When you shut your eyes you still see. If the light is strong you register a red haze as it passes through your eyelids, or the retinal after-images of bright objects. But even without residual inputs, even when there is nothing you can be said to have looked at, you still see spots and flashes and more organised phenomena like the fringe patterns that go with some headaches. That kind of brain-generated seeing, which has no starting point in seen objects, is one source of James Turrell's art. Another is the experience of space without reference points, as in a white-out when snow and mist remove all indication of near and far, or its converse - the absolute darkness of a blacked-out room. Indeed Turrell seems to find sources for his work in anything that separates light from substance, any situation where colour is abstracted from the thing it colours, light from its source and from the thing it illuminates. Secondary attributes which philosophers sought to distinguish from solid objects become primary.

LRB 16 December 2010 | PDF Download