A View of the Sky: On James Turrell and Atmospheric Isolation
Tobias Carroll on sight, skyspaces, and states of unbecoming.
There’s a context for this: during a period in my early twenties, I started to fear the sky.
I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey, where I was never far from pastoral fields or glimpses of cloud-filled skies and tree branches reaching into them, but when I went to college amid NYU’s brick halls in Greenwich Village, any and all views of the sky were occluded by buildings old and new collectively looming overhead. Somewhere in those months, the sky became alien. On a trip out of the city, venturing back to my home state on the Newark Bay Bridge, I caught a glimpse of the open blue sky through silhouetted metalwork and I was overtaken by the fear that I would be pulled up into it.
I’ve since learned that there’s a name for this fear: casadastraphobia. Not that the sky is falling, but that you are falling into the sky.
I haven’t felt that way in a good long while: after college I stayed in the city but moved to a neighborhood where the sky was visible in clouds and slices of blue and grey, whether from an apartment window or on walks from street to street. During the time when I worked at jobs that held me away from the sky, including one three-year stint in a basement office, I did my best to sneak in fixes of the sky whenever I could: a trip to the open meadows of Prospect Park, or a segment of my commute transferred to a ferry, the view of sky and clouds over lower Manhattan’s bridges, in the unobstructed waters between riverbanks and skyline.
Like a work of art in a museum open to the public: the sky existed for everyone, but I was the only one who could see it.
It’s a space that lends itself to silence. The neutral tones of the walls accentuate the natural light. And above: the sky. Every once in a while an aircraft would cut across the view of the sky, creating an implicit triangle as it went. Clouds passed. I became sensitive to the gradients of blue visible overhead, and sensitive to the sounds and silences around me. I could feel the way my body rested on the seat. I became aware of things I never would have otherwise noticed.
It’s hard to explain the appeal of skyspaces. It’s like anything oblique: the value comes from the experience. Even so, running down a list of friends and family suggests a whole lot of people I know — intelligent, thoughtful people — for whom the process of sitting in a stark room and looking at the sky would be intolerable.
But the sum is more than the parts, the artist or the art.
James Turrell: American artist; Quaker; onetime war resister, for which he spent time in jail. The globe is dotted with skyspaces that Turrell has designed; the look and feel of each is distinct, while the sky above each remains the sky. I have sat in several, though nowhere near as many as I’d like. Some are markedly simple, while others incorporate a technological aspect. The commonalities are these: seats, either in a square or circle, around an opening in the ceiling, through which the sky is visible. Sometimes the design of the skyspace accentuates the blues or greys of the sky above; sometimes the color or texture of the sky is left on its own, impassive, awaiting interpretation or projection. Turrell may be best known for his massive work Roden Crater, which has been in progress for decades now and may be open to the public at some point in the near future. Or not.
The sense of time and structure evoked in a skyspace is not unlike the process of looking at the blank page and slowly, haltingly, developing something on it. There are obvious differences as well, but that sense of wrestling with absence is paramount. And it’s terrifying: trying to make heads or tails of raw material that, literally, could be anything. There are no hints; there are no prompts. There’s only the simplest of structures around me and a blank page, waiting for an idea or a concept to seize me.
Sometimes it’s thrilling; sometimes it’s a horrifying reminder of insignificance. Sometimes it leaves me paralyzed, unsure of what my next move should be. As I write this, the concept of writing more fiction feels as unnerving to me as those early-20s drives under the all-enveloping sky. Then and now I am experiencing my smallness. The world is pulling me up.
My first exposure to a work of Turrell’s came in Minneapolis in the winter of 2006. It was a warm January: I’d packed a down coat, thinking that was the appropriate thing to wear in the Twin Cities in the middle of winter, but soon found that wearing it caused me to sweat through layers of clothing. The friend I was visiting took me to the Walker Art Center one day, and we walked through the grounds and the sculptures adjoining the museum and approached what looked like a burrow in the earth. This was Sky Pesher.
Inside, the space was square, with a row of seats running along the perimeter. Four or five people could have comfortably sat on each one of them, though far fewer were there on that afternoon. Above us, at the top of the space, was a hole, a smaller square through which the sky was visible. And so I sat there and took in its subtle shifts, and left when I felt satisfied.
Since then I’ve visited: Meeting, at MoMA PS1 in Queens; Light Reign, at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; Aten Reign, at the Guggenheim in Manhattan for a few months in 2013; and Blue Pesher, located on the grounds of the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art in Nashville. As different as they are, the feeling is always the same: a sense of grounding against the sense of drowning.
Turrell has cited the design of Quaker meeting houses as an inspiration for his skyspaces. It’s probably not coincidental that my sole experience with Quakerism came at the wedding of the friend who’d first taken me to see Sky Pesher. My experience with that is limited — seats arranged in a way where those seated face one another, an emphasis on waiting and a sense of community — and yet: the notion of waiting in silence and speaking if you’re so moved by the spirit was profound to me in a way that the religion I was raised in was not.
Perhaps the appeal of Turrell’s work for me comes from the inherent accessibility of it. My one attempt to take an art history course in college involved being asked to leave it. (Not even for a good reason: I hadn’t taken a prerequisite that hadn’t been listed as mandatory.) As with many things in my life, my penchant for art is self-driven, my fondness for certain works and certain artists coming in fits and starts, without much underlying logic. But many of the artists whose work I find myself drawn to create work that feels immersive — literally, in some cases. Besides Turrell, Julie Mehretu and Janet Cardiff come to mind. There’s something about feeling dwarfed by a work, of feeling like I’m beholding something that could, if it so desired, swallow me up. In a way, it’s a kind of repurposing of those old anxieties, those fearsome sensations that have become familiar, an old rival that’s become an even older friend.
A series of colors, a sense of something grander; if not a glimpse of the infinite, a glimpse of something approaching. If the canvas of these works is the sky, then it seems to ask whoever regards it to consider the sky in the same way that they might otherwise consider a visual work that someone labored over for days and nights for years. But in the case of the sky, the frequently blank sky, there’s a sense for me of a need to impose something on it.
While I’d already begun writing fiction at the time of that trip to Minneapolis, it occurs to me now that the first works of mine to be published were written and revised in the aftermath of this trip. Call it a way of seeing. Call it a revision. Call it a way of learning to see something in a new way. Call it discovering that the thing that once profoundly terrified you would later become your greatest ally. Call it seats around an opening, and above them a view of the sky. A blessed shift in scale: the distant and impossible words called to earth.
Blue Pesher may be the largest skyspace I’ve visited. A light rain was falling when I got to the sculpture garden. I set out on a mile-long walk through the woods, around which a host of artworks were found. Turrell’s skyspace was at the very end of this. After walking for half an hour or so, I reached it; a pair of towering doors led inside. I walked into the main space, which was round with a hole in the roof and a charcoal pit in the center. A sign I’d seen before entering instructed visitors to avoid walking on the charcoal.
Inside, I found a group of people having their photographs taken. I’m not sure what the occasion was: a wedding or a documentation of a family event or something different. I came inside and sat down and very quickly realized that I was the sole outsider in the room. I sat quietly and stared at the sky and the walls and drowned out the sound of a shutter snapping and snapping. The photographer had positioned themself directly in the charcoal pit. Mixed emotions: the sense of community, of seeing people who clearly loved the space as much as I did; and alongside that, the frustration that they’d hired someone who had no issue disregarding the artist’s wishes for the space.
That’s the hazard of loving a work of art: that which you think profound might only be a cool backdrop for someone else, an obstacle to ford, a means to an end.
And that’s also the hazard of making art: once it’s done, you have no control over how it’s received. In front of hundreds of pairs of eyes, your intentions don’t matter. Once you’ve moved the work outside of that silent space, your time to shape it is over.
In 2013, New York’s Pace Gallery held a showing of Turrell’s sketches and models for spaces built and unbuilt, including a host of models and renderings of Roden Crater. I furtively left my office job and made my way across Manhattan for the opening: through the workday and tourist crowds of Times Square and up into the 50s, a space where the sidewalks were less crowded and the views more open.
I’ve joked to friends about a theoretical skyspace punch card, where visiting ten would grant you admission to some distant or otherwise difficult-to-reach one: Amarna, located in Hobart, Australia, for instance. But given that several of the skyspaces were built in private residences, the likelihood of visiting them all is slim. This was the next best thing, then. The trip to Epcot in lieu of the world tour. I lingered there for a while, feeling underdressed and out of place, but grateful that I’d made it.
On the opposite side of some display cases, I saw a white-bearded man in conversation with a group of attendees. If this wasn’t Turrell, it was at least his body double. I felt an onrush of jitters. It was a feeling not unlike what I’d felt upon realizing that I was standing ten feet from Ian MacKaye at a punk show in Washington, D.C. years before: the glowing proximity of a hero, and the fear of doing something utterly mortifying in front of them. But with someone whose essence is absence, here was an entirely different context: at the risk of unbecoming, here was a most welcome sense of presence.
Tobias Carroll is the author of the books Reel and Transitory. He is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn, and writes the monthly Watchlist column for Words Without Borders.
