March 25, 2004
James Turrell's Latest Folly
by Jerome du Bois
Hammacher Schlemmer is selling a shelter worthy of Kubla Khan's Xanadu dome, plushy and swanky with posh hanky panky that affluent Yankees can really call home!
Hammacher Schlemmer is selling a shelter, a push-button palace flourescent repose, electric devices for facing a crisis with frozen fruit-ices and cinema shows! -- from Rhymes for the Irreverent by E.Y. "Yip" Harburg
James Turrell has created several confining, controlling, totalizing environments, such as Into the Light, Call Waiting, and Boullee-Bolla. Unlike the color-flooded room illusions, cute corner cubes, or the skyspaces, such as Knight Rise at SMoCA, the focus is on almost forcing a particular kind of experience -- See? you can see yourself seeing! Stand here. Lie down. Look here. See? -- which gives me a crick in the aesthetic neck.
So it was fun to read about his latest project, a million-dollar "garden folly" for an LA entrepreneur named James Goldstein. [The price tag isn't fun at all, in this world of hurt, but in this country rich people are free to insult priorities.] Lucie Young, in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, described it:
From the outside, this folly looks like a cross between a bunker and a concrete brioche. Inside, it is like an isolation tank or a private chapel, filled with expensive nothingness: curved walls, a floating floor, a rectangular opening for a window and another, much larger one in the roof. Turrell likens the spare interior to Plato's cave -- (Whups, don't get him started.)
Personally, I think it looks like an angry baboon snarling out of the corner of his mouth, but you decide (photo Richard Barnes NYT):
Inside, 5,000 computer-controlled lights, concealed in the floor, throw a "symphony of colors" on the walls and, at night, make black rectangles of the sky from two carefully-crafted openings. The floor is covered with mats and there's a special place to sit. You can bet Tyler Green is even now attempting to get James Goldstein's personal assistant's personal assistant's private number.
Here's the funny part, though:
Twice a day he [Goldstein] navigates the 230 or so steps down a near-vertical hillside from his house to visit his folly, which is equipped with a wet bar and a sound system -- two distinctly un-Turrellian additions. The artist would prefer that his patron listen to the sounds of the planets, but he doesn't dictate how the space is to be used.
The planets are kind of hard to hear. But picture it: James handing out the yogatinis, the walls flashing colors, heat-activated gel cushions responding to body heat, OutKast bouncing awright awright awright awright awright awright off the curved walls, and, in the middle of the room, James Turrell standing there chewing his beard like an Amish teleported to a Best Buy. You can blot out the sky, Jimboy, but you can't control everything.
CODA: I should add that the proper response to a Turrell room, which is like an expensive lamp, is the one my wife spontaneously gave when we visited the 2001 Turrell show at SMoCA. We were alone, and as we entered the first sacred, oppressive, light-filled space, Catherine began to dance, out of simple, natural, resistance, a sinuous hula, revolving in the room, arms slowly rising, breaking up that static, boring flood of blue.
Light's about life. Life isn't quiet, and it doesn't stand still.