Bringing heaven to earth: Artist James Turrell is carving an Arizona crater into a grand monument to light and space

Since the early 1970s, James Turrell's world has revolved around an extinct volcano in the Northern Arizona desert.

The 57-year-old artist purchased Roden Crater, along with miles of surrounding land, in order to build a vast composition of corridors to funnel celestial light into spaces beneath the volcano's cone.

It's a project so monumental in scale and mind-opening in concept that, when the first phase opens later next year, it will no doubt alter our thinking about the function of public art.

For Turrell — in Seattle this week for a residency at the Henry Art Gallery — his project at Roden Crater isn't a new idea, but a way of showing the same kind of attention to site, stars and awe-invoking scale that ancient civilizations cultivated, from the mysteries of Stonehenge to the pyramids to the Greek temples.

"Our great architectural statement would be our cathedrals," the 57-year-old artist said over coffee at the Henry Art Gallery. "The sense of awe when you enter a cathedral has always been the territory of the arts. Of course today the great architectural structure is the art museum, like Bilbao," the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim in Spain. "Generally we've taken from nature and brought it back to the art museum," Turrell says. "This (the Roden Crater) requires you to go out into nature."

Nature is right: Experiencing the Roden Crater is no casual adventure. Located 40 miles north of Flagstaff in the Painted Desert, the crater stands at an elevation of 5,000 feet. Its last eruption was some 300,000 years ago; the red-and-black cone rises 600 feet above the desert floor.

It now hides within it an 854-foot tunnel that rises gradually to a spot of light, an elliptical opening in a sloped elliptical room, that one viewer described as "spectacular, like the entrance to some pharaoh's tomb or Mayan ruin." At the other end of the tunnel is the "Sun and Moon space" where you can lie down and observe a specific part of the heavens.

Another tunnel leads away from the elliptical room to a circular room beneath the bowl of the volcano, with a round aperture for experiencing the shape of the sky. Working with an astronomer and engineers, Turrell has oriented each space to celestial events. He says that when you're there, you feel a part of "geological time."

A student of perceptual psychology before he turned to art, Turrell has always been fascinated with light and the way we respond to it.

"Generally we use light to illuminate other things," he said. "We use it to read or illuminate paintings or spaces. But to look at light itself is different." He discovered a way to work with it in the 1960s, when the notion that a work of art had to be an object got dissolved in a blitz of ideas, performances, installations, earthworks — and, for Turrell, light installations.

"I made a career out of selling blue sky and colored air," he says happily.

No easy sell

It hasn't always been an easy sell. When Turrell started work on the Roden Crater, he was backed by the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, an organization that existed to help artists with exceptional projects. But Dia fell into rough financial times, and Turrell did, too. As Dia foundered, he took over ownership of the crater and tried to raise money through his own foundation. He also took out a huge mortgage to buy 155 square miles of nearby ranch land: an enterprise that lost money at first but has become "a mild success."

Now, after a $7 million-plus cash infusion from the Lannan Foundation, and with a rejuvenated Dia back at the helm (for that, Turrell credits the shrewd management of Charlie Wright, son of Seattle patrons Virginia and Bagley Wright, who stepped in for a few years as director) the Roden Crater is moving toward completion of its first phase. Turrell expects the budget to hit $21 million if his entire plan is completed. In more human terms, the crater project has, he says, "cost me two marriages and a relationship."

A native of California, Turrell retains a strong affection for the Seattle art scene, which he says is one of the most vital in the country. And Seattle is wild about him, too, as an overflow crowd of 700 proved at his lecture Tuesday night at the University of Washington's Kane Hall.

When the Center on Contemporary Art opened its doors in 1982, the first show was an installation by Turrell. People lined up to get in. At that time, even though Turrell had been featured in a show at the Whitney Museum in New York, he was better known outside the country. He had lived in Europe for a while as an itinerate artist, having shows in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands.

Staunch supporter

Turrell returned to Seattle in 1992 for a show at the Henry Art Gallery, where he has a staunch supporter in director Richard Andrews, a follower of Turrell's work since the 1960s. Andrews has invited Turrell to consider a site-specific installation at the Henry.

Meanwhile, work at Roden Crater continues. But given its remote location, how will people get to see it?

Slowly, quietly and just a few at a time, Turrell says. A small bed and breakfast at the site will accommodate up to 16 people, who will be encouraged to wander the corridors of the volcano and lounge in a series of spaces, experiencing "the relation between inside and outside, and how the light is formed.

"I'd like you to at least stay 24 hours, possibly more," Turrell says. "There are as many things happening at night as during the day." By "things," he means the movement of sun, moon and stars; the shape of the sky.

But won't many people who want to see the artwork be turned away by such limited viewing opportunities? Turrell scoffs at the idea. "This is contemporary art, it's not rock 'n' roll," he says. "If you multiply it by 300 days, that's 5,000 people a year. To get 700 to see a lecture here is one thing. To get the same 700 to arrange a trip to the Southwest — it's a little more difficult."

Art made for one

Besides, Turrell says, all his artwork is really made for just one person. "I try to make it work for this idealized viewer ... it's not a performance for a crowd," he maintains. The whole notion of running big groups through the site negates its purpose, which is, he says, to help us "bring the universe closer."

Turrell is philosophical about the setbacks and uncertainty he has gone through for decades and the fact that his hair has turned from black to white during the course of this project.

"The task of the artist is simple: It's staying with it," he maintains. "Things do take time, but I've got the time."

Sheila Farr can be reached at sfarr@seattletimes.com.