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Global cultures 1980–now
Course: Global cultures 1980–now > Unit 1
Lesson 13: Landscape and ecology- Desert to Suburb, framing the American Dream
- Mark Dion, Neukom Vivarium
- Mapping nature's stunning beauty
- A desert on fire, Salgado photographs Kuwait
- Michel Tuffery, Pisupo Lua Afe
- James Turrell, Skyspace, The Way of Color
- Endangered coastlines and lifeways
- Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Earth’s Creation
- Inspiration at Yosemite
- Binh Danh, Bridalveil Fall, Yosemite CA, May 31, 2012
- The landscape remade, Thiebaud's Ponds and Streams
- Noel Harding, The Elevated Wetlands
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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.
Want to join the conversation?
- In the description, what does "228 x 652" refer to? Thanks.(4 votes)
- 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) - Is this inspired by or perhaps a modern take on the Pantheon?(2 votes)
- 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)
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)