James Turrell

Albion Contemporary Art Limited, London
Private collection, London

Valencià, IVAM Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, James Turrell, 14 December 2004 - 20 February 2005, p. 460

Pittsburgh, Mattress Factory, James Turrell: Into the Light, 2 June, 2002-30 April, 2003, pp. 14-15 (an example for Beanie, 2002), illustrated in colour
Vienna, MAK, James Turrell: the Other Horizon, 1998-99, pp. 120-121, 242 (an example for Hi-Test, 1998), illustrated in colour

This work is in good condition. The TV, remote control, cables, SD card and card reader are functional.
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“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

Working with light, light as a work – James Turrell:  Magnetron

James Turrell was born in 1943 in Los Angeles. He is currently one of the most important living artists creating art using light and space. In 2013 the Guggenheim Museum in New York held a major retrospective of his works and for the occasion an interview of James Turrell was released:

“I want the strength of the power and the primal relationship we have to light to be the strongest. And you know, I’ve always thought that the history of art is littered with references, depictions, and the use of light. The more emotional forms of light, like Goya, and Velázquez, and Caravaggio, these are amazing qualities really talking a lot about light, where light is maybe not the subject, but its presence is very powerful in all these works.

I really felt to be using light as a material [is] to work or affect the medium of perception. For me, it’s trying to orient toward what the perception really is, rather than the object of perception, to actually, sort of, remove that. I have an art that has no image. It has no object. And even very little a place of focus, or one place to look. So, without image, without object, without specific focus, what do you have left? Well, a lot of it is this idea of seeing yourself see, Understanding how we perceive.” (James Turrell Video Transcript, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 21 June—25 September, 2013)

Turrell graduated from Pasadena High School in 1961 and studied experimental psychology at Pomona College in Claremont, California, receiving a BA there in 1965. To a large extent, Turrell came to be interested in working with perceptual environments from his learning in experimental psychology; his works are concerned with how people see rather than what they see. Having become interested in art, he enrolled in the graduate program at the University of California at Irvine. He created his first light piece, Afrum (Proto), the next year, in which light projected into the corner of a room seemed to form a three-dimensional, illuminated floating cube that resolved itself into flat planes of light only upon close inspection. Leaving school, Turrell took a studio in the former Mendota Hotel in Ocean Park, California, and began to make more projection pieces.

In the mid-1960s Turrell began to be associated with a group of artists, including Robert Irwin and Bruce Nauman, who pioneered what came to be known as the Light and Space Movement. Turrell began his experiments with artificial and natural light in a modest storefront studio in the Ocean Park district of Santa Monica in California, seeking to use light itself as his material. Using a projector, he cast a highly focused light beam across a room onto a mural surface. Where the light hit the wall (or corner) it became a sharply rendered geometric form, both defining and dissolving the space around it. In the 1970s Turrell developed a number of installations that heightened the relationship between light and the architectural frame. The resulting series of Light Spaces, Shallow-Space Constructions, and Wedges manipulated light so that the viewer becomes aware of light as an elemental force and as a plastic material primary to the existence of color. Standing within one of these spaces is a wonderful and even transcendent experience in which an opening onto a space filled with ambient light is seen first as a flat surface and then as a window onto a fog-filled room of uncertain dimensions.

In 1977 Turrell initiated what would be his most ambitious project, the transformation of Roden Crater, outside Flagstaff, Arizona, into a complex site-specific installation which would both frame the sky and chart the movements of the sun, moon, and stars. Over the past three decades, Turrell has continued to refine and expand his exploration of light and space, gaining international recognition. He has created dark pieces in which light is reduced to barely perceptible levels as well as site-specific light installations visible from outside of the multi-story buildings they inhabit.

Despite the vast scale of some of the artist’ works, Turrell is essentially concerned with light in its pure form, almost in the scientific sense: the electromagnetic flux unsullied by the presence of anything else, the temporality of it and the texture of it. The artist wants us to know light, not as a reflection of something else, but in and of itself; he wants us to see, touch and understand light intimately. Turrell explained his interest in the tactility of light in one of his interviews: “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.” (Turrell quoted in “Interview with James Turrell,” in Occluded Front, James Turrell, exh. cat., ed., Julia Brown, Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art and The Lapis Press, 1985, p.43. )

The present work on offer, Magnetron, is exemplary of this understanding. The work consists of a small aperture in the shape of an old television screen. As in Turrell’s aperture works, there is only a shape cut through the wall, no glass over the opening. The light comes from an actual 12-inch CRT television, out of view within the wall and tuned to a specific channel. The major installation for this series is currently located in Los Angeles and is called Hi Test (1997). This first Magnetron work is permanently installed at the Mondrian, a hotel in West Hollywood, California. On each floor of the Mondrian, in the elevator lobby, is a small aperture work.  The openings are the size and shape of a standard television screen, and the light in the small sensing spaces beyond is created by a television placed on the floor inside the space, just below the aperture. On each floor the television is tuned to a different channel, and the viewer soon discovers that each network broadcasts its own unique range of colors.

Few of us have considered or seen the light emanating from a TV screen in its pure, isolated form. Turrell’s Magnetron offers us the rare opportunity to experience something that we are all so familiar with, yet know so little of. The body of works, to which Magnetron belongs, represents a shift toward more intimist and even domestic projects on Turrell's part. It is also one of most brilliant uses of the television as a medium for a work of art.

Turrell’s works have been celebrated and exhibited all around the world. Magnetron might be his first work to be auctioned in Asia, James Turrell the artist is already well-known in the region, especially in Japan where his works are exhibited in several large museums, including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and in a permanent installation at the Chichu Art Museum at Benesse Art-Site in Naoshima. At the latter, Turrell's works Afrum - Pale Blue (1968), Open Field (2000) and Open Sky (2004) are displayed. As part of the Naoshima town exhibitions, his Minamidera (Southern Temple) was designed together with architect Tadao Ando. Also, in Tokamachi, Niigata, Turrell's House of Light has a view of the sunrise through the open roof that has been described as incredibly moving.