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James Turrell, Skyspace, The Way of Color

James Turrell's art piece at the Crystal Bridges Museum uses nature as a palette. The room's changing lights and the sky's colors interact, creating a unique experience. This artwork challenges the idea of unchanging art, emphasizing the importance of perception and time. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.

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  • male robot hal style avatar for user KEVIN
    In the description, what does "228 x 652" refer to? Thanks.
    (4 votes)
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  • mr pants teal style avatar for user Anthony Natoli
    What is the height of the structure?

    The caption and end-card at the end of the video give only two dimensions of the structure: 228 x 652 inches.

    Is 228 inches = 19 feet the height of the structure, and 652 = about 54 feet the diameter of the apparently circular structure? And is that the inner diameter of the observation room, or the outer diameter of the entire structure?

    Or is 228 x 652 inches the width and length of the outside of the structure, leaving out the height?
    (3 votes)
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  • starky sapling style avatar for user Saint Dane
    Is this inspired by or perhaps a modern take on the Pantheon?
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  • female robot grace style avatar for user Digital Citizen
    How is the colour inside "determined"? Is it some refraction or filtering of the natural light outside, or artificial, whether random or sequenced or algorithmic based on the colour outside? Or some other means. Thank you.
    (1 vote)
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Video transcript

(jazz piano) - [Steven] We're in a small building on the land of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in a room, designed by James Turrell, looking out through an oculus, a hole with no glass. - [Beth] And the room itself is circular. The entranceway, narrower at the top, wider at the bottom, the geometries of the space are very simple. - [Steven] It feels so elemental. As we record this, it's six AM. The James Turrell is activated only at dawn and dusk. - [Beth] And as we sit here, the lights that are at the edge of where the stone meets the wall, change color. - [Steven] But it's not so much that the walls change color, but the color of the sky is therefore changed, so right now, I'm looking at this cool yellow-green, and the sky is the most intense, rich, vivid indigo. - [Beth] Moments before the walls were deep greenish yellow, and what we saw through the oculus was a reddish gray, so here, time is an important subject, a very slow movement of sunrise and then also the scale of time, the changing of the lights that Turrell has orchestrated for us. - [Steven] I would argue that there's a 3rd shift of time, which is your own eyes' adjustment, and so it's this interaction between nature, the intervention of the artist, and our own experience. And it's all about this relationship between the color visible, it's only the way in which the frame of the sky has been altered. - [Beth] So what that makes me think about is how everything is contingent, everything is related to everything else around it. It makes me think that there is no one truth, everything is dependent on human vision, on what we bring to it, our own perception. - [Steven] And here, we're talking about the color of the sky. Here we're talking about the earth below. Nothing could be more stable and yet James Turrell, the artist, has unveiled that contingent relationship between us and the world around us. - [Beth] We normally think about works of art as things that are unchanging. Painting in a museum one week is the same painting the next week. And, in a way, that's part of the point about art for centuries, is that it communicated something that was unchanging, that was a truth. - [Steven] That outlived us. - [Beth] Right, and here Turrell has created something, which evolves and changes and looks likely different to you than it does to me. - [Steven] The light has changed again, and now there's this wonderful pink glow inside, and the sky is this deep, sea green. James Turrell's work is usually considered an earth work. That is, it is something that takes nature as its palette instead of paint on canvas. - [Beth] And this was something that artists began to explore in the 1960s, a period when there was increasing attention to human beings' impact on nature and the ways that we were endangering our home, the earth. - [Steven] We're here on a cloudy day, which is creating this very soft sky, and it's in real contrast to the very sharp edge, which I think is really important in Turrell's work. - [Beth] It's very difficult to not see this as an eye itself. The circular shape of the room, two circles inside that, the area of color in the center. I feel like I'm looking with my eyes and in some ways there's an eye that's looking at me. - [Steven] That's an ancient idea and probably the most famous example of that is the Pantheon in Rome with its oculus, and in fact, the word oculus has the room as our English word ocular, and it does in fact mean eye, and there's always been this sense of a relatonship between our vision upward to the heavens and the way in which the eye of God may be looking down at us. - [Beth] Day has begun and we can see outside, and I feel this tension between things that stay the same, the circular spare shape of this room, and the sky that's changing more visibly now as the light has come up, so we're seeing more birds, more clouds that pass, so that there's this tension between stillness and movement. (jazz piano)