BOOKS
331
means are dramatic, a virtual wall of vivid color broken only by a vertical
disturbance running through it; for Turrell, the means may be sharp or
subtle
to
the point of being perceptually subliminal, an irradiating light
inducing phenomenological experience of walls and rooms. Both artists
hope to induce a markedly subjective response to fields of brilliant color
or
to
dim light.
To accomplish this, Turrell typically prepares a light chamber into
which the viewer enters to see the work. Promoted as much by the New
York School as by West Coast "holistic" uses of light, manipulating a
total visual field - the phenomenon perceptual psychologists call
Ganzfcld - is an approach to concentration that artists who came of age
in the 1960s have taken for granted and have tried to perfect. The dark
visual environment within the Rothko Chapel is, by virtue of unruly
natural light and shadow or steady gloom, only partially effective as a
meditative chamber; but Turrell's sustained artificial control over light
results in a predictable immersion of the viewer in the subjective and
physiological aspects of seeing. Staring hard into dim space and perceiv–
ing only the blue streaks of one's own neurons firing within the disori–
enting weightlessness induced by a specially sealed, raked approach by
ramp, can result in somatic effects as intense as the retinal experience is
subtle.
The question remains whether all this is art or an especially ethereal
form of "special effects." Dr. Edward W ortz, the scientist with whom
Turrell and Irwin collaborated in the late 1960s while they were mem–
bers of the Art
&
Technology experiment, considered these projects art.
Turrell's Skyspaces incorporating the temporal spectrum of night arc less
scientific than poetically framed natural observations. Turrell himself insists
he has taken pains to avoid spectacle. Both in his long-term diligent
studies in perceptual psychology and in his secreted and modest applica–
tion of technology, he has, indeed, acquitted himself: the sensory aura of
his installations is almost always more potent than is one's curiosity about
how the aura is produced. Turrell's installations, together with Irwin's
light objects, initially coincident with the trendy interest in Op art, have
decidedly surpassed Op and other glib rnisconstruals of pure visibility.
From the viewpoint of contemporary art history, however, Turrell's
poetically framed nature has often been judged as scientistic, although
they are non-materialist and interiorized.
[n 1966, the year Turrell sealed a room to create his first docu–
mented light piece, Newman himself told Andrew Hudson of
The
Washington Post:
The scale of a painting in the end depends on the artist's sense
