This summer, the American installation artist, James Turrell, is exhibiting in the garden of The Jewish Museum in Berlin. With a couple of friends, I paid a visit to his installation Ganzfeld “Aural” to see how the famed artist was capable of manipulating the mind and body using only light in an encapsulated space.
When a couple of friends were visiting me in Berlin in the spring of 2018, we were determined to plunge headfirst into the whirlpool of the infinite number of art galleries and museums scattered neatly across the city. Or, at least we tried to.
On day one, we decided to pay a visit to the famed Berlinische Galerie, which, along with its brilliant permanent collection (Otto Dix, Georg Baselitz, El Lissitzky, etc.) was displaying a curious Carsten Nicolai laser installation, seemingly investigating Einstein’s theory of quantum mechanics and the possibility of telepathy.
After the visit, one of my friends scrolled through a local art guide and immediately let out an audible gasp. James Turrell was being displayed at the Jewish Museum. Having never heard of the artist before, I became intrigued and suggested we visit the museum, since it was located just around the corner.
On our way to the museum, filled with anticipation, my friend explained James Turrell’s significance as one of the most distinguished and celebrated installation artists of the 20th and 21st century, having centralized his artistic focus on exploring the idea of the sublime in light and space since the 1960s. Still, I had no idea what to expect. All she would tell us without spoiling the coming experience was to strap in and hang on for the ride.
By the time we arrived at the museum, the sun was mercilessly beaming down, as if mentally and physically preparing us for what was to come. After entering the museum, we were given a time slot for the visit, and on we went.
A meditative silence
Being completely unaware of Turrell’s life and oeuvre, I had a million expectations entering the installation space. The guide at the welcoming reception (the most wonderful and enthusiastic guard I have come across in a long time) warned us of the potentiality of strong reactions to the flashing lights, which I immediately interpreted as if we were about to enter some sort of insane LED party, perhaps accompanied by a slowly escalating drum ’n’ bass-heavy Underworld-tune. But I was wrong.
Entering Turrell’s installation was more like entering a cave of ominous silence, as we were embraced by the lucent glow of color bouncing off the walls and each other. However, the color seemed to come from nowhere. At first, I thought to myself, “What the hell is going on?” Even though the installation was created from light and by playing with its sensors, you, as a viewer, were completely in the dark. By dark I mean, you had absolutely no sense of orientation. Upon entering the space, situated at the end of a rather impressive staircase, the feeling of walls, ceiling, and floor melting together or even completely disappearing became apparent. Only the security of still having your feet planted on a solid surface provided a guide for how to move.
James Turrell, Ganzfeld Aural, 2018; Jewish Museum Berlin, gift of Dieter and Si Rosenkranz, photo: Florian Holzherr
After a while I started to think, “When is this thing starting?” My fantasy of a rave in this enclosed cave was being rejected by the silence of the space and the bizarrely calming effect of the light, intense and ever glowing. I felt as if I was being transported into a meditative state, where my thoughts scattered and drowned out concurrently with the colors of light shifting from a soothing cobalt blue to aggressively hot pink.
The Ganzfeld effect
The work in which I now found myself so deeply immersed was titled Ganzfeld “Aural”. The title stems from the German word, “Ganzfeld”, which describes the phenomenon of staring into a space of unified and unbroken color, causing sensory deprivation as well as, in some instances, hallucinations. Although I ended up seeing neither unicorns nor sea monsters in the end, I certainly felt fundamentally affected.
The flashes of light I had been anticipating came in the form of 20 second-long intervals of glitches in the glow as the colors shifted from one to the other once every circa five minutes. The transitions of color were never aggressive, but much rather seemed to bleed into each other, creating a hypersensitivity in me and my fellow visitors.
Colorful sublimity
We were beginning to understand the sublimity in Turrell’s work. The idea of “the sublime” has been ascribed to different times and strands of philosophy throughout history. From Longinus in Roman-Era Greece, to Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant in the late 1700s, “the sublime” has acted as an umbrella term for the sensation of man being lost in a greater entity than him- or herself, whether that be physical, metaphysical, intellectual, spiritual, or artistic.
Where many artists have taken on this (literally) enormous theme – from Caspar David Friedrich to contemporary artists such as Ólafur Eliasson and Yayoi Kusama, very rarely have I felt as lost in a work of art as I did in Turrell’s Ganzfeld “Aural”. Being inside this installation felt like losing yourself in the infinity of a space resembling an all-absorbing field of nature like fog or a large snowstorm. The gradual shifts in the color scheme fascinated and disturbed me, and I felt taken over by something out of my control – something bigger than myself.
James Turrell, Ganzfeld Aural, 2018; Jewish Museum Berlin, gift of Dieter and Si Rosenkranz, photo: Florian Holzherr
The bigger picture
The fact that James Turrell’s installation from his Ganzfeld-series finds its place in such a historically charged institution as The Jewish Museum of Berlin says something about the art work’s potential for transcendence and universal affect. These themes furthermore manifest themselves when you look into Turrell’s past.
Having spent his early adulthood as a keen pilot, flying Buddhist monks out of the Chinese-controlled Tibet during the 1960s [1], Turrell is an avid connoisseur of celestial space and the serenity of its silent enclosure. Undoubtedly, his experiences as a pilot, as well as his later studies in perceptual psychology [2], were elements navigating him towards his impressive artistic creations.
With his unfinished masterpiece, Roden Crater, which commenced in 1977 [3], Turrell’s background in fine art, science, and psychology truly culminated. Roden Crater, taking its form in an extinct volcano outside Flagstaff, Arizona, is still a work in progress. The enormous project includes tunnels and apertures allowing the natural desert sunlight to be viewed in full form, as well as the stars and planets at night. By taking on an observatory status, Roden Crater is Turrell’s most ambitious and awe-inspiring artwork to date. It is a view of celestial activity boiled down to its phenomenological core; it is the unfathomable beauty of space presented to us in nature’s very own nave, creating a counterpoint of ethereal phenomena and terrestrial perception.
Since Roden Crater’s genesis, which is now more than four decades old, Turrell’s artistic purpose has not seemed to change or slow down. My visit to his more recent Ganzfeld “Aural” turned out to be not only a shift in my perception, but also in my understanding of the vastness of art as a medium.
The exhibition will be on display in the The Jewish Museum’s garden until 30 September 2019.
For more information, visit the museum’s website here.
Note: It wasn’t until I later got home and did my research that I realized why Turrell’s chamber had seemed so familiar; Ganzfeld “Aural” had been the back drop of the musician Drake’s famous “Hotline Bling”-music video. Unfortunately, it was Drake’s chunky sweater and dad-like dance moves and not Turrell’s colorful universe, which ended up receiving the majority of the attention.
Portrait of James Turrell, photo: Grant Delin – www.grantdelin.com
[1] Taylor, Andrew. Let there be light: James Turrell A Retrospective opens at the National Gallery of Australia. The Sydney Morning Times, 11 December, 2014.
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/let-there-be-light-james-turrell-a-retrospective-opens-at-the-national-gallery-of-australia-20141211-124xea.html
[2] Ferro, Shaunancy. The Mind-Bending Science of James Turrell’s Art. Popular Science, September 24, 2013. https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-07/james-turrell-psychology
THE CULTURATOR 