Installation Artist James Turrell To Speak On Monumental Work

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - It takes a grand vision to shape a 380,000-year-old crater into cutting-edge art. Artist James Turrell has been absorbed with the process of seeing since the sixties, when he made his name as one of a group of California artists experimenting with light and space. For over thirty years he has been working to transform Roden Crater, an extinct volcano on an Arizona cattle ranch, into a celestial observatory. He will discuss this project in a lecture, "Plato’s Cave and the Light Within," at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, March 10 in the UA’s Giffels Auditorium.

Although Roden Crater functions as art on a grand scale, the emphasis is not on his vision, but that of the viewer/participant. "My art," he said in a recent New Yorker profile, "is about your seeing." While relatively untouched on the exterior, the interior of the crater is carved with tunnels, chambers, and openings onto the sky that are carefully aligned to capture light and record cosmological occurrences, thus resonating with ancient monumental sites such as Stonehenge. The bowl of the crater has been smoothed into an elegant oval and equipped with viewing platforms to facilitate the perception of the earth curving up to meet the sky. "By playing with scale he creates an Alice-in-Wonderland effect: sometimes you feel very small, and sometimes very large," notes UA architecture professor and painter Laura Terry, who arranged for Turrell to visit the university. "It's always important to me to have another side of architecture presented," she adds. "Technology is important, history is important, but I believe that the more artful side of architecture is equally important."

Turrell’s work hasn’t always been so monumental, although the use of light, and the viewer’s perception of light, have been ongoing themes. His undergraduate studies in mathematics and perceptual psychology informed his earliest work, which consisted of rectangular prisms of light that appeared to be suspended in the corner of a room. This led to more complex projections, dreamlike spaces shaped by veils of light, and eventually to skyscapes - oculi cut into ceilings that framed a luminous slice of the sky. With these explorations of light and space, Turrell created realms of pure sensory experience.

In the early 70s Turrell became interested in shaping viewers' perceptions of natural phenomena. He spent seven months crisscrossing the western United States in his Helio Courier airplane before locating Roden Crater near the Grand Canyon and Arizona's Painted Desert. Currently slated for completion in 2006 at a cost that will probably exceed twenty million dollars, work on Roden Crater has been funded by the Dia Foundation and Guggenheim & MacArthur Fellowships. Though his work isn't the sort wealthy collectors can purchase to hang over the sofa, he has received commissions from visionaries such as Italian collector Count Panza de Biumo, and has installed pieces in museums all over the world. He has been the subject of eleven solo exhibitions at museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Setagaya Museum in Tokyo.

James Turrell's lecture has been co-funded by David Banks, Carolyn and Breck Speed, the UA School of Architecture, and the UA Department of Art. The lecture will be followed by a reception in Giffels Auditorium; both events are free and open to the public.