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THE EYE LISTENS: LIGHT MUSIC AND VISUAL PERCEPTIONS BY JAMES TURRELL

I. Sakhno, A. Staruseva-Persheeva

Abstract

Authors of the paper are focusing on American artist James Turrell's investigation of the nature of light in his conceptual projects. By the means of creating a specific immersive environment where a spectator is plunging into a unique optical space set up by light installations, the artist reconstructs a sensory synesthesia experience: a synthesis of light, colour, music and meditation. This being the case light becomes the main character of a story told by him. The artist analyses a phenomenon of perception and his specific tentative of creating optical effects which allow spectators to become participants of light performance. Turrell takes the light as his paint and the architecture and the viewers — as his canvas. A colour-light vision of the artist accumulates the grounds of optical physics, astronomy, mathematics, perception psychology, preceding issues of light art and land art. In the series “Space”, “Tall Glass” and “Skyspace” he renders incorporeal and immaterial fields, a certain “presentation of absence” (Merleau-Ponty) when the invisible is being marked by the visible. Viewer's inner sensation, diving into music and meditation become key factors of an art piece. Thus, appears a new landscape with no horizon, top or bottom — a space without borders. In his latest significant project “Roden Crater” Turrell demonstrates the new practices of creating sensory connections and delving into the nature of vision. He constructs a unique illuminating system for an extinct volcano crater in Roden, Arizona. New “architecture of light into space” is establishing specific sensory connections in the perception of natural landscape and illumination.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SWS.ISCAH.2019.1/S25.031

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