Turrell at the Bookstore

The colorful book, James Turrell: a Retrospective, published at the occasion of three exhibitions taking place conjointly at the LACMA, the Guggenheim, NYC and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will overshadow the display at the gift shops this Summer with its pink, mauve to violet jacket, the artist's name spelled in red on the background.
Three hundred pages long, composed of ten chapters, the coffee table look-alike book is filled with breathtaking photographs and includes a biography, an interview with James Turrell and essays written by Michael Govan , CEO and director of LACMA, Christine Y. Kim, associate curator at the LACMA and two contributors, Alison de Lima Greene, curator at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and E.C. Krupp, astronomer, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.
Each chapter is printed on a different colored paper, turquoise, mustard, dark blue, violet, red... Under the chapter's title, a statement from the artist introduces the text followed by abundant photographs to illustrate the subject. We discover skylight spaces, ganzfeld effect, the architecture of space and follow the artist's path through his projects like Roden Crater in Arizona or others in far away places like Japan, Australia, Argentina...
Alison de Lima Green reminds us of Turrell's background: California in the sixties, Minimalism, the Light and Space movement and relates his interaction with numerous artists including Robert Smithson, Dan Flavin, Malevich with a special mention for Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler, otherwise, the book is exclusively dedicated to Turrell and his work for the past fifty years. The contribution of technology to "see the light", emphasized in the last chapter brings us back to the introduction titled "Inner light, the radical reality of James Turrell" which resumes the quest of the artist.
A book filled with colors, but a visit to the museum is required to look for the light.



photographs Flickr Photo Sharing

"Gand", 1968
"Air Apparent", ASU Campus, Tempe, AZ