The intangible art of James Turrell

It takes an extraordinary commitment of time, space and money for a museum to produce a James Turrell exhibit. He's not the kind of artist who simply builds work in his studio and trucks it to the gallery for a show.

Turrell makes art out of intangibles — ideas and light — and most of those ideas need to play out on a grand stage.

For the past 25 years, Turrell has channeled much of his time, energy and money into the Roden Crater project, a network of tunnels and light chambers built within an extinct volcano in Northern Arizona.

The first phases of the project are slated to open to the public next year. The Roden Crater promises to be one of the most astonishing — and ambitious — works of art of our time, a modern temple to the sun, moon and stars.

Yet even Turrell's more manageable projects end up being huge undertakings, as the exhibit "James Turrell: Knowing Light" makes clear. The show opens Saturday at the Henry Art Gallery and includes three new installations that reconfigure the museum's entire south gallery into several jaw-dropping encounters with light. Topping it off is an entire room of models, drawings and photographs of the Roden Crater project, geared to help people grasp the complexities of the hard-to-describe earthwork.

The exhibition required building a new floor, ceiling, interior walls, a stairway and wheelchair ramp inside the space. The Henry's south galleries have been closed to the public for the past six weeks during construction.

A perfect fit

When "Knowing Light" opens, visitors will also encounter a major Turrell work in progress. To celebrate the museum's 75th anniversary, the Henry has commissioned a permanent Turrell "Skyspace," an elliptical sky-viewing room that hovers on twin pillars, 11 feet above the outdoor sculpture court, and will be entered through the Henry's beautiful old beaux-arts doorway. That original entryway was left high and dry, an empty architectural feature, after the Henry's remodeling was completed in 1997. It's almost as if the Turrell installation, conceived last year, were intended for that place all along.

The Skyspace will transform the Henry's nighttime face from staid to glamorous. The freestanding chamber, built of concrete, aluminum and fiberglass, will be sheathed by LEDs (computer-controlled lights) under a translucent glass housing. Turrell will program the lights to create an ever-shifting after-dark display. Turrell has installed several exterior architectural illumination pieces like this in European cities, but this is the only one in the United States.

Inside, the Skyspace will be a quiet haven. A warmed bench rims the egg-shaped room, a place to sit and observe the sky through the oculus above. It's not a simple skylight, revealing a patch of clouds or blue, but a meticulously crafted portal that gently shifts our perception of the external light. In wet weather, a retractable roof will slide shut and interior lighting will create a plane of color across the aperture.

Turrell has designed three other Skyspace installations in the U.S., each unique and specific to its location: at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona and Plan B Evolving Arts, in Santa Fe, N.M..

Patience required

The Skyspace doesn't open until July, so most Turrell fans — and there are lots in Seattle — will be rushing to see the exhibition first.

"James Turrell: Knowing Light" will require some patience on the part of visitors. In fact, many of the people who attend the preview party will not be able to see the exhibition that first night. The Henry will be timing admissions, letting only a handful of viewers enter each section of the installation at a time, so that each person gets an undisturbed impression of the art.

"It's not your fly-by art experience," says Henry Gallery director Richard Andrews, who has been following Turrell's career since the 1960s. "He wants, and we want, for you to spend time with each work, to give in to each work. Your eyes need time to adjust to different light levels. The more you spend with it, the more intense the experience will be."

The first, and grandest, of the three installations is called "Spread." It's a newly constructed interior space that measures 65 by 49 feet and is 18 feet high. It's part of Turrell's ongoing work with ganzfelds, a German term describing an evenly illuminated, featureless space used in the field of perceptual psychology. Turrell earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at Pomona College in the 1960s, and that early training has since informed his art.

In this case, you'll approach the entry by walking up a pyramidal staircase toward what appears to be a solid plane of color on the wall. (Wheelchair access is also provided.) But you will penetrate that colored plane — like Alice through the looking glass — and step inside, to a large room with a pitched floor like a theater, where your perception of colors will instantly shift. The place you just came from will look different now, haloed in light.

Beyond description

The attempt to describe a Turrell installation can be maddening. Words are insignificant compared with the physical experience of the piece, the inexplicable way light can ignite consciousness. Reading about Turrell's work or looking at pictures of it can be interesting, but unsatisfying: On paper, the magic evaporates.

That's one of the reasons Henry director Andrews believes so strongly in making Turrell's work available to the public. "We try to make a full commitment to our artists," he says, laughing at what sounds, in this case, almost like an understatement.

Because without patronage, without institutional support, much of Turrell's work would exist only in the artist's mind. And, for a public used to getting acquainted with major pieces of art in books, newspapers, magazines, or the inexorable slideshows of art-history classes, pictures of his installations can seem like flat, bloodless reductions.

Funding for this show, which cost $100,000, came from the Henry Gallery's Contemporary Art Fund, the Allen Foundation for the Arts, Poncho and NBBJ Group. A variety of private donors, spearheaded by Bill and Ruth True, came forward to fund the $1.4 million Skyspace.

"Spread" is one of the largest ganzfeld installations Turrell has realized. Leaving it, you'll encounter one of his smallest works, part of the "Magnitron" series. Titled "Kimo Sabe" (a toast to the old "Lone Ranger" show), the image is just the size of a modest television screen set in a wall. And the light source, in this case, is TV light that unravels into something amorphous and shimmering, an aurora borealis of color that changes second by second.

The third installation, one of Turrell's "Wedgeworks," is set in a newly constructed 41-by-25-foot room. Three colors of light will play across the empty space, creating the sense of a solid wall where none exists.

That's the crux of Turrell's work: Shifting the way we perceive light and space. He accomplishes his sophisticated art with the deliberation of a scientist and the fervor of a mystic. And he pursues the most seemingly impossible projects — the $25 million, 25-year Roden Crater has eaten up much of his life — with a tenacity characteristic of great artists.

"The task of the artist is simple," Turrell once told me. "It's staying with it. Things do take time, but I've got the time."

A lifelong project

He's also got an incredibly polished mechanism for self-promotion, tirelessly accommodating anybody who can get the word out about his projects or help fill the coffers of his international exhibitions and permanent installations.

The costly construction at the Roden Crater will stretch on for years after the first phase of the project opens and probably occupy the artist for the rest of his life.

The final section of "James Turrell: Knowing Light" documents Turrell's obsession with the Roden Crater. With his characteristic attention to detail, Turrell had the plaster model infused with pinkish soil from the crater, so that even its color is perfectly represented.

If describing a Turrell installation can be maddening, trying to convey the scale and complexity (not to mention the awesome sensuality) of Roden Crater is an utterly hopeless task. Seeing Turrell's models and drawings, including a 9-by-27-foot pastel overview of the site, is as close as a person can come to understanding the project, without actually going to see it.

I was lucky enough to go there last spring and get a preview of the Crater's tunnels and sky-viewing chambers. That quick tour of a work in progress — just a taste of what visitors will experience when the Roden Crater opens — convinced me that Turrell's extinct volcano in Arizona's high desert will become a place of pilgrimage.