Artscape

Light house

By Tracy Zollinger Turner

Brad Feinknopf photo/? 2008 James Turrell

Most of us don't give much thought to all of the light we absorb, reflect, avoid, manipulate or use in a given day. We don't think about where it came from or where it might be headed. It's simply a fact of our lives.

Throughout his career as an artist, James Turrell has explored light's palpable and improbable qualities, as a source of nourishment with a living history and broad possibilities for exploration, as well as its relationship to space. For the past four decades, he has sculpted it, framed it and determined new ways to help viewers perceive it differently. His work has made him a luminary in the art world, metaphorically and literally.

Over two years ago, he turned his eyes on the Palm House at Franklin Park Conservatory, where his new, permanent light installation will be unveiled this weekend.

To be powered daily from dusk until dawn, the Palm House is filled with approximately 7,000 small, computer-controlled LED light sources, most of which are obscured from direct view inside.

"Lighting a greenhouse is an exciting situation," Turrell said. "A glass building takes on the raiment of light quite easily. It's the same piece of architecture, but it sort of extends its personality into the nighttime. I liken the secret life of buildings at night to the way that we have a day job, but then at night, dress up and go out on the town and have a different part of us revealed.

"This is a different way of thinking about lighting buildings. Generally we light them from the outside — lights on the outside shining up, lighting the exoskeleton of the building, often leaving the windows dark, so it's almost as though it's a skull without any life inside it," he continued. "Here, the idea is to light from within so that the building has a life. I think you feel that when you see this. It becomes quite lively and enlivened, revealing more of the architecture."

WILL SHILLING PHOTO

James Turrell

Turrell and his tech team, led by Broadway lighting designer Ben Pearcy, have programmed the lights to change gradually several times over a period of longer than 90 minutes. Each light has red, green and blue hues and is able to be controlled individually, giving them 21,000 parameters to work with. The technology is so new that the full range of possibilities they have employed didn't even exist when the proposal for the conservatory was written more than two years ago.

"This wasn't possible when I was a young artist," Turrell said. "It's something I dreamed of existing, thought was going to exist — but it takes consumer demand in America. It makes for the flowering of this building."

The lights sometimes highlight different aspects of the building, sometimes illuminate the entire structure in one color. It has unexpectedly graceful transitions that make the palm house into a character actor that is sometimes elegant and delicate, sometimes bold and fierce. On the inside, the glass of the building is bathed in light, but the plants remain their natural green and visitors don't take on new, alien tones.

The installation also coincides with a large expansion of the conservatory that includes two new rooftop gardens and a special-events area.

Standing outside of the Palm House, Turrell and Pearcy point out that the structure now has the two brackets of more than a century's worth of light technology — old gaslit street lamps that stay on 24 hours a day and were likely installed soon after the building's construction in 1895, and the new LED fixtures.

Columbus' involvement with Turrell comes during an exciting period of his career. He has upcoming exhibitions in Seoul, South Korea, and Canberra, Australia. Early next year, the first museum devoted solely to his work will open in the foothills of the Andes Mountains in Argentina.

In 2011, a large retrospective of his work will open at the Guggenheim in New York, and when that collection travels to his birthplace of Los Angeles in 2012, he will simultaneously open the Roden Crater, the culmination of 40 years of work. Located in the Painted Desert of Arizona, it's a natural cinder volcano that Turrell is transforming into an observatory for celestial events that can be seen with the naked eye. He began working on it in 1972.

"Part of it is to make the cosmos part of our personal territory," he said. "I think you need to see the division of the Milky Way to do that. During the day, the sun lights the sky, so we don't see the universe that is there. At night, that's revealed, although we then use light to cut us off from that.

"I've done a lot of work with the light of the sun, which is brand new light, eight-and-a-half minutes old, sort of a Beaujolais of light, and then also working with gathered starlight — I do it so it masks our light from the ecliptic, which is from our sun off planets — or the galactic plane, which would be the Milky Way," Turrell said. "So that's something that hasn't changed. These are light sources that are youngest, on average, three and half billion years — so you're confronting a light that's older than our solar system."

The project has the kind of extraordinary ambitions that attracted Turrell to the notion of art in the first place. As a nine-year-old boy, he saw Los Angeles' Watts Towers — tall steel skeletons encrusted in elaborate tile, porcelain, glass and mortar mosaic built up over a 33-year period by an Italian immigrant construction worker.

"It was exciting, because here was something that someone made and then left. They didn't sell the property, they just walked away from it. The city took it over because of taxes and when they tried to pull it down, it pulled the crane over," he said. "That picture was in the paper — people protested that the city tried to tear it down and now it's a cultural thing. They have a center across from it, they've found ways to take care of it. Culture lifts up neighborhoods, it lifts up people."

It will be interesting to see how Turrell's contribution to the nightscape of Franklin Park influences the surrounding neighborhood. During the recent late-night testing and programming phase, oohs and wows from the darkness indicated that nearby residents are already watching.

"Where light is and where it isn't can either obscure or open up. And this can make spaces and places very different. It can make the habitability of the night quite different," Turrell said. "We have a lot of light sort of for nothing. Cars have their own headlights, many places that don't need lamps have them all the way down all the streets. Pouring all of that energy out just for lighting an area is quite inefficient. We've sort of taken light and put it to a use that is not that interesting.

"In cities, we light the night so much out of fear. And part of this kind of work here [at the conservatory] is not to be lighting the night to counteract fear, but to produce joy and pleasure. Generally we have light that illuminates things — I'm interested in the thing-ness of light, and in having light be the revelation itself," he said.

Revelation or no, the Palm House installation is simply a lovely sight.

"These are kind of large concepts. I mean, in the end, we're making a piece of art here," he laughed. "And it's not even rock 'n' roll."

August 7, 2008

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