SOLSC 17: Art in Dark and Light

James Turrell is one of my favorite artists. He creates works that “collect” light and make you think you see something you don’t. I first saw his work at the Whitney Museum in the 1980s. One work looked like a white rectangle painted on the wall. When I got closer, I realized that what I saw was a rectangle cut in the wall, but from a distance light made the space look like a solid.

            Ad Reinhardt was a mid-20th century abstract artist who also worked magic with color. Turrell was greatly influenced by Reinhardt, and for a few weeks, the Pace Gallery in New York had a show that presented a work by Turrell, as well as a Reinhardt collection curated by Turrell. And that’s where I went this afternoon.

            Turrell’s “After Effect” was in a dark room, to which eight people were allowed in at a time, and we had five minutes to soak in the slowly changing colors from rose to green, looking like a rectangle at an angle. Of course, that isn’t exactly what was there, and we didn’t have much chance to really examine the work, given our time constraint and that we had to sit on a bench and not move around. (See the link below, but a photo really doesn’t do justice to what’s there.)

            The Reinhardt was much more satisfactory, as we could stay as long as we wanted in front of each of the eight paintings. A canvas of solid black would, with patient looking, begin to reveal shadowy red-black blooms that almost pulsate. A solid blue long rectangle actually had a slightly thicker thin blue line in the middle, and some of the blue was just a tad lighter than the rest, but you had to look at it deeply so see the difference. I would have liked to get up close and examine the paint on the canvas — how did he achieve his effects? — but the setup kept viewers at least three feet away.

            Still, it provided many moments of stillness and looking.

Turrell’s “After Effect”

Reinhardt’s Color Out of Darkness

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 17 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

 

SOL Tuesday: Small World Story 1

My daughter and I are on a road trip north, through the western edge of New England, visiting friends, and ending up in the tiny village in central Vermont where my aunt Nita and uncle Ben lived and my husband and I visited every summer, until my aunt died in 1997.

            Today’s stopover was in Williamstown, Mass. After spending last night with a friend, we went to the Clark museum and Mass MOCA before moving on to East Dover, Vermont. At Mass MOCA we experienced one of James Turrell’s light installations (if you don’t know his work, please look it up and visit anything that is near you). I usually don’t use “experience” as a verb, but that is the only way to describe this particular work at Mass MOCA, Perfectly Clear: you stand in a large room painted all white and over the course of several minutes, the walls, floor, and ceiling subtlely change color. You feel like you are standing in the midst of nothing, surrounded only by color, and if you look behind you, the wall of the room you just left has turned some totally different color simply from the ambient light coming from the room you are in.

            As we are leaving this exhibit, we are standing by a couple with two preteen-age children. The woman asks me if I’m from New York, and she thinks she knows me, but she can’t think how. After some back and forth of how we might know each other, we realize that she was my student in the late ’80s in an undergraduate Copy Editing class I taught at NYU. When she told me her name, I remembered her instantly; in fact, I’d noticed her name on the masthead of Scientific American some years after I’d stopped teaching full-time. She was one of my best students, too, and I am so glad she ventured to ask how we might know each other.

            I’m calling this Small World Story 1, because there have been many more and will be many more. We are all only a few degrees from knowing everyone in the world.