ery early in his career, James Turrell knew that he wanted to use pure light and to see it inhabiting space, and in one of the most direct gestures of the minimalist period, he abandoned the physical object altogether and began to work with the basic components of vision. Much of the thinking behind this approach was done at his studio in the Mendota Hotel at the corner of Hill and Main streets in Ocean Park, California. Turrell acquired this building in November 1966 and worked and lived there until 1974. His eight years at the Mendota were productive, especially in terms of his conceptual development. He says that he “discovered a universe of possibilities in light and ideas for a lifetime’s work during the Ocean Park period.”¹ Inside the Mendota studio spaces, Turrell worked out a wide range of individual light images and also put together his first works that interacted directly with the light in the environment around them. The latter included an integrated series of pieces known as the Mendota Stoppages and a group of dramatic open sky works known as Structural Cuts and Skyspaces.

The two main studio spaces in the Mendota consisted of the front room of the hotel and the larger room just behind it.

These spaces are shown in plain view in Turrell’s drawing Music for the Mendota: Mendota Stoppages, 1970-71. When Turrell rented the building, he was working on his Projection Pieces, and one of the first things he did to the interior was to seal the rooms off from all outside light, first by painting the panes in the windows and then later by constructing interior walls in front of the windows. The interior surfaces were covered with smooth plaster, the ceilings were sound-deadened, and everything was painted white, including the floors.

During 1967, Turrell used the austere, pristine shells to cxplore the space- generating capacities of high-intensity light images. When his Projection Pieces were activated inside the rooms, they gave pure light both substance and loca-tion. In Turrell’s terms, they “seemed to objectify and make physically present light as a tangible material.”² The Cross-Corner Projections, including such images as Afrum and Catso, created solid-like forms that seemed to occupy a hypothetical region in front of the walls. This kind of three-dimensionality was comparable to the virtual space created in representational paintings: it was a “kind” of space, but there was no possibility of confusing it with the space of the real world. More than this, it was in no way equivalent to a two-dimensional structure “containing” a three-dimensional form, as does a painting; rather it was a three-dimensional space that in itself contained something not quite three-dimensional. Turrell points out that in the Cross-Corner Projections space itself became the image support:

Three-dimensional space was being used illusionistically. That is, the forms engendered through this quality of illusion did not necessarily resolve into one clearly definable form that would exist in three dimensions.³

During 1967, Turrell also developed a series of Single-Wall Projections. These works, including such images as Decker and Phantom, were equally involved with modifying the perceived shape of the space inside the room, but rather than taking advantage of the inherent-spatial qualities of corners, they utilized the monolithic character of the single wall. Some of these planar projections seemed to float just in front of the wall, some seemed to be attached to the wall, and some seemed to penetrate it. The light often seemed real while the actual surface dissolved into nothingness. In many cases, the light appeared to create spaces that existed outside the physical confines of the room. When viewers occupied the room and a Single-Wall Projection was activated, they had difficulty locating the actual position of the wall.

During 1968 and 1969, Turrell continued to develop reciprocal light and space works inside the Mendota studio. The Shallow-Spacc Constructions, as these works were known, modified the perceived amount of volume inside a given chamber as radically as the Projection Pieces, but they wcrc achieved using very different means. One of the first works in the series, Ronin, developed directly out of the Single-Wall Projection Tollyn. In the Shallow-Space Con-struction, a secondary wall was constructed in front of an existing wall in such a way that a narrow slit occurred at one edge of thc partition.

The secondary wall was then backlit with hidden fluorescent fixtures. Like the earlier Projection Piece, it tended to open the room, to pry it apart visually, but here the impression was created by an actual architectural division being filled with a narrow volume of light. In Tollyn, the light tended to dissolve the actual position of the surface. In Ronin, the light tended to create a surface where none actually existed.

The Shallow-Space Constructions also seemed to modify the perspective of the room, an impression that was more fully realized in another work first developed inside the Mendota studio in 1968. In this world entitled Raemar, the slit was extended all the way around the partition. A similar work called Rayzor, 1969, was constructed in front of the high windows on the south side of the innermost studio room. This variation was thus generated by a combination of fluorescent and natural light. At night, it had a steady state, but during the day, the chang-ing light outside caused it to go through a sequence of states that responded to such things as weather conditions and the color of the sky.

The Projection Pieces and the Shallow-Space Constructions laid the groundwork for a series of interrelated pieces that became known as the Mendota Stoppages. The Mendota Stoppages were among Turrell’s earliest realizations of responsive spaces. He referred to the interior rooms as “sensing spaces,” because they interacted in direct ways with the exterior spaces they conjoined. This general approach has continued to inform Turrell’s art. It is, for example, the primary impetus behind his work at Roden Crater. When the various spaces at the volcano are completed, they will respond to the naturally occurring light available in their desert environment. At the crater, the varied light of the sun, the moon, and the stars will replace the artificial light of the storefronts and traffic signals at the intersection of Hill and Main streets.The Mendota Stoppages developed slowly as Turrell reopened his studio spaces to exterior light. He explains:

The Mendota Stoppages really came out of this experience of going down to zero and then coming back up. At first, the studio was tremendously closed off, and the process of then opening it up was an intense experience. Any window or aperture that I opened seemed amazingly powerful and strong.⁴

In the beginning, Turrell wanted just to let light and fresh air back inside the building, but as he worked he began to discover light qualities that he could use to empower his interior spaces: “The big thing was that the interior space was created by the light and not by the physical confines of the room."⁵ The art involved selecting from the multitude of possibilities.

As the Mendota Stoppages evolved, Turrell found images that he liked and then developed them in isolation. Then, over time and with some elaboration, he put together an organized group of light pieces that were performed sequentially. During the night aspect of the performance, light from the traffic signals and neon signs came into the studio spaces, and lights from passing vehicles played across the walls. Shadows of trees, lamp posts, and pedestrians were cast onto the interior surfaces. As the light pieces progressed, Turrell opened and closed the openings that allowed illumination into the spaces, and the audience moved from one viewing position to another inside the two studio rooms.

The early stages of the performance took place in the first space. They involved dramatic and fairly large amounts of light. Moving across the wall surfaces were crisp shadows and prismatic color patterns caused by the refraction of light passing through the glass in the windows. In the later stages, which took place in the inner space of the studio, more and more subtle perceptual qualities were presented to the audience and the light tended to remain stationary. Some of the light in the late stages of the performance was just at the edges of perceptual capacity, and thus dark adaptation was an important component in its detection. Near the end of the Mendota Stoppages, the amount of light that came into the interior space was so small that it could hardly be perceived at all. During the last stage, the interior studio room was plunged into complete darkness, but no one ever reported seeing it totally dark. This was probably because they had crossed the threshold of perceptibility into seeing the light chaos generated in the retina itself, and did not notice the difference.

It is in fact very difficult to distinguish between the intrinsic light inside the visual system and extremely low levels of light—something that has complicated traditional experimental attempts to determine the absolute threshold of human light perception. In this last kind of viewing situation, the light chaos, or idio-retinal light, that is generated in the retina by random nerve firings became the light that viewers focused on inside their own heads. They were perceiving their own perceiving.

The purpose of idioretinal light is to keep the retina at a threshhold level of preparedness so that it can detect light from the environment when called upon to do so. By focusing the viewer’s attention on this preparedness, Turrell managed to create a high-intensity self awareness through a very low-intensity light experience. In terms of the art, the gesture was highly reduced. The physical object had completely disappeared and most of the light had disap-peared as well. But the meaning and the perceptual significance of the experi-ence were of paramount interest. After experiencing the dark inner room of the Mendota studio, the audience went back into the fixing area for tea and conver-sation, and, according to Turrell, it was like “undoing a compression chamber.”⁶

Each of the different stages in the Mendota Stoppages involved taking outside light sources and allowing them inside. As the evening performance developed, the sources became progressively abstract, and it was increasingly difficult to tell what specific objects were generating the light and where it was coming from. During the day, the Mendota Stoppages were not quite as wide-ranging as they were at night, but they did involve a number of interesting perceptual situations. Turrell explains that:

In appearance, the day aspect of the piece closely resembled the Projection Pieces in that simple forms of brilliant light were imaged on the wall and floor surfaces. The position and shape of these imaged forms slowly changed throughout the day and throughout the year. The change in shape and position of the image altered the spatial qualities of the interior space.⁷

Turrell used the apertures in the front studio space to generate these shifting, flat patterns of light. The sunlight came into the room and rectilinear images moved across the walls in response to the sun moving across the sky. Certain maximum positions, diagramed at the bottom of the drawing Mlusic for the Mendota, were reached at the solstices, and intermediary positions were reached at the equinoxes—something that gave the day aspect of the Mendota Stoppages an astronomical rhythm, a constantly changing cadence that responded to the basic movement of the sun.

The apertures used in the Mendota Stoppages allowed Turrell to place light on the walls inside his studio rooms. Looking back out through these apertures into the sky also provided him with ways of locating light and color in the open air. One of these openings was particularly important for the development of the group of works that became known as Skyspaces. In the first studio room, located toward the front of the hotel, he built a Sky Window—an aperture that wedged back through the dry wall to the Hotel’s existing windows. A section was removed from the glass where the opening met the window pane so that, from inside the studio, one looked out onto an area of sky that pulled up flat against the interior volume of the room. In the Sky Window piece, Turrell could vary the amount of light inside the studio and by so doing change the apparent color of the sky through the perceptual phenomenon of simultaneous contrast. He constructed a similar work in the dining room above the doorway opening out onto Hill Street. Also, in one of the upstairs rooms above the studio spaces, a cut was taken through the roof of the building. This work was the direct precursor of the Skyspaces, but, like the other Structural Cuts in the Mendota, it was in place for only a short period of time. Both the Skyspaces and the Structural Cuts can be subsumed under Turrell’s Wall Cut Series since they comprise actual modifications to the architectural fabric of buildings. The early works at the Mendota were carefully controlled and carefully placed windows that opened above the horizon line so that nothing but sky could be seen through them. The sides of the openings came to sharp edges, something that made it seem visually as if the sky and the surface of the interior wall met along the same superficies. Turrell explains:

The front surface of the space outside is drawn up to the same plane as the wall that is cut. The degree of transparency of the front surface and the color and grain in the space outside depend on the light quality of the interior space in relation to the light quality of the sky space looked onto.⁸

The sky can, of course, have many things in it—clouds, airplanes, telephone poles, stars—and when it does it seems transparent, but when it is empty and lit by the light from the sun it presents what is essentially a homogeneous field of blue color whose distance and location are difficult to specify. Such homogeneous visual fields are generally referred to in psychology literature by the term Ganzfeld, the German word for “total field.” Ganzfelds were first described in an important paper by Wolfgang Metzger in 1930.⁹

Metzger constructed a curved wall and then had observers view it under low light conditions. With high illumination, the observers saw the wall and the results were of no interest, but with low illumination, they were unable to see the fine structure of the surface and perceived it as a mist or fog of light. The stimulation of the retina was homogeneous and there was not enough information in the light to determine the location and composition of the wall. Under these circumstances, Metzger thought that he and his subjects were seeing “space” as a primary percept—that rather than constructing the three-dimensional world from the perception of surfaces, the viewer had direct access to it.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. James J. Gibson and his coworkers, starting from Metzger’s position but skeptical of his conclusions, conducted several now classic Ganzfeld experiments of their own. In a later recapitulation, Dr. Gibson argued that three-dimensional space was not visible in the mist of light engendered by the homogeneous visual field:

What my observers and I saw under these conditions could better be described as “nothing” in the sense of “no thing.” It was like looking at the sky. There was no surface and no object at any distance. Depth was not present in the experience but missing from it. What the observer saw, as I would now put it, was an empty medium.¹⁰

Many of Turrell’s works involve creating non-referential light experiences, and, in Gibson’s sense of containing “no thing,” they are empty. But the artist objects to such characterizations, arguing that, far from being empty, his spaces are filled with light. By controlling the amount of stimulation reaching the eyes, he creates visual arrays that contain insufficient information to determine the composition and location of the physical surfaces reflecting the light or the actual configuration of the spaces containing the light. The Skyspaces and Structural Cuts developed coevally with works that Turrell calls Space Division Pieces. Known also as the Prado Series, these works consist of two different sized spaces that contain two different qualities of light separated by rectangular openings. A small amount of ambient light reflects into the innermost space, called a “sensing space” because it responds to the light in the outer room, and creates a Ganzfeld-like viewing situation. But the degree of non-specificity in the mist of light engendered by such works as Laar and Jida is more complex than a simple Ganzfeld; it is contingent upon the viewer’s position in relation to it. From a distance, the opening appears to be opaque, but as the viewer approaches, its material character yields until the volume beyond it becomes sensible. But even up close, the space is only dimly seen behind the apparent surface. The light itself seems to become particulate, and the ambient illumination seems to fog up inside the chamber and to hold the space with an almost physical palpability.They concentrate light’s inherent insistence, its intrinsic Eindringlichkeit, making it seem as if pure light is suspended out in open space. Seen through one of the openings in a Skyspace or Structural Cut, the sky presents a homogeneous visual field very similar to those inside the inner chambers of the Space Division Pieces. The color seems to come up to an immaterial “meeting” between an interior and an exterior space, forming a visual surface across the aperture between them. This insubstantial interface somehow has ponderance and densityÑand an unspecifiable spatial resonance that changes through time.

The first fully realized Skyspaces were executed for Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo at his villa in Varese, Italy during 1974 and 1975. The first space completed was similar to the Structural Cuts and consisted of an opening that replaced an existing semicircular window at the end of a barrel-vaulted hallway. Called Lunette, the opening has no glass in it and faces onto the sky just above the horizon. The light inside the space is supplied by neon and argon tube lighting running along the top of a ledge at the springing of the barrel vault. These fixtures are hidden from view, and their illumination generates a glow on the interior surfaces that intensifies the natural color of the sky seen through the cut.

Both the Space Division Pieces and the Skyspace and Structural Cut Pieces present color in self-luminous or “film” modes so that, rather than being part of some object, the color is just itself—pure chromatic sensation. They concentrate light’s inherent insistence, its intrinsic Eindringlichkeit, making it seem as if pure light is suspended out in open space. Seen through one of the openings in a Skyspace or Structural Cut, the sky presents a homogeneous visual field very similar to those inside the inner chambers of the Space Division Pieces. The color seems to come up to an immaterial “meeting” between an interior and an exterior space, forming a visual surface across the aperture between them. This insubstantial interface somehow has ponderance and densityÑand an unspecifiable spatial resonance that changes through time.

The first fully realized Skyspaces were executed for Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo at his villa in Varese, Italy during 1974 and 1975. The first space completed was similar to the Structural Cuts and consisted of an opening that replaced an existing semicircular window at the end of a barrel-vaulted hallway. Called Lunette, the opening has no glass in it and faces onto the sky just above the horizon. The light inside the space is supplied by neon and argon tube lighting running along the top of a ledge at the springing of the barrel vault. These fixtures are hidden from view, and their illumination generates a glow on the interior surfaces that intensifies the natural color of the sky seen through the cut.

Skyspace I, completed in 1975, is constructed adjacent to Lurzette. It consists of a tall square room with a square opening overhead looking directly up into the sky. A small roof rolls into place when the work is not being viewed. The lower chamber is 12 x 12 feet, and the upper opening, almost twenty feet overhead, is 8 x 8 feet, leaving a two-foot margin on all sides, and neon/argon discharge tubes are recessed into the baseboard area of the space. The floor curves up under the lower edge of the walls, and the light fixtures are hidden under the resulting lip some four inches up from the base of the room. The floor itself is painted with shiny white epoxy paint that reflects the light up across the walls and onto the margin surrounding the hole in the ceiling. Experiencing the work is like being inside a light well filled with bright white illumination.

Both Lunette and Skyspace I are performed by changing light conditions outside the spaces. Especially during twilight transitionsÑa sequence that requires ap-proximately two hours beginning an hour before dusk or dawnÑthe areas of sky seen through the openings go through substantial color changes. As a typical performance begins in the late afternoon, a great deal of ambient light comes into the space through the upper opening, especially on clear days, completely swamping the artificial illumination inside. In the early stages, it is difficult to tell that the interior lights are on, but as the sun goes down and the atmosphere outside gets darker and darker, the artificial light gradually becomes dominant. Principally through the perceptual phenomenon of simultaneous contrast, the light on the walls and on the narrow margins framing the openings intensifies the color of the sky, making it appear deeper and darker. In the traditional terms of experimental psychology, the margins function as inducing fields and modify the target color of the sky. The colors seen through the upper opening of Sky-space I tend to fall into the blue part of the spectrum whereas the colors in Lunette just next door tend to range through more yellow, orange, and pinl tones. At any given moment, the colors in the adjacent cuts can be quite distinct.

Among Turrell’s most interesting recent Skyspaces are Meeting and 2nd Meeting—works that develop directly out of the pieces at Varese. Meeting is a permanent installation begun in 1980 on the upper floor of P.S. 1 in Queens, New York and finished in 1986. 2nd Meeting was constructed on a one-year temporary basis in a small building (formerly a gas station) adjacent to the warehouse building of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles in late 1986. Both consist of cubical chambers with square holes cut through their ceilings. Meeting is approximately 22 x 23 feet, with an upper opening, eighteen feet overhead, measuring 13 x 14 feet. The hole is surrounded by a flat, four-and-a-half-foot margin on all sides. A copper-clad roof rolls into place when the piece is not being viewed. 2nd Meeting has similar proportions: the main chamber is approximately 20 x 20 feet with a 12 x 12 foot opening twenty feet overhead, leaving a four-foot margin around the hole. The floor of 2nd Meeting is designed to drain, and the piece is permanently open to the weather. Wooden seating surrounds the walls of both spaces except for the entryways. These benches have high (6 foot 4 inch) backs and running along their tops, hidden from view, are Osram linear tungsten lamps—fixtures that resemble clear fluorescent tubes. They emit the characteristic yellow-orange illumination of incandescent lighting.

Care was taken, especially in 2nd Meeting, that viewers not have the impression of simply walking into an enclosure in order to look up. The Los Angeles installation has an antechamber with an intermediary light level separating the interior space from the outside environment. At P.S. 1, the Skyspace is on the upper floor of a former public school, and its integration into the existing fabric of the building was not as much a problem in an aesthetic sense as that presented by the smaller structure in Los Angeles, although the physical construction at P.S. 1 was more laborious, requiring the removal of a large section of thick concrete roof and the rearrangement of a number of large steel girders. The visual and artistic characters of the New York and Los Angeles pieces are comparable but distinct. Despite their similar physical dispositions, the differences in their locations and architectural settings, and the distinctions between New York and Los Angeles with their respective atmospheres, engender separate responses.

2nd Meeting is intimate and self-contained. Meeting is part of a large building and presents a strong sense of opening out from a complex structure. In relation to the labyrinthine interior of the neo-Romanesque school, the Skyspace is a surprising spatial disclosure, particularly since it is unusual to find a room in such a building completely exposed to the upper atmosphereÑwith its ceiling open and nothing visible through it. Unobstructed views of the sky are rare in New York City. But the viewing situation is not quite this simple either; the room is not just an open volume. The sky itself seems to come down to form a visual “surface” at the upper boundary of the interior volume, and, in a way directly analogous to what happens in Lunette and Skyspace I, outside light levels affect the color seen at the opening. Both Meeting and 2nd Meeting induce dramatic perceptual shifts in sky color. The differences can perhaps be more readily appreciated in the Los Angeles installation where the interior chamber is connected almost directly with the exterior. As the performance develops, even a dull gray sky with only a slightly blue cast when seen from outside becomes a dark ultramarine when seen from inside through the aperture overhead.

The direct perception involved in the Skyspaces is of interest. The physical structures and their severe, rectilinear format share characteristics with minimalist art. Turrell studied with Tony DeLap and John McCracken and was closely associated with Robert Irwin and Larry Bell, artists connected with the California branch of the minimalist movement. He feels an affinity for many aspects of minimalism, although he argues that his own art is about something other than structure and primary form—it is about direct perception. Turrell remarks:

Minimalism is a movement that I admire. It has to do with feeling something all at once, with reading it and not being confused by reading it in any literal sense of that term. Minimalism gets directly to the point and is unconfused by side head fakes this way and that. Today’s art seems filled with head fakes. It has a lot of vague allusions to this and that, but the meaning seems added on. The direct expression of an idea is something I saw in much minimalist work, and I was very drawn to it.¹¹

Contemporary assumptions under the sway of post-modernist extravagance and post-structuralist philosophy suggest that minimalism can do little more than carry non-decorative loads, but Turrell’s production contradicts such arguments. The work occupies an area that is both reductive and maximal. With minimal means—with only light itself—he creates rich perceptual, and, many would say, spiritual environments.

Light presents and detracts. It contains information and masks it, allowing us to see the world with clarity and encrypting it in glare and natural illusion.

What is physically present in these works is minimal, but this fact in no way diminishes the interest generated by the rectangle of sky seen at the opening. The sequential change in the color, the lush experience of primary seeing, is completely adequate to hold our attention. The delight produced by the changing expanse of color is analogous to the abstract pleasure of pure mathematics. It has to do with order, clarity, and with what Turrell calls “directness of expression.” In some additional sense, it involves surprise and fascination with the entopic aspects of vision itself, with hue shift and retinal stimulation, with the irising of the pupils, assimilation, adaptation, the movement of maximal color sensitivity sixty nanometers toward the blue during the Purkinje shift. These things turn the experience inward and make the viewer’s own seeing part of the art. In Turrell’s terms, the perceptual interface between the art and its audience becomes “non-vicarious.” It holds our attention because we are attending to the very processes of attention.

Turrell planned the first version of Meeting for a group of installations at the Rice University Art Museum in 1977. During that same year, he produced a number of other proposals that included Skyspaces and Structural Cuts. Largely on the basis of what he had done in Varese, Turrell was invited to submit plans for other projects at several sites in Europe. The most important of these were located at the 18th-century Villa Scheibler on the northern outskirts of Milan; near Edinburgh, Scotland; and at Rolandseck near Bonn, West Germany.

All of these planned European projects were designed with interrelated spaces meant to work in conjunction with one another. They would allow viewers to modify their own perceptual expectancies by changing position, and, when such parameters as adaptation, afterimage, simultaneous and successive contrast, and perceptual set are combined with the changing light conditions of the outside environment, the visual range of the sites would be almost infinite. This approach has reached its most complex elaboration in Turrell’s plans for the Roden Crater Project where there will be many options for moving in relation to interior and exterior spaces. One such opportunity will be provided by the crater’s East Space located at the edge of the lava scarp fanning out around the secondary vent on the northeastern side of the cinder cone. The main chamber of this space will have interior stairs leading up to a Structural Cut looking out toward the eastern horizon and exterior stairs leading down into the desert, not to anything in particular, but just as an interesting vantage for looking back at the crater. The East Space will also function as a Skyspace. The main, rectangular space will measure approximately 30 x 40 feet with a 20-foot ceiling. It will be hypaethral, and its general architectural arrangement will be comparable to the Skyspaces at P.S. 1 and MoCA. But rather than having artificial light inside, the space will be powered by sunlight. During a twilight transition in the morning, the viewer will have the option of looking out through a large rectangular aperture on the east side of the space toward the skyline in the distance or up through a large opening overhead at the empty sky. Both apertures will have the sharp edges typical of Skyspaces and Structural Cuts, and the light outside and the light inside will seem to meet along crisp perceptual planes.

In other Skyspaces, the warm color and the greater luminance of thc artificial light inside is juxtaposed with the cool, less luminous color of the sky outside, and the resulting simultaneous contrast intensifies the light experience. At the East Space of the crater, the contrasting hues will be supplied by light from the sun and the contrast will be supplied by different areas of sky being brought down to adjacent facets of the interior volume. As the sun comes up in the morning, the red, yellow, and orange tones refracted through the atmosphere will shine through the east-facing aperture and illuminate the walls and the lip around the upper opening. The warm colors will complement the blue color of the sky. In a downtown Skyspace, the interior light works at a steady state while thc amount of light in the sky outside either increases or decreases. At the crater, both the interior and the exterior light will respond to changes in the direction of the sunlight.

The quality of the light in the East Space will evolve throughout any given day, and one of its most powerful aspects will occur at sunset. As the sun drops below the western horizon, the earth casts a shadow up into the eastern sky, and Roden Crater is ideally situated for viewing this phenomenon. The silver-blue shadow of the planet slowly rises into the atmosphere while the pink tones of raking sunlight continue to illuminate the sky above. As the twilight arch develops, the lower east-facing aperture will look into the blue shadow while the pink upper atmosphere will be visible through the aperture overhead. The simul-taneous contrast should be as dramatic, though more subtle, than anything visible in city Skyspaces.

Many of the spaces at Roden Crater will have different looks onto different parts of the sky adjacent to one another: simultaneous contrast will be involved in the spaces planned for the fumarole area of the crater. The West Space and its Skyspace antechamber will accept light qualities comparable to those in the East Space, and many of the details of the entryways and exits of other spaces and tunnels will be informed by general Skyspace approaches to light. The color contrasts will at times be surprisingly intense. The crater spaces, like Turrell’s other Skyspaces and Structural Cuts, will isolate and intensify areas of natural color. Especially during twilight transitions, they will provide the viewer with rich manifolds of experience. The colors available in the desert sky are often unbelievable in and of themselves, and, when they are enhanced by a kind of architecture that, in almost literal terms, possesses vision, the results will be even more remarkable. Turrell explains: “I am really interested in the qualities of one space sensing another. It is like looking at someone looking. Objectivity is gained by being once removed. As you plumb a space with vision, it is possible to ‘see yourself see.’ This seeing, this plumbing, imbues space with consciousness.”¹²

The interior chambers at Roden Crater will provide us with colors as striking as those available in other Skyspaces, and because they use only natural light, they will retain a relationship with the hues that are already in the surrounding desert, and, in this sense, be in keeping with Turrell’s general interest in having the hand of man blend imperceptibly into nature.

His art indicates valid things to look at, but it does something more than this: it places us in direct contact with nature and allows us to slip beyond the artifices of cultural seeing into areas of natural seeing. By enhancing our awareness of our own perceptual nature, that nature becomes part of all-encompassing nature, and the art becomes a way of dealing with the objective world at basic levels. As Turrell puts it: “The work gets at the root of how we construct perceptual reality.”¹³ In the Mendota Stoppages, and the Structural Cuts and Skyspaces that developed out of them, the artist established relationships between exterior and interior spaces, and his art is at the interface. Meeting and 2nd Meeting, the pieces at Panza’s Villa, the planned spaces in Europe, and Roden Crater, are designed to work closely with what is already there, but they go beyond the worldly givens into areas of autonomous, unbounded seeing.

¹Author’s conversation with Turrell, September 1986.

²James Turrell in James Turrell: Light & Space, exhibition

³Turrell, 1980, p. 15.

⁴Author’s conversation with Turrell, November 1986.

⁵Author’s conversation with Turrell, November 1986.

⁶Author’s conversation with Turrell, August 1986.

⁷Turrell, 1980, p. 30. ⁸Turrell, 1980, p. 33.

⁹Wolfgang Metzger, “Optische Untersuchungen am Ganzfeld, II. Zur Phanomenologie des homogenen Ganzfelds,” Psychologische Forschung 13 (1930): 6-29.

¹⁰James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1979). p.151.

¹¹Author’s conversation with Turrell, November 1986.

¹²Turrell in Occluded Front: James Turrell, p. 25.

¹³Author’s conversation with Turrell, January, 1987.