, 104), 270. Revised and expanded English edition: pp. 155, 156 (plates 134, 135), 312. French edition: pp. 132, 133 (plates 103, 104), 270. Italian edition: pp. 132, 133 (plates 103, 104), 270. Revised and expanded Italian edition: pp. 155, 156 (plates 134, 135), 312. (The work is published as Sky Window I in all editions.)

Lewis, James. “James Turrell: Open Space for Perception.” Flash Art (Milan) 24, no. 156 (January/February 1991), p. 113 (illus.).

Panza di Biumo, Giuseppe. “Artist of the Sky.” In Julia Brown, ed. Occluded Front: James Turrell (exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). Los Angeles: Fellows of Contemporary Art and Lapis Press, 1985. Additional essays by Edy de Wilde, John Coplans (reprinted from the Pasadena Art Museum’s exhibition brochure Jim Turrell, 1967), Craig Hodgetts, Craig Adcock, and Jim Simmerman; pp. 74, 75 (illus.), 76.

Spector, Nancy, ed. Guggenheim Museum Collection: A to Z. 2d ed. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2001, pp. 336, 337 (illus.).

Svestka, Jiri, with Alison Sarah Jacques and Julia Brown, eds. James Turrell. Madrid: Fundación “la Caixa,” 1992. Essays in Spanish and English by Thomas M. Messer, Jacques, Svestka, and Richard Andrews; p. 26 (illus.). German edition: James Turrell: Perceptual Cells. Düsseldorf: Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, 1992. Essays by Adolf Krischanitz, Jacques, Svestka, and Raimund Stecker; p. 26 (illus.).