“In working with light, what is really important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought, to make the quality and sensation of light itself something really quite tactile. It has a quality seemingly intangible, yet it is physically felt. Often people reach out and try to touch it”
Executed at the turn of this century, Magnetron Series: Cisco 2000 consists of an aperture in the shape of an old television screen, opening onto a 12-inch CRT television tuned to a specific channel. The screen moves through tones and planes of coloured light, a distinct contribution to James Turrell’s five-decades of radical experimentation with light as a medium and material in art-making. This series of works takes their name from a magnetron, which is a microwave-creating device similar to the glass cathode-ray tube in an old television set, responsible for making images appear on the television screen. Each Magnatron has a unique program based on the show that it’s named after. “Cisco, 2000” is based off of the old TV series “The Cisco Kid”. As a child, Turrell would routinely see the TV light emitting from windows in his neighborhood; having grown up in a Quaker family that did not use anything powered by electricity, this was the only way that the artist would experience these TV series.
“I'm known as a light artist. But rather than be someone who depicted light, or painted light in some way, I wanted to have the work be light” (James Turrell in ‘James Turrell’, video transcript, Guggenheim Museum, June 2013, online). For over half a century, Turrell has created art from light, an early pioneer of the Southern Californian Light and Space movement. From the start of his Projection Series in the mid-sixties, throwing light in geometric shapes onto his studio walls, Turrell has explored the sculptural, sensory qualities of light and tone, an investigation that continues in the present work. The Magnetron Series re-examines the familiar glow of television screens, considering the light emitted in its pure, isolated form. The work recalls Turrell’s ‘strategic cuts’, openings cut into walls or ceilings to let natural light into interior space; in a similar vein, Turrell isolates and re-frames an everyday, familiar light, presenting it as a tangible and encompassing physical reality. The artist’s use of colour has its roots in Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field Painting of the 1950s and 60s, though here it is about movement and time as well, as the screen shifts and flickers between different tones. Mesmeric and transient, it epitomises Turrell’s distinctive visual language.
Two decades on, Magnetron Series: Cisco 2000 gains a new resonance as a signifier of a specific time and now recent past, with a shape and type of television no-longer commonly used. It records an interaction with light at a moment in time, a reflection of its presence in domestic life that continues to evolve with advances in technology. The work is related to the major 1997 installation Hi Test, while the first Magnetron series is permanently installed at the Mondrian, a hotel in West Hollywood. The apertures are located on each floor of the hotel, by the elevator lobby, each screen tuned its own channel and emitting a different sequence of colours.
His Magnetrons play on viewers' expectations: what appear to be television screens are in fact apertures opening into a deep space filled with oscillating light. These works frame space as a canvas of infinite depth. Where historically there have been many works of art about light and its effects, Turrell's works are made of light itself, suddenly made into visible solid-seeming things.