James Turrell: Master Of Light
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Welcome to Klaas Olsson Klaas Olsson
Welcome to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service. This is the programme that explores the work of the world's leading artists as they're making it. We have to finish the floor, do the finish to the seats, also get the cushions made. I'm Julian May and I'm at Aarhus, the art museum in Aarhus in Denmark. I'm on the top floor, a circular gallery with glass walls. As I walk round, I realise the glass is red, then further on it's orange, yellow, green, blue. I'm looking down at the city through a rainbow panorama. It's beautiful.
The experience that you had was walking around Oliver Eliasson's artwork, which is called Your Rainbow Panorama, an experience with light and colour. And the reason it's called Your Rainbow Panorama is because it's for the city and the citizens of Aarhus to see their city 360 degrees in all of the colours of the rainbow and all of the colours of the spectrum.
It's January the 15th today, overcast, grey, cold. I begin to understand that here in the north, where the winters are long and it never really gets light, and the summers short and it never really gets dark, people have an intense relationship with light.
You're right. Rebecca Matthews, museum director and chief executive of Aros, Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark. I do think the Danes have a relationship to light. The Danes are very, very specific about how they light their homes. Lighting and lamps are incredibly important. It's very rare you will see a bulb in a Danish home just like hanging from the ceiling. There will be lamps that are hung over special parts of a room so that it creates the atmosphere, the hooglidt. You know, this coziness, hygge, that the Danes really genuinely focus on. So when you buy a house in Denmark, there's no lights and no light bulbs because that's your job to light the space how you want to. So, yeah, I think Danes do have a really interesting relationship to light.
So it's no surprise that the newest work here that's still being built, it will open on June the 19th, close to midsummer, is all about light and colour. Outside the entrance to Aarhus, which is a very modern building, is a huge mound covered in grass. It looks ancient. It could be the burial site of a Viking chief, except for a rusty metal cap and some men I see working on it. This is the latest of what James Turrell calls Sky Spaces, and it's titled As Seen Below the Dome. To experience the work, you'll have to go underground beneath the huge dome and look up to a hole in the top. that's cut out to let the sky in.
Working with James Turrell, he really is an artist whose works are probably the most rigorous and sustained artistic investigation into perception and light that we've ever seen. It's probably reflected in the psyche of the Danes, yeah.
James Turrell, in his 80s now, has created skyspaces in 39 countries. He's famous as a light artist. But, I asked when we met, haven't all artists all over the world always been concerned with light? The 19th century Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma is famous for capturing the play of sunlight on skin. Light is a recurring theme in the work of the Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo. And for the Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, light was an emotional and spiritual force. What, James Turrell, are you doing that's different?
The history of art is littered with art that's about light. The difference here is this is light.
Right. So artists of the past have been depicting light, but you've been... Using it. Yes.
So I use the material light to affect the medium of perception. Right.
Light itself is the material.
And it is material. I mean, it's part of our diet. We drink it as vitamin D through the skin. So we have a physical connection as well as intellectual and spiritual connection. You know, when I talk about near-death experience, all that vocabulary is the vocabulary of light.
My understanding is that your new piece, as seen below, we access through a tunnel into a room full of light.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–7:24
2
What is James Turrell’s Skyspace and where is As Seen Below – The Dome located?
7:24–11:27
3
Why does Aarhus and Danish culture have a special relationship with light?
11:27–23:25
4
How does James Turrell define light as his artistic material rather than a subject?
23:25–29:16