James Turrell at the Guggenheim

I did not see nor wait in line for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Rain Room" (nor have I queued up, beginning at 5:30 am, for a cronut--yet), so I cannot say definitively that James Turrell's (1934-) exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum is the most crowd-pleasing New York City art show of the summer, but I won't hesitate to urge anyone who is in anywhere near upper Manhattan, has a few hours, and wants to be delighted and lulled by Turrell's artistry to catch the show.

Afrum I (White), 1967 (iPhone drawing by John Keene)

Ronin (1968), Fluorescent light,
dimensions variable
© James Turrell / Photo: Courtesy the Stedelijk Museum

Running until September 25, and James Turrell's first exhibition since 1980 in a New York City museum, the show gathers together several differing and compelling examples of this artist's work, which employs and explores light, color, space, and the possibilities human perception. The show-stopper, which I had heard people rave about and thus had to experience firsthand, is Aten Reign (2013), his transformation of the Guggenheim's rotunda into a sublime oculus that fills and shifts with natural and artificial light depending upon the position of the sun and time of day, the weather, and perhaps other mechanisms I'm unaware of. When I entered the museum, the rotunda was a pale yellow, and I thought, pretty but ho hum, certainly an accomplishment but not worthy of all the hullabaloo. I preceded up the spiral to view the smaller light displays in the Annex-level galleries, about which I'll say a little more below, and was impressed, though the long line to see the topmost piece, a bit of a dud that plays deeply with one's sense of space and vision, did peeve me. I returned downstairs and decided to stand at the periphery of the oculus and draw it, since photography was forbidden. (I had been drawing in my sketchbook, so I decided to see if I could get away with using my phone.)

Aten Reign, 2013 (iPhone drawing by John Keene)

Rendering for Aten Reign (2013), Daylight and
LED light, © James Turrell / Rendering: Andreas Tjeldflaat,
2012 © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

As one of Turrell's famous Skypaces--and evocative in particular of his Roden Crater Project (1979-, the cinder cone crater he has remade in Flagstaff, Arizona), and of Meeting (1986), at New York's P.S. 1--Aten Reign demonstrates his sense of how to use light as a painterly and sculptural tool and device, in order to transform sensory perception. The rain clouds, which necessitated an umbrella, and late afternoon hour paid off, because by the time I had reached the rotunda it was beginning to dramatically and rapidly shift. Green, orange, yellow, and my favorite, an almost unbearably exquisite lavender that held for several minutes, before giving way to a tranquil, transcendent blue. I wanted to lie down on the mat that had been placed in the center of the floor to peer up at it, but there were no openings and none of the people there in deep thrall to the beautiful dance of light and hue appeared willing to move (I later read that the guards did cycle people in and out), so I walked around the periphery, drawing, staring up, in a reverie, just watching the unpredictable palette, until I decided to depart.

Prado (White), 1967

Curated by Carmen Giménez, Stephen and Nan Swid Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, and Nat Trotman, Associate Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and organized in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the show also included wall-sized backlighted pieces (Ronin, 1968) and projected light works: Afrum I (White), 1967) and Prado (White), 1967. There was only one real line to view one of the artworks, and it was a very long one, the line, that is, not the artwork, that stretched halfway up the final summit of the Guggenheim's spiral, and took about 45 minutes to get through (I stood for a longer period to see Christian Marclay's The Clock, but the payoff was huge), to see Iltar, 1976, an example of one of Turrell's Ganzfeld works, in which a volume of light exists without discernable limits and boundaries, and can produce equally accurate perceptions and interpretations of reality. In the Iltar room, which was divided, museum visitors stood in one space and encountered a "sensing space," a room or space that gathered its light energy from another area. In the case of Iltar, the effect was akin to peering into what looked like a cloud--only there was nothing there, no mist, no real light, only the production of an effect based on a structural device Turrell had created. It was intriguing, but ultimately, I thought, not worth the wait. Perhaps a smaller space--a gallery or several?--will host Turrell exhibits comprising a series of Ganzfelde--but make sure they're available for visitation for much greater hours than was the case to see Iltar.

The line to see Turrell's Iltar (1976)

The line to see Turrell's Iltar (1976)

Ultimately Aten Reign is worth the price of admission, or at least doesn't make shelling out $20 or so dollars that bad (though catch it on the Guggenheim's free day/night or use a student/elderly pass if you have one). And if you have to muscle--er, politely request that someone lift herself or himself off that circular pad so that you have an opportunity to stare up at the lightshow, well...I'm not counseling aggressive behavior, but when in Rome....

The entrance to Iltar (1976)

Iltar (1976), Tungsten light, dimensions variable
© James Turrell / Photo: Courtesy James Turrell

Ann Hamilton's "the event of a thread"

"the event of a thread"

Yesterday, with the end of the exciting but also exhausting fall academic semester nearly over and no classes or meetings scheduled,  I took a little time to see artist Ann Hamilton's much-heralded participatory installation, "the event of a thread", which is occurring in the Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory, at Park Avenue and 66th Street, through January 6, 2012. If you are in New York, I would urge you to catch it before it's gone. Some artists create works that can only be described as child-like and reveal the world to us through a perspective we may have lost; others produce artifacts that are childish, and make us wonder what their point is, beyond puerility; and then there is an Ann Hamilton, who, in the event of a thread, can invoke and return to us, via physical and emotional means, some of the wonder and most pleasurable moments of childhood while also pressing us to think carefully and critically about what she's up to.

The readers and the pigeons

Roberta Smith's some what snarky New York Times review of this installation ("I don’t even know if this is art, participatory theater, a refreshing sociological experiment in how quickly adults will take up childish things, or perhaps a harbinger of the next fitness craze."--is she kidding? In light of Fluxus, Conceptual Art, Performance Art, Relational Aesthetics, she is still asking such a question?) positively highlights its most notable element, the field of giant swings, which suspend from the Armory hall's main roof, and which I can attest are tremendous fun. They are large enough to hold two or three people, and are solid enough that you can really take flight in them without fear, so long as you hold on tightly, of plummeting to the floor.  To quote Hamilton herself: 

"I can remember the feeling of swinging--how hard we would work for those split seconds, flung at furthest extension, just before the inevitable downward and backward pull, when we felt momentarily free of gravity, a little hiccup of suspension when our hands loosened on the chain and our torsos raised off the seat. we were sailing, so inside the motion--time stopped--and then suddenly rushed toward us again. We would line up on the playground and try to touch the sky, alone together."

Inside motion, time stopping, alone together, touching sky--these feelings this installation replicates, multiply. The ever-changing crowd, emptying and filling swings ensure this. But there's more to the exhibit than the vast swing set; each one is linked, by cables, pullies and weights, to a giant white silk curtain that undulates based on the motions of each swing, creating an interdependent system in which each individual participant and all collectively control the motions of the curtain, those "many crossings of the near at hand and the far away" that Hamilton was hoping to produce, "transmission[s]" and connections, but also suggesting figuratively, at least to me on a winter day far warmer than usual, our global climate system. That the curtain itself, from a distance and up close, evokes both cloud and wave, only reinforced this. Smith notes that it echoes the work of Christo and Jean-Claude, which it certainly does, and it also reminded me of Hans Haacke's Blue Sail (1964-65, in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art) which floated like a dream in space, lifted only by fans and a counter-weight system, at the Ghosts in the Machine show at New York's New Museum this past fall. Like Haacke's piece, the curtain's metaphorical and analogic effects are immediate and enthralling.

Listening to one of the radios, with the swings and curtain behind me

The swings could have been enough, yet they hover in a larger field of ever-changing bodies, shifting interior light and ambient and projected, amplified sound, as well as a constellation of concepts and practices that Hamilton defines, obliquely but enticingly, in a free newspaper-like document that I'm glad I picked up and glanced at before writing this review.  As she has done with prior installations, this one includes seating figures at a desk, engagement with space and time, and a score.  As you enter the Drill Hall, you approach two announcers, reading from scrolls of text at a table, covered with 42 tiny pigeon cages, some of the birds in them cooing, some sleeping, several look a bit distressed; at the other end of the hall sits a scribe, dutifully writing away whatever he thinks of. All three seated figures wear thick shearling coats over denim worksuits. The announcers, actors from SITI Company, declaim from a collage-text concordance of works by authors ranging from Aristotle to Ann Lauterbach, but there are also portable radios, trussed in twine and brown-paper bags, that broadcast the announcers' declamations. Listening to one for a bit had a hypnotic effect on me. I would not suggest doing so while   swinging and trying to photograph oneself.

The swings and curtain

As I said, Hamilton provides her thoughts on the installation in the accompanying free newspaper, listing her motivations, intentions, and the projects key concepts. In a series of insightful, dictionary-like entries titled "Regarding...," authors Natalie Shapiro and Harry Reese offer their conceptual readings of each. Reese writes in "Regarding Touch,"

A knife, a watch, a motor, a stylus are able to do the same thing repetitively, the way that our hands begin and complete many different functions while remaining our hands. New hand tools and other mechanical devices have not replaced old hand tools as much as they have coexisted with them. 

Consciousness is not a verbal process and we learn through the fingers and hands in ways we cannot investigate or explain otherwise. From their start, digital technologies have depended upon the tactile environment to validate its generation, transmission, and reception. 

The tactility of visual art refers to what can be touched and let go, but not forgotten. Each sense creates its space. Tactility is not a sense, and although it often involves the sense of touch, it is the common-sense meeting place of all the senses. Constant touch however, is not tactile. Tactility refers to the gap in between an artifact and a medium. Tactility is the space of the resonant interval, what is touched and let go.

People having fun on the swings

Soundspacetimescape, what we enter, touch, exit and let go of, the complex sensorium everyone present creates and experiences at all times, sometimes with enjoyment and contemplation, but which is sharpened to its constituent elements in the Park Avenue Armory's Drill Hall: these are the events of a thread that Hamilton successfully pulls off. With (y)our help of course. So you must go see it and do you part, having some real fun in the process.

More photos and a video after the jump: