Trippin’ the light fantastic

Turrell's Quaker roots influence his art

Learning to love contemporary art has let light into my life

I’ve never seen an artwork from one of my favourite artists, James Turrell. I’d love to, but a heavy workload and a light wallet are making it almost impossible to go and see one of his artworks in person, yet I remain an admirer.

In a reverse of the usual pattern, I’ve become more open towards art as the years pass. Youth is a place for the iconoclast, the easy mockery and quick dismissal. The art world of the seventies in a Northern town didn’t help.

There was a stunning museum and gallery in the town centre where I went every week as a child to visit the library inside, pausing by the Foucault’s pendulum before selecting the week’s reading. Afterwards, I’d often just wander around, but the art never did anything for me, it was the overly ornate, too dark and formal Victorian oil paintings and the selection of local dignitaries on the staircases that merely provoked a momentary interest in whom they might have been.                                                                      
There were one or two more modern pieces but it had the heavy feel of a funeral parlour. It may have been a mildly educational collection, but it didn’t inspire.

Later I moved to Edinburgh and found myself making regular visits to their modern art collections, which were far more exciting.

There was the enormous Lichtenstein on the wall, the hyper-real sculptures of American tourists, the nightmares of Max Ernst and many others.

The museum and its grounds provided a place to ponder, a space to allow abstract ideas, thoughts and impressions gather and begin to work their magic. Unencumbered by anything more than piecemeal learning and no artistic talent, the power of art still made itself felt.

Having worked in mountain conservation the next ‘art attack’ I had was with land art. I found Goldsworthy a bit twee but he did give a good income to a friend who built his designs in our traditional skills, such as the cement-free stone walls.

Once again, it was the open spaces of America that provided opportunities that would be more difficult in crowded Europe, but you can look at pictures, watch film and get an idea about these artworks.

Turrell’s masterpiece is the Roden Crater and isn’t yet finished. Turrell uses light as his medium, coming from a Quaker background where light is at the core of their religious expression.

But Turrell uses light as a medium all of its own. Not silly conceptual trickery, but by using sculpture and constructions to frame the sky, allowing the changing light to produce unexpected pleasures.

He used part of a mall in Las Vegas to make a Granzfeld room, one with soft and diffuse light that the mind interprets the experience as a limitless room and produces spontaneous hallucinations, if you get the effects right.

The effect of these, and oh the joy of using light in Las Vegas to provoke awe and wonder instead of tacky neon, is just a side-delight.

Turrell has also produced ‘perpetual cells’ a sort of flotation tank of light, to be used by one person at a time: A Plato’s cave for our times.

But having an open mind to art rewards in many ways, even if it leads you to an artist who uses nothing you can touch to make art that you need to experience, yet have never seen.

But one day I’ll get to Roden Crater.

Hidden homes, secret spaces

Wordsworth's 'Grot' at Rydal Hall nr Ambleside

There’s always been that childhood thrill of having a secret hideaway, perhaps it is why so many British males aspire to owning a garden shed but there are entire sub-cultures devoted to sheds and their US version, the man cave.

Rita Rudner once remarked, “Men don’t live very well by themselves. They don’t even live like people. They live like bears with furniture.”

While some poor fools matured as far as a man can, a debatable distance, there are still some who have gone all out on a hidden home.

William Wordsworth had ‘The Grot’. It is visited by following a path under a forbidding bridge just over head height, then a plain stone faced and humble building. Open the little wooden door and the opposite wall is one large window showing the previously hidden scene, a small waterfall and pool where the water rushes off the mountain and down to the lake a mile away

In this place, the poet gazed out at the scene of natural perfection and honed his sonnets. Naturally, there’s also tales of the other Lake poets – who brought Romanticism to the fore – having less noble uses of the hideaway and one only has to consider the lifestyles of Shelly, Byron, Coleridge and so on.

The poor little outhouse has probably seen more drug abuse and degradation than Keith Richard’s cleaner.

There are other secrets in the area, including a cave with a hidden door in one of the Lakeland hills, whose location was a highly guarded secret and it was so well hidden that even on return visits, finding the handle that operated the opening mechanism was far from easy.

More lofty, was the ambition of Gustave Eiffel, whose tower, it was discovered had a secret apartment built into it, just under 300m high, for the use of himself and his friends, such as Thomas Edison, who left a suitable gift, one of his new phonograph machines.

There are other stories, once rumours, such as the tale of secret tunnels under the Playboy mansion leading to film stars houses. Well, some old blueprints were found for designs leading to ‘Mr. J. Nicholson’, ‘Mr. K. Douglas’, ‘Mr. W. Beatty’ and ‘Mr. J Caan’.

A group of artists in Providence, Rhode Island were inspired by a local shopping mall’s adverts saying their place was so good, you’d want to live there, explain the artists, “The central theme of the ads was that the mall not only provided a rich shopping experience, but also had all the things that one would need to survive and lead a healthy life.”

However, they were inspired to create a home in the mall. They had watched the construction of the mall and noticed that a space used for storing materials used in the construction was not being used.

They spent time sneaking in 200 tons of materials and created a 750 square ft apartment, where they lived on and off for four years before one of them was caught leaving the illicit apartment. He pleaded guilty to trespass, but no harm seems to have been done.

The artist behind the project says he was trying to build an oasis and admits, “Yes, I have done other secret installations: The Tunnel.”

Other artists are using malls. In Las Vegas’ City Center mall, the Louis Vuitton hosts a permanent exhibit by James Turrell, whose use of light and Granzfeld effect – where distances can’t be judged, causing the brain to hallucinate.

So if home is where the heart is, can it also be where the art is.