Poetry out of Emptiness

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York, the light-wave sculptures of James Turrell

Perhaps the most interesting museum show by a living artist to be seen in New York at present is at the Whitney: "Light and Space," by a 37-year-old Californian named James Turrell. A spare-time pilot and full-time sculptor, Turrell has filled an entire floor of the Whitney with almost nothing: some walls, some tungsten and fluorescent lamps, and the reactions between them. To say that he has posed some ingenious visual conundrums on an ambitious scale is true, but insufficient. Turrell has also contrived an exquisite poetry out of near emptiness.

The most compelling illusion in the show seems at first to be a big flat rectangle pasted to a white wall, dark gray in color with perhaps a greenish cast: undifferentiated, banal. But as you approach it, corners appear within its surface, as though reflecting the gallery in which you stand; perhaps this is a dark, smoky sheet of mirror? Not at all. "This" does not exist; it is nothing more than a hole in the wall, giving onto another room, which seems to be filled with a gray-green mist. The surprise of this dissolution of substance into absence is so intense, and yet so subtly realized, that it becomes magical; a trick enters the domain of the aesthetic.

Ever since the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis astonished his audience, and created a durable legend, by painting a bunch of grapes so "real" that birds tried to eat them, the problems of illusion have been central to our sense of culture: How does one conjure up the presence of something that is not really there, and, once that is done, how do we know the exact limits of image and reality? We only see the dog in the corner or the Vermeer on the wall by mentally reassembling and interpret ing the stupendous variety of light waves reflected from them, but these light waves are not a dog or a Vermeer. Can one make art by eliminating the middle term, and just having light?

That is what Turrell has tried to do -- and with brilliant success, leading us to question our sense of substance, presence and absence while looking at his work. A wall floats and fogs out in a blue hypnotic glow; a tract of colored light takes on the apparent density of a screen or a boundary. These are not cheap hall-of-illusion effects. At its best, as in Raemar, Turrell's work has a restrained, elevated air, hushed and deliberate; one thinks of Mark Rothko's paintings, translated into three dimensions and actual conditions of light. And just as Rothko's paintings were once accused of "emptiness" -- there being nothing for the casual eye to engage beyond a couple of fuzzy colored rectangles -- so Turrell's installations may be thought, by some, not full enough. But after a while the question of fullness vs. emptiness turns on itself; in contemplating these peaceful and august light chambers, one is confronted -- perhaps more vividly than by any current painting -- with the reflection of one's own mind creating its illusions and orientations, and this becomes the "subject" of the work. The art, it transpires, is not in front of your eyes. It is behind them. --By Robert Hughes

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