LIGHT AND DEATH

People who have had near death experiences typically describe the experience as a passage into light.

I could not help thinking about this as we experienced James Turrell’s Perfectly Clear (1991) at Mass MOCA. This is one of his immersive Ganzfeld installations, in which the boundaries of space and time are dissolved.

The museum docents said that Turrell does not want any photographs taken of his works.   Yet the docents were very willing to discuss what they knew about the geometry of this piece.  So I did the above drawing from memory.  I took the liberty of including a screen shot of the piece taken from the Mass MOCA website.

The experience of entering this piece is consonant with the entry experience of religious structures.  You first enter a small / dark / cool space and are asked to sit down on a simple wood bench and put slippers on over your shoes.  You can see the glowing light thru the opening to the light space.  You then ascend about 7 risers before you enter the space / sanctuary.  This is very similar to the manner in which you enter a mosque.  In that scenario, you take off your shoes in a small foyer, and then you enter the worship space.  The mosque sanctuary has no furniture.  You are oriented in one direction.

The light in the space enters from a very large room behind the wall opening.  This is depicted in my drawing with the intense yellow.  This is what I call the light generation room; light appears to achieve a critical mass and then infuses the sanctuary.  And you cannot make out the limits of the room;  it appears as an indeterminate light filled phenomenon.

Once you are inside, space and time really do dissolve.  Turrell’s Ganzfeld designs are characterized by the curve that he places between the floor, walls and ceilings.  With all of the light bouncing around the space, it does become nearly impossible to see where the floor ends and the wall starts.  You do feel that you are floating, or have dematerialized, into light.  The light changes color and intensity.  It shifts and pulses.

We have experienced two Turrell installations previous to this.  We saw Aten Reign in the Guggenheim.  We saw Light Reign at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.

And I just have to mention another Turrell piece at Mass MOCA.  This is called Hind Sight (1984).  The entry of this piece is the exact opposite of Perfectly Clear.  Hind Sight is a progression into absolute / total darkness.  You hold onto a handrail as you walk into the piece via a winding hallway.  There is only room for two people;  each person has their own handrail on either side of the corridor.  The handrail is your only orientation as it immediately gets too dark to see.  Your handrail leads you to a chair, which you have to figure out where the seat is, since it is absolutely dark.  And you sit in the chair for about 15 minutes.  At about 10 minutes your eyes have adjusted to the darkness to the point that you can barely see extremely faint shimmers of light, which we assume were projected onto a wall some distance in front of us.  The overall experience is about the absolute limits of your vision and the threshold of the human organism to perceive light.

Both pieces operate at the outer edge of the capacity of a human to see.  It makes you realize that our visual world, this thing that we call reality,  is nothing more than a very small slice of the eletromagnetic continuum.