My journey through the wilderness was long and hard (5 hours on a plane with an 18 month-old is on par with a trek through any desert in my book), but soon I arrived in the promised land: Orange County (That's Biblical, right?). Ok, so I suppose the real reason for the trip was to visit my 2 month old nephew and his family, but it afforded me a great opportunity to check out some of the SoCal art scene, and I knew exactly where I'd start. I indeed felt a bit like Moses' followers arriving in the (actual) Promised Land as I stepped into the towering entryway to LACMA and retrieved up my program for the hallowed James Turrell retrospective!
As you may know Turrell is, after all, essentially equivalent to Moses as far as mystical light artists go. Having experienced Aten Reign at the Guggenheim, I was stoked to be able to explore the two buildings worth of work LACMA dedicated to this projection prophet.
The work on view spans roughly 4 decades (pictures below courtesy of google image searches, as no photography was allowed inside the exhibit), ranging from his early projection pieces...
... and prints and drawings...
... to his holography work...
... to room-sized light pieces and wall-cutout pieces...
...to the legendary Roden Crater...
... but the piece that took the cake was...
the Ganzfeld room.
As you approach the installation, you're instructed to take off your shoes and don a pair of paper medical booties to retain the pristine whiteness of the chamber. After ascending a velvety black stairway, you enter into a chamber with no discernible edges or corners, with a backlit hole cut into the far end of the room.
You don't see the source of the light, just the light itself, shifting through blues and pinks and whites and purples. The result is an soft, modulating color that floods the room, so thick you feel like you could drink it. You know that feeling when you walk out of the shower and the steam in the bathroom is palpable? That's how the light feels!
What's even weirder is what it does to your perception. You know how video projections can have a chromatic aberration when out of alignment in which you get a red fringe on top of a figure and a blue fringe underneath? When someone walks in front of you you actually see this effect on the outline of the person, produced in real life by your eyeballs! What's more, if you walk sideways towards one of the walls, you lose all bearings and you can no longer tell where you are or how far you've walked until you suddenly feel your foot touch the gentle slope of the curved wall edge and you realize the wall is 3 inches from your nose. All you see is an infinity of color.
As if that weren't enough, when you turn around, inundated by this color, the white wall of the entry room opposite the hole that you climbed in becomes a thick, dark, floating greenish rectangle because of the after-image burned into your eyes from the color in the room!
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| this isn't the ganzfeld room at LACMA, but you can get a sense of what I mean. |
It's an utterly surreal and disorienting experience that I highly recommend to everyone. The only drawback is the time limit they place on experiencing it. Get your tickets now - the retrospective is up for a few more months.
So now I have much pondering to do. The next step for me seems to be translating my projection pieces from an interactive object of sorts, to an immersive environment. I wonder, what would be my Ganzfeld?
Well,
After rounding off my trip to LACMA with a healthy dose of Chris Burden and Calder, my pilgrimage extended to the typical tourist spots: San Diego Zoo, Santa Monica Pier, Disneyland, and the very first Trader Joe's in Pasadena (I'm a bit ashamed to say so, but being the store artist I am I felt I couldn't leave without stopping by), and lots of quality time with my new nephew and the gang (which was of course the goal in the first place).
100 blog posts down, and I feel like Turrell has given me a glimpse of a trajectory worth 1000 more posts. Shooting for the stars is one thing (for which Turrell has quite literally set the precedent, in the case of Roden Crater) and a career like his seems almost mythical. So, inspired by his mystical leadings, I'm content to set my sights a bit closer - say 3 inches in front of my nose, right about where the wall of the Ganzfeld disappears into eternity, far beyond the stars, but closer at hand than my next day in the studio.
