James Turrell
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/highlights/001102_turrell.shtml
“His aim is to make environments that will enhance the natural light and dark.”
“one of his earliest memories is of his grandmother inviting him to ‘go inside and greet the light’ at Quaker meetings”
“Sometime later he became involved in flying high-altitude spy planes for the Central Intelligence Agency which resulted in a fascination in the tricks of perception.”
“After completing a degree in perceptual psychology, Turrell began to experiment with light.”
‘The ideal viewer, who will treasure this light. I make situations that allow anyone to have this relationship.’ –JT
“Furthermore when Turrell exhibited in New York last year, several people were so convinced by the illusions of light that they tripped over the beams and fell to the floor. One such casualty sued Turrell for the broken wrist that she sustained.”
“Turrell’s vision is to create a number of chambers within the volcano where visitors will ‘feel the presence of gathered starlight’.”
http://www.pomona.edu/Magazine/PCMWin02/CRturrell.shtml
“Turrell has moved cinder from high to low spots in the crater’s small bowl, making it more uniform. This accentuates a perceptual phenomenon in which the sky can appear to be a dome.”
“Under the volcano, the artist is building interconnected tunnels and chambers that direct a viewer’s attention toward perceptions of light, color, space and time.”
“I think about artists as exploring the content and the aesthetics of thought, but also of sending you back to your own exploration of this territory,” – JT
“To stumble, blinking in the white light, out into the crater’s bowl, pulse and respiration elevated, is to experience a vivid sensation, like rebirth.”
““At times the only difference between hallucination and reality is consensus,” says Turrell. “How we respond to light and space, the feeling and sense of space, and how reality is put into question—these sorts of things, and the emotions attached to them, are not much talked about, but I think are worth exploring.””
“This is a period where we’ve never been richer, never had greater individual worth, and yet we are continually removing funding from the arts,” – JT
“Every 18.61 years, when the moon reaches its most southerly orbital declination, it will cast a beam of light through a precisely aligned tunnel, projecting, as a huge camera obscura, an 8-foot-diameter lunar image on the marble monolith for about two minutes.”
“Visitors are expected to be limited to 14 a day when the crater opens.”
“There’s a very pure, spare quality about his work that does seem consistent with a Quaker background,” – Marjorie Harth
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2004/dec/22/art/print
“Roden Crater, guarded by Turrell's team, is as difficult to access as any of the land art works. Rumours abound of uninvited visitors, in search of the site, vainly trekking for days through the Painted Desert.”
“These are troubling questions. And yet there is an undeniable majesty in Roden Crater, as there is in all the land art masterpieces. As we stand and stare at it, cowed into silence, it echoes the line in the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem: "What I do is me: for that I came."”
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25007947?seq=2
“Turrell began searching for a hemispherically-shaped, dished space, four hundred to a thousand feet above a plain. A high-altitude site would reveal the slight convex curvature of the earth, which pilots flying at low altitude can often experience.”
Maya Lin
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/monumental.html
“Never has a wall—a structure that divides—done so much to unite. Its power to create a common ground, to stir deep emotions and even to heal (to use that overused word) is difficult to pinpoint.”
“Christopher Knight, art critic for the Los Angeles Times, declared in 2000 that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the “greatest aesthetic achievement in an American public monument in the 20th century.””
““Wherever I go, veterans will come to my lectures and say thank you,” she says. “It’s really powerful. They’re a little teary, I’m a little teary. I end up thanking them.””
“Her work has frequently tested the boundaries between architecture and art—a tension that she cultivates. Her sculptures have drawn crowds to gallery shows, and she is in demand as a lecturer.”
““I do like the simplicity of her work, the way she strips things down,” says Carl Pucci, a New York City architect who has followed her progress since her undergraduate days. “And she’s gained confidence in that style over the years.””
“Her late father was a ceramicist and dean of fine arts at OhioUniversity; her mother, now retired, taught literature at the college.”
“Lin accompanied her drawings with an essay, handwritten on a single sheet of paper, that helped make her case. “For death is in the end a personal and private matter,” she wrote, “and the area contained within this memorial is a quiet place meant for personal reflection and private reckoning.””
““There were some young officers calling the wall the black gash of shame,” says Brig. Gen. George Price, a member of the veterans memorial advisory board and an African- American. “I just lost it and said that they were dealing with an issue that had racial overtones inconsistent with the principles behind the memorial. I thought we went through the riots of the ’60s to set that record straight.””
““Hart looked me straight in the face and said, ‘My statue is going to improve your memorial,’” recalls a stillindignant Lin. “How can an artist say that? And at this time, the statue would have gone at the apex, and their heads would have stood above the wall.””
“In mid-November 1982, more than 150,000 veterans assembled in Washington for a five-day homage that included a candlelight vigil, a reading aloud of the 57,939 names then inscribed on the Wall and a triumphant parade. For many Vietnam veterans, it was the first time they were cheered.”
“It backed the creation, in 1996, of a half-scale replica of the memorial, known as the Wall that Heals, which has traveled to more than 100 towns.”
“Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History, writes on the Web site that the monument “stands as a vivid symbol of both unity and redemption. The Wall was originally intended to commemorate the dead, and it has succeeded admirably. But it is currently transcending that function to become an instrument of goodwill.””
““They’re large-scale artworks, but they are anti-monumental. No matter how large the piece might be, in the end, it breaks down to an intimate, psychological experience.”” – ML
“Lin’s love of nature’s handiwork is evident in one of her favorite installations, Wave Field, dedicated in 1995 on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Inspired by a photograph of water waves in a book, she reshaped a campus quadrangle into a series of gently undulating berms.”
“she describes her design style as one that borrows elements from Japanese temples and Shaker, Scandinavian and early modernist ideals.”
““I completely believe that the natural environment is more beautiful than anything we as people or artists can create,” says Lin, who is a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The extinction memorial, she says, “is really about focusing on biodiversity and the loss of the land that you need to sustain a diverse planet. That one is going to be political— as if the others were not. Of course it’s political. I’m political. That’s where I have also evolved.””
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40426096
“but I have always wanted the integration between sculpture and text to be less a surface applied event than one in which the words and their meaning correspond to the space, and one’s movement through it.”
“The sculpture for the Cleveland Public Library, like my body of work is site specific, but it will respond not just to the physical site conditions but to the cultural context of the library.”
“What happens when sculpture and words can help shape each other’s meanings-so that words become descriptive of the spaces they inhabit and the spaces are somewhat shaped by the choice of words?”
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