James Turrell at the Guggenheim

With very few exceptions, purely abstract art leaves me cold. As implied, the problem is relational. I can't establish much of a connection with these works. Such art begins from a position of radical weakness -- it eschews imagery to which we naturally respond. As human beings, we necessarily relate to images of other people or environments inhabited (either actually or potentially) by people. Even a still life of flowers or fruit posits a connection between the viewer and the image -- objects are offered, as it were, to the prehensile grasp of the eye. By contrast, much abstract art is rebarbative -- I can't figure where I stand in relation to it. But this is not always the case. James Turrell's astonishing "Aten Reign" at the Guggenheim Museum is wholly abstract and, yet, offers an aesthetic experience that seems to dwarf most other encounters with art, abstract or otherwise. People are hushed in the presence of this installation. They fling themselves on mats on the floor to experience the art work's vast scope, an emanation of light proceeding mysteriously from the great vault of the museum overhead. It is the kind of experience that brings tears to your eyes, that makes your knees tremble, that takes your breath away: an encounter with the numinous that seems to alter your posture and your stance and that inclines you to change your life. Somehow, Turrell has repurposed the rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright's famoust spiral museum into a series of luminous ellipses, seemingly suspended at some indefinite height above the floor. The ellipses alternatively seem to recede or advance -- sometimes, the concentric rings of light overhead appear as a void; in other manifestations, the elliptical zones of light seem heaped on top of one another, projecting downward like an inverted ziggurat suspended above the floor. Turrell has contoured the concentric ramps of the Guggenheim into a series of scrim-covered cones and cunningly lit the fabric by hidden LED devices. The nested ellipses modulate through the spectrum, sometimes, stunningly blue like the night-sky, then, imperceptibly, the lapis lazuli darkness fades into roseate dawn,then, pink, orange, and yellow, various tints of indigo and turquoise -- the effect is that of the vast revolution of light through its various passions and humors, radiance that perpetually cahnges although you can never exactly catch it in the act of changing. Color saturates the rotunda and the crowd of people, prostrate like worshipers, is suffused with the luminous glow pouring down from above, the light in the rotunda vibrating overhead in great elliptical rings rising up to the hazy oculus at the top of the museum. At certain points in the color-cycle, it seems that there is no colored lighting at all -- in some ways, these are the most eerie and awe-inspiring moments manifested by the installation: an icy, glacial light fills the atrium -- it is like the glowing void that precedes creation. On the strength of this colossal and stupendous installation, the visitor rushes upward, ascending the concrete coil of ramps anxious to see other works by Turrell. The first few galleries, still suffused with the awe imparted by "Aten Reign" contain images that are similarly impressive and moving -- constructions of light projected into right-angle corners, so-called "cross corner projections" that create ghostly cubes and fissues of white radiance that can be read either as negative or positive forms. Turrell seems to have studied the phenomenon of cross corner projection and prepared a series of completely abstract, geometric studies of light illumining corners, big enigmatic prints called the "First Light" series that are also very beautiful. The show's last installation is something called "Iltar" -- you have to wait for forty minutes to enter a small dark room where two tungsten lamps are mounted on opposing side walls. Between the tungsten lamps, there is a dark rectangle on the wall that the viewer faces -- this space beyond the tungsten lamps, between the viewer's position and the rectangular field on the wall facing the viewer is what Turrell calls a "sensing space," that is, a zone where the spectator is supposed to perceive the dimensions and character of the dimly illuminated and empty territory between your eyes and the wall. Turrell writes that "Light is treated in most art as revealing something. In my art, light itself is the revelation" -- and the point of "Iltar" is to see and experience light as a Ding-an-sich. But, in this case, the emperor has no clothes and the theoretical armature, mystical as it is, yields a puny experience -- "Iltar" is pretty much nothing more than a dark room with some greyish and dim light on the side-walls. The experience of "Aten Reign" is so overwhelming that viewers gladly queue-up and wait interminably on the humid and stuffy museum ramp for an experience that is distinctly, and painfully, underwhelming. I'm not sure how I would have reacted to "Iltar" if I had happened upon the installation on my own, alone, and had a chance to experience the space for five or six minutes by myself -- in other words, perhaps, there is something there that I didn't perceive. But with expectations ratcheted-up astronomically by "Aten Reign" in the rotunda, "Iltar" is immensely disappointing. Turrell has been working near Flagstaff, Arizona for three decades, laboriously re-contouring the landscape of an extinct volcano to create a series of celestial viewing rooms -- I assume that this project, probably some kind of grandiose and magnificent failure, is something that will require a trip to the deserts of New Mexico if, and when, the work is completed. (But, probably, the labor will end only when Turrell dies.)