‘It Cost Me Two Marriages and a Relationship’: Watch James Turrell Explain the High Price of His Still-Unfinished Masterpiece

by admin

Jan 16, 2020

artnet

Artist James
Turrell has achieved a kind of rarely paralleled notoriety in
the art world: not only is he a popular favorite with the public,
but he is also able to count critics, collectors, and
even Kanye West as some of his biggest fans.

Turrell, who has a show on now at the Museo Jumex in Mexico
City that includes wall-mounted works alongside larger
installations, was an early pioneer of the Light and Space
movement.

His work is also informed by his studies of perception,
psychology, and the cosmos, which inspire him to create light
installations and sculptures that verge on the sublime.

For the past four decades, he has been hard at work realizing
Roden Crater, an ambitious Land Art masterpiece that
is transforming the site of a now extinct volcano in the remote
Painted Desert of Arizona into a celestial observatory.

It has been a long and
complicated project. “People often ask me how much this crater
costs,” Turrell said in an exclusive 2001 interview with Art21.
“It cost me two marriages and a
relationship.”

James Turrell’s Roden Crater
(ongoing). © 2017 Skystone Foundation. © James Turrell.

A devout Quaker, Turrell is heavily influenced by his
spirituality, and the slow, quiet contemplation that is integral to
its practice.

Speaking to Art21, he recounts one of his
earliest memories, of visiting a Quaker meeting house and asking
his grandmother what he was supposed to be doing. Her response:
“Just wait, we’re going inside to greet the light.”

You could say that from that moment, Turrell has been chasing
the light.

“I had this thought to just
bring the cosmos closer down to the space we occupy,” Turrell
says in the Art21 episode, which originally appeared in the Art
in the Twenty-First Century television
series. One of the ways
he’s made that vision a reality is through a Quaker meeting house
in Houston, Texas, which he outfitted with a Skyspace that opens up
like a little window into the cosmos.

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part
of Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century series, below.
“James Turrell: Passages of Light” is on view at
Museo Jumex through March 29, 2020.

This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration
between artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking
artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art
in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all
episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play
and learn about the organization’s educational programs
at Art21.org.

The post ‘It Cost Me Two Marriages and a Relationship’:
Watch James Turrell Explain the High Price of His Still-Unfinished
Masterpiece appeared first on artnet News.