Journey to the temple of light: Is Roden Crater obsessive folly or the greatest artwork of our time?

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — The word "inspiration" derives from the Latin spirare, meaning to breathe, and it's sometimes used to describe the celestial grace that infuses saints and mystics. James Turrell is one of the rare contemporary artists who takes the word literally. Though firmly rooted in the art and technologies of this century, Turrell still looks to the sky for inspiration and to ancient civilizations for his models of what art should be.

For the past 25 years, Turrell has been toiling away at a project that seems destined to be one of the most important and lasting artworks of our time. With the help of engineers, modern earthmoving equipment and skilled Navajo stonecutters, Turrell has been carving away at the interior of the Roden Crater, at the edge of the Painted Desert in Northern Arizona. Turrell purchased the extinct volcano in the 1970s.

Turrell's medium is light. The artist has designed a series of tunnels and shafts that intersect with phases of the sun and moon. Throughout each day and night, light streams into the bowels of the crater in ways that Turrell has carefully orchestrated as a series of visual shocks that twist our perceptions of reality. Anyone lucky enough to visit the crater and experience it will get a taste of wonder.

When Turrell visited Seattle last year, I interviewed him and struggled to visualize the place he was describing. To remedy that, Turrell invited me to visit the crater and see it for myself. Even though the first phase of the Roden Crater project is still incomplete, I couldn't pass up a chance to witness the work Turrell has been obsessed with all these years. Could the Roden Crater project really be worth the huge amount of time and money the artist has poured into it? Will it hold meaning for more than a handful of art enthusiasts?

As a further incentive, Henry Art Gallery director Richard Andrews had just commissioned Turrell to create a permanent "Skyspace" at the gallery. Here was a chance to get a preview of the kind of artwork Seattle would be getting.

Juggling finances, cattle, art

I'm hanging on to the armrest as we bounce along a 10-mile dirt road through open range land in James Turrell's battered pickup. Off to the right I can see the red and black cone of Roden Crater. During the long, dusty, undulating approach, there's no sign that this crater is any different from the other extinct volcanoes that dot the region.

The gray-bearded, world-renowned artist at the wheel is talking business — and that, surprisingly, doesn't mean art. At the moment, Turrell is more concerned with his cattle. When Turrell purchased the crater back in the late 1970s, he also acquired control of 156 square miles of ranch land along with a backbreaking mortgage.

The Roden Crater project, now managed by the Dia Foundation in New York and the Skystone Foundation in Arizona, has a financial life of its own, but Turrell runs the ranch. To make the land pay for itself, he hired a ranch manager to oversee the production of free-range beef.

"That one just went through a difficult birth," he says, pointing at a cow that to me is indistinguishable from the others. "We're keeping an eye on her."

Turrell, 59, grew up in an agricultural family in California, and, when he was younger, tried to get as far away from farming as possible, living fast and hard as an artist in New York City. Now, bowlegged from riding the range with hired cowhands, he admits, "I'm actually most comfortable with this."

Raising cattle is part of the complicated financial juggling act that allows Turrell to continue his work on the $21 million project, with major sponsorship coming from the Lannan Foundation and other private funders. If all goes well, the first phase of Roden Crater should soon open to the public — which might mean next year or five years from now: Turrell won't say. But judging from the amount of press the project has gotten in the past year alone — with big spreads in major papers from New York to Los Angeles — the Roden Crater won't have any problem becoming an instant attraction.

People have compared Turrell's work at the crater to Stonehenge, the mysterious prehistoric stone monument in England, but Turrell says that's inaccurate. "Stonehenge points to the [celestial] event. This brings the event indoors."

Altered worlds of light, sound

"There are very few religious experiences that aren't explained using the vocabulary of light," Turrell says.

As we step through a portal partway up the side of the crater, I imagine entering some ancient pyramid. You leave behind the hard, desert light for thickening darkness, entering the earth at nearly 6,000 feet above sea level through a passageway with a couple of random tumbleweeds stranded in the vestibule. The first chamber we reach, the Sun and Moon Space, is lit by a small overhead oculus that channels in daylight. At this point we've only walked a short distance into the earth. Soon, a 64-ton slab of translucent white marble will be trucked from Colorado to stand in this chamber as a screen for the direct rays of the sun, piercing through the tunnel at summer solstice.

On other occasions, it will absorb the light of the full moon, washing through the tunnel. "The lunar cycle within the solar season: that kind of syncopated rhythm is what life relates to," Turrell says.

From here we begin a long, dark walk up an 875-foot corridor toward something that looks like the full moon hovering in the distance. As we approach that lunar orb, it shapeshifts first into a keyhole, then — magic! — into an ellipse of open sky.

Our altering perception of that static light source is similar to what happens when you stand on a stage and can't see the audience through the lights, Turrell says. "Vision has been stopped by where light is and where it isn't." Turrell said that he has always been interested in the idea of Plato's cave, that "we are looking at the reflection of reality on the cave wall."

One thing you can be sure of, though, is that here, in Turrell country, there will always be light at the end of the tunnel. No matter how black your immediate surrounding grows, even when you have to put your hand on the wall for comfort (as I eventually do), you are always heading toward some point of light. Being light-deprived is part of the visceral experience of the place, sort of like a mythic descent into the underworld. Moving from darkness to revelation, you descend through blackness then back into the light. It's like a rebirth: like Jonah plunging down the throat of the whale, or Odysseus entering the land of the dead.

'Tuned like a flute'

Here, eventually, when the East Portal space is complete, a part of the Roden Crater experience will culminate with an ethereal gesture. Like Old Testament prophets, visitors will ascend a golden, crescent-shaped stairway that will lead them out of the earth and into celestial light.

But that 8,000-pound, bronze staircase hasn't been installed yet — it is still being made here in Seattle by a company called Fabrication Specialties — so we continue downward, descending toward the crater's eye. The darkness is palpable, and the sound of voices and footsteps amplifies into a kind of music.

Even this noise, in the obsessively orchestrated world of Roden Crater, has been pre-determined. When Turrell realized how much the sound in each tunnel and underground chamber would resonate, he decided to control that part of the experience as well. "Each of these spaces is going to have a sound aspect," he said. "It can be chaos or I can try to organize it."

He hired a sound engineer to regulate the pitch of the various chambers. "This is tuned like a flute, this tunnel above us," Turrell said. "Each of the spaces you go into you can feel the space through the sound as you go toward it."

We reach the bottom of the passageway and in a giddy rush of light emerge into a sensation not just of illumination, but of lightness. Darkness compresses around the body; light expands. We've reached Crater's Eye and stand in a circular space with a circular aperture above us. This is the spot that thousands of years ago funneled down into the fiery core of the earth. But this volcano is long extinct and it's placid here now. This is a place where visitors will be able to lie back and contemplate the bowl of the sky and its shifting panorama before returning to the outdoors.

A glimpse into eternity

We exit from a tunnel into the bowl of the crater. Outside, there are more visual thrills, but I'm beginning to feel overwhelmed. It's too much stimulation to absorb in a brief hour or two.

When the crater opens to the public, visitors will spend 24 hours or more at the site. They will be able to lounge in each space, exploring the subterranean chambers in a leisurely and contemplative way.

A guest house, almost complete and nearly invisible in the side of the crater, will accommodate a small group of visitors and allow them access day and night to the various viewing points.

Yet, for now, even with just this quick tour of the unfinished crater, the power of the place is clear enough.

What Turrell has done is create an environment that walks people back to a place where the origins of art and religion intersect: our urge to connect with the mysteries of the universe.

Many ancient civilizations have left monuments similar to this, mysterious places tuned to the movement of the sky and stars.

Today, in an age where art has become a commodity, the Roden Crater project looks not to the marketplace, or to a space on the walls of some museum, but to a piece of eternity.

"You're not in the time that's created by the constructs of man," Turrell says. "You're looking out from there ... you're involved in the music of the spheres, played out in light."

Sheila Farr: 206-464-2270 or sfarr@seattletimes.com