If ever there were a competition for the world’s oldest work of contemporary art, the Roden Crater would probably win.
The crater is part of a 400,000-year-old extinct volcano in Arizona, which the artist James Turrell acquired in 1977 and turned into his magnum opus. Nearly 50 years later, the still-unfinished crater project is both a monumental artwork and an observatory with apertures and tunnels.
Born in California in 1943, Turrell, the son of an aeronautical engineer, got his pilot’s license at age 16, gaining early exposure to light and sky. Growing up in a Quaker family, he was once taken as a boy to a meeting house by his grandmother and told to “go inside and greet the light.”
Turrell has spent his life doing just that. Light is not just a device or a tool in his art; it is the art. Whether natural or artificial, light is at the core of everything, from projections and holograms to room-size immersive installations and Skyspaces (enclosures with open ceilings framing the sky).
Turrell is exhibiting five new installations at the Pace Gallery in Seoul, including a site-specific Wedgework — an installation that uses light to give the illusion of a wall or barriers.
Turrell lives and works in Flagstaff, Ariz., near his Roden Crater. In a recent video interview, he sat in front of a wall-size photograph of it to discuss life, light and art. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Can you speak about your new exhibition in Seoul?
My wife and brother-in-law are Korean, so I very much enjoy going there. Artistically, I’m moving forward with the Wedgeworks, and I’m back doing a lot of work with prints. I’m trying to be a full-service artist.
I’m working on several projects in Korea as well, including a show at the Daegu Art Museum.
Your art is very much in tune with the times: Immersive, experiential installations appeal to a lot of audiences, including younger ones.
Basically, the world has sort of caught up with me in a certain way.
It’s just like an oncoming train. It’s always important, for opportunity, to have that coming toward you, but you want to step aside and let that train go by. I am enjoying this time. I could have used this attention 40 years ago. But art is like it is, and you don’t get to call it always as you might like.
How does it feel to have young people engage with your installations?
You have to realize that I’m not a performer, so I’m not there to feel the audience. I get these things done, and I like to go to an opening, but sometimes I even miss the openings. I’m not that involved with my audience. I like to feel that I know what they’re feeling, but then each person comes with their own experience, and meets the experience that I create. This is one thing about art that’s very different than performance. In a way, these pieces perform for me.
As an artist, you live near the Roden Crater — far from the cities where your exhibitions and audiences are.
I’m very similar to two of my art heroes, Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin. They both lived where their source was, what gave them their sustenance, as do I. Even though they lived away from the art world, they certainly were participating in it at the highest level. That’s what I seek to do as well. They felt their strength coming from the landscape, but still showed their work in important art cities.
Culture really happens in cities. I can say it’s not happening out here at the Crater — yet.
Why do you say that?
Art isn’t everything. You certainly realize that when you have somebody like Drake or Kanye West get interested in your work: Suddenly you get millions of hits on your website, and it fries your website. That doesn’t normally happen with those who are interested in art as we do it today.
There are a substantial number of people interested in art in the world, but it’s not like popular music or things of that sort, which really have tremendous audiences.
Taylor Swift changed American football. She started dating a football player, and suddenly women started watching the games because she was there watching.
At what age were you drawn to art?
When I came to see my aunt in New York at age 15. She was the coordinating editor for Seventeen magazine, and really loved culture. She took me to the Museum of Modern Art to show me the Monet water lily paintings, which I was very impressed by. On the way out, I went by this work by Thomas Wilfred, who was part of the very important “15 Americans” show at MoMA in 1952. The work was about eight inches off the wall: this box, with just a screen in the front with frosted glass. It looked like the northern lights, slowly changing. I thought: now somebody is really doing this new art. This is our art.
Why did you make art with light?
It all had to do with renting space in California after I became an artist. We had large spaces that you could rent inexpensively, so it was an art that luxuriated in space.
I like the ephemeral quality of light, but also the physicality of it. You have to have a certain size to get the physicality, and still have distance away from it so that you see the ephemeral quality as well.
As an artist, you have had a role in redefining art, wouldn’t you say?
I call attention to the truth.
Art history is littered with artists who have this fascination with how things are illuminated: Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio and Titian, then someone like Turner — boy, was he prescient! — all the way up to Rothko, who had the glow of light coming off the painting.
I’m interested in the thingness of light — not that light is revealing something about an object or another thing, but that light becomes a revelation itself.
Let’s talk about the Roden Crater, which we see behind you on the wall. Somebody slightly ignorant might come up to you and say, James, what’s the point of it?
Well, what’s the point of any art? These are things that we make without function. Art is part of culture, as is architecture, as is literature.
The one thing I have to say is that all of these things involve maintenance.
Books have to be continually read, plays have to be continually performed, symphonies have to be continually performed to stay alive. As a professor of mine once said, that’s what defines culture and civilization.
It’s only since 2012 that we’ve actually known our position in our galaxy. That’s rather recent. Call it religious, if you want, but it’s very much about realizing our position and where we are in all of this and the grandeur of everything. I just want to have a space where you come out and understand those things a little bit, or at least understand the question. Artists are very good at posing questions. Science always tries to give us the answers, but these answers keep changing.
The crater, your masterwork, is unfinished. Do you see the light at the end of the tunnel?
We have all the plans completed for the Roden Crater, so it can be finished if I’m gone. But I would like to see that myself. Moses didn’t get to go to the Promised Land. I will certainly continue as far as I can.
I may have visualized the light at the end of the tunnel, but I haven’t gone through it. So I’m still at it, and will be.
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