James Turrell: Master Of Light

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1:36James Turrell:Welcome to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service. This is the programme that explores the work of the world's leading artists as they're making it. We have to finish the floor, do the finish to the seats, also get the cushions made. I'm Julian May and I'm at Aros the art museum in Aros in Denmark I'm on the top floor a circular gallery with glass walls as I walk round I realise the glass is red then further on it's orange, yellow green, blue I'm looking down at the city through a rainbow panorama it's beautiful

2:23Julian May:The experience that you had was walking around Oliver Eliasson's artwork, which is called Your Rainbow Panorama, an experience with light and colour. And the reason it's called Your Rainbow Panorama is because it's for the city and the citizens of Aarhus to see their city 360 degrees in all of the colours of the rainbow and all of the colours of the spectrum.

2:44James Turrell:It's January the 15th today, overcast, grey, cold. I begin to understand that here in the north, where the winters are long and it never really gets light and the summer's short and it never really gets dark, people have an intense relationship with light. You're right, Rebecca Matthews,

3:07Julian May:museum director and chief executive of Aros, Orhus Art Museum in Denmark. I do think the Danes have a relationship to light. The Danes are very specific about how they light their homes. Lighting and lamps are incredibly important. It's very rare you will see a bulb in a Danish home just like hanging from the ceiling. There will be lamps that are hung over special parts of a room so that it creates the atmosphere, the hygge, this coziness, hygge, that the Danes really genuinely focus on. So when you buy a house in Denmark, there's no lights and no light bulbs because that's your job to light the space how you want to.

3:46Julian May:So, yeah, I think Danes do have a really interesting relationship to light.

3:49James Turrell:so it's no surprise that the newest work here that's still being built it will open on june the 19th close to midsummer is all about light and color outside the entrance to our horse which is a very modern building is a huge mound covered in grass it looks ancient it could be the burial site of a viking chief except for a rusty metal cap and some men i see working on it this is the latest of what James Turrell calls sky spaces and it's titled as seen below the dome to experience the work you'll have to go underground beneath the huge dome and look up to a hole in the top that's cut out to let the sky in working with James Turrell he really

4:40Julian May:is an artist whose works are probably the most rigorous and sustained artistic investigation into perception and light that we've ever seen. It's probably reflected in the psyche of the Danes, yeah.

4:53James Turrell:James Turrell, in his 80s now, has created sky spaces in 39 countries. He's famous as a light artist. But, I asked when we met, haven't all artists all over the world always been concerned with light? The 19th century Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma is famous for capturing the play of sunlight on skin. Light is a recurring theme in the work of the Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo. And for the Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, light was an emotional and spiritual force. What, James Turrell, are you doing that's different? The history of art is littered with art that's about light. The difference here is this is light.

5:39James Turrell:Right. So artists of the past have been depicting light, but you've been using it. So I use the material light to affect the medium of perception. Light itself is the material. And it is material. I mean, it's part of our diet. We drink it as vitamin D through the skin. So we have a physical connection as well as intellectual and spiritual connection. You know, when they talk about near-death experience, all that vocabulary is the vocabulary of light. My understanding is that your new piece, as seen below, we access through a tunnel into a room full of light. Now that's reminiscent to me of what people have said about near-death experiences.

6:29James Turrell:Has that been part of your thinking? Yes, that ties into that, absolutely. And that also is the experience of birth. Well, we come into the physical world and then leave into the spiritual world, but we come from the spiritual to the physical. This piece is what you call a sky space. What is a sky space? Well, first of all, I'm very happy to have people look up. Seldom do we. But the big thing is that I'm very interested in this cusp between day and night. It's a lot of what we were made for. You know, during the day we squint even, and even we'll put on dark glasses. So we're really made for the light of the cave.

7:13James Turrell:And we're made for this twilight hunting. That's when we generally did the hunting. So this is a time that is very important because what happens is we have better color perception. And that's when we have our most romantic moments in reduced light. We rarely do it in blinding noonday sun. but we're very much in and we're these strange creatures that hibernate every day once a day we hibernate at night and so we have certainly about eight hours or a third of our existence in that period Most art we look at it's there very often on the wall and you're separated from it and you look at this depiction but your work is very different from that isn't it we're in it somehow i do want you to enter the space what i call the new landscape which is the landscape with a horizon it's very similar to when you have white out in a skiing condition or when you're flying and you have you fly into fog or cloud but the beauty of it is amazing you were a very precocious pilot i I understand that you got your pilot's license.

8:34James Turrell:Very early, yeah. You were 16. 16, but I have four daughters who've gotten their license at 14. In England, where I come from, you can't even drive until you're 17. So for you to be flying at 16 was, I think, quite remarkable. What has the influence of your experience as a pilot had on your work? I really love flying in the atmosphere because the atmosphere has all these different qualities of light, which is quite interesting. Flying in the San Joaquin Valley, you would often get this tule fog, where the fog actually is about three feet thick. The floor of the valley is covered with white. And there's a stratus up above.

9:19James Turrell:That stratus cloud was somewhere around, oh, 2 ,200 feet, something like that. so it's cloud up above and cloud below and then the sun came up and it starts out red and then it goes to orange and then it goes to yellow sort of gold. Many people call that abstract but this is real, something that happened so in a way sitting in the cockpit is the best front seat for all this. Very wonderful kind of vision or light or quality, and people get very taken by it.

10:08Julian May:The height of the entire work, the dome itself, is, I think, 17 metres, and the majority of that is underground. And that required a huge amount of digging out of earth and soil and then kind of bolstering the entire area with these big metal, I don't know what they were, like sheets really, that held all of the earth back before we could even think about what was coming next. Because the whole project is not just James Turrell's As Seen Below the Dome. It's also an underground gallery, a very long corridor and also an art square above that subterranean gallery space. It's a really big construction, massive piece of engineering.

10:51James Turrell:I think it's all right, James, that we should go to your work now. But James, you want us to hang on here for a bit until a certain time. Is that something to do with the quality of the light? We have this cusp from day to night or night to day. It's a very interesting time to really look at light and feel it. So we're waiting. We're waiting for the light now. I'm very interested in that idea. I know that you were brought up as a Quaker. And I think you are a Quaker still, are you? Again. I'd just like to say, incidentally, that I am also a Quaker. And the Quakers are best known in the world for silence, for worshipping in silence.

11:42James Turrell:and I think that your work itself instills a kind of silence. Well, I think art in general does, but we rarely look at paintings very long and we don't get that much of a chance to. What I've always done is I've always provided either seats or cushions or mattresses to have time to experience it because if you're at a Quaker meeting, if it's a really gathered meeting, it'll have almost no talk at all. And the purpose is to go inside to greet the light. Yes. There's light in everyone. That's a very important aspect of Quakerism as well. People know about the silence. I think they don't know quite so much about this idea of the light, the idea that George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, talked about an inner light and the light in everyone.

12:40James Turrell:Tell me, James, are you, in your art, making that spiritual idea physical? Is that what you're doing? Well, I have to tell you that the physical world can take you up and to the spiritual world, but it doesn't necessarily deliver you into it. That's your responsibility. And that's one of the tenets of Quakerism, is that there's no one between you and the universal consciousness or the Godhead. It's your responsibility to take yourself there. But that's just the same as people need to enter the work as opposed to look at it. And in general, we've looked at work rather than entering it. I want us to value light.

13:29James Turrell:So now, James, we're going to leave the gallery, this lovely space, and we're going to go and experience your work as seen below the dome. Thank you.

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14:46James Turrell:You're listening to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Julian May and I've come to Aarhus in Denmark to experience, as seen below, the dome and to meet the artist James Turrell, whose latest work this is. It's one of many which he calls sky spaces. Such is Turrell's preoccupation with light, he's even turned the cone of an extinct volcano in Arizona, the Rodan Crater, into a sky space, a vast observatory for the contemplation of light and time. As seen below, the dome is nowhere near as huge as the Rodan Crater, but nonetheless, it's monumental. We're walking down a long curved corridor below ground into the dome and it's cold and I'm coming into a big chamber full of orange light.

15:53James Turrell:A bit like a sunrise actually. In the middle of the dome, there's a circular hole, an aperture, and that's the sky itself we're seeing there, isn't it? We're sitting on benches. This is indeed reminiscent of a Quaker meeting house, I think. James Turrell. How does this artwork actually work? What happens here? Well, that we're about to witness, so I'll let you do that yourself. So what I am witnessing is a change of colour. The huge dome, it's what, 40-odd metres, I think? 43. 43 metres. The dome is now a kind of purple colour. The light has changed. Magenta, I'd say. Magenta. That's more accurate, I think.

16:57James Turrell:It's magenta. And it seems through the play of the magenta light, which is artificial light. So there's no such thing as artificial light. It's light we make, you know, it's like fire. We make fire. But is fire artificial? No. No, I'm completely wrong. There's no such thing as artificial light. But the play of the light that is created by you against the light of the sky, the aperture, that has now changed. It looks green. Just now it was blue. It's changed to a green colour. Just now there was the drama of a bird flying across it, which was very pleasing.

17:52Julian May:And the way that you see the sky and the changing of the colour of the sky is really interesting because it is about how James Terrell works with our perception entirely. And you can actually only see those changing colours of the sky with your eyes. So if you try and take a photo of that with your camera, you can't capture the colour you're seeing with your eye. And that's because there's something medical, maybe biological, that's going on in your eyes that he understands and is playing with. That means that the sky, even though it's grey outside, it's often grey in Denmark, even though it's grey outside, you're seeing a brilliant cobalt blue sky.

18:30Julian May:You're seeing a bright, vivid green sky or yellow sky, etc. as you experienced. and that is something to do with the way the interior programmed light plays on your field of vision which means that it changes the color of the sky and everything is meticulously timed I was in there with James programming in January and he has two watches where he's watching infinitesimal changes in the light natural light of the sky and changing the programming of the interior light at the same time. And it is a marvel to behold.

19:04James Turrell:And to appreciate this work, you just have to sit and immerse yourself in it. The twilight changes length. 45 minutes at this time of year, and it goes to about 72 minutes in summer. now the light that James Turrell has created is a kind of grey blue it's changed subtly another bird has flown across the aperture which is a paler green now this is a wonderful slow drama of light it's very beautiful it's very moving

19:59Julian May:technically there are over 1 ,100 special lamps set into the interior of the bench which you sit around in the dome which light up the space and right at the very centre where the oculus is directly beneath it you'll have seen there was this kind of polished granite marble surface and around that there is something called an electric edge which James especially wanted in a dome of this size, you kind of need it. It's very, very specially created lighting lamps which light the very edge of the Oculus and make it kind of razor sharp so that you see that distinction between the light of the sky and the interior of the dome.

20:41Julian May:But, you know, in a way it's kind of very analogue because it's not something that can... You can't experience that digitally. You can't experience that through some kind of technology. You have to experience it yourself in person with your eyes. And, you know, he's very famous for saying, I can paint the sky only colour you like. And it's absolutely true.

21:02James Turrell:It's interesting in that it does instil silence. I'm doing my best to describe what's happening. But actually, I just want to be quiet and experience it.

21:24James Turrell:If you want to know what I have to say about this, this is what I say. I'm very interested in, like when you look into a fire, you sort of drift off. And actually almost everybody exhibits a theta state. And that is a state of wordless thought. It's still thinking, but it's wordless. and so I don't mind that it's difficult to be hard to describe in words because this is not about the thought of words.

22:04James Turrell:That's the bells of the church you're hearing through the opening. It's the city hall.

22:09Julian May:It's the bells of the city hall.

22:11James Turrell:Oh, city hall? That's city hall.

22:32James Turrell:Rebecca, when I was first in the space to watch the lights changing, after a while I thought, how long have I been here? I wasn't sure. And is that an aspect of the work, that it's somehow outside time or disorientating in that way?

22:50Julian May:I mean, it is a kind of magical, wondrous space. And I think you're right. You do lose track of time in there. It certainly happened to me as well. There was an interview that James did with Rice University researchers. They had done some research into how much time you spend in artworks. And I think it was something like the average time you spend in front of a painting in the Met is 15 seconds. and the average time you spend in a James Terrell sky space is over an hour. My view on it is that you're not given a finished piece. You're part of it in a way. It is a highly subjective nonverbal experience in which your own personal interaction makes the work happen.

23:30Julian May:And that takes time. And people want to stay with it. And I think the other thing is that he's created this room with a soul, this very quiet room for reflection, and it calms you, it slows you down. You feel quieter. You know, that's a gift, isn't it, in these kind of frenetic, fractious times that we are in, which are about speed and response, and he takes that away from you. So I think you do lose your sense of time. It's almost exactly a month since I was there,

24:02James Turrell:and so it's February the 11th today. The work officially opens in the summer, on June the 19th, almost Midsummer's Day, not quite. What are you doing now? What's the work going on at the moment?