James Turell- feeling something, something come through light, come through space.

I have just been spending the afternoon reading the entire catalogue of James Turrell "Zug Zuoz"after recently having seen his skyspace in MoMA PS1 in New York. His reflections about light, seeing and being....outside-inside-outside light

"Even in the skyspace you are not looking even at the light; you are looking at what the light does to the sky. so this idea of the presence of light, making it physically felt to feel its power, you can't use it with image because then you're paying attention to the content or story. you can move through time with this light, as in music. ... Pianists can even sometimes go beyond what the composer was mapping out. and in mapping the territory, these people can very elegantly express that territory. So I see this quality of light without image as having the possibility of having a sort of inner pure emotion, or perhaps a stricter and more direct way to the idea of an expression of how to survive. you can begin to get toward that way of feeling something, and feeling something, something come through light, come through space... The big thing is that it's something we don't see a lot of, coming, moving through volume, just this color coming from behind, through the front, and then the color that's expressly part of it....I mean if you have something that has no image, and maybe there's no particular object, and nothing to focus on- so without image or object or focus what is there, you know?...It comes from nothing; and then, nothing is not nothing, emptiness in not emptiness...."

"I generally make a light that we don't normally see; I like that. Now we're looking at light. We're not looking at what light reveals about somethings else. Light is not illuminating another thing. We're looking at the light itself. "

"It's just like the skyspaces are a gentle reminder, or a mild koan - a koan being the Zen question that doesn't really have an answer about how we create the reality in which we live, because we color the sky but we are very unaware that we give the sky its color. and it is only becaus we give the sky its color, that I am able to change the color of the sky for you. ... We are not so much of how much this reality, this thing we receive is actually created by us....It is this idea of how much we ourselves make of this reality within which we exist."

That what people in leadership call the "inner place- a capacity that sets apart one person/leader from the other- that the same situation and actions can have two completely different outcomes, depending on that inner starting point." Otto Scharmer

Seize and enjoy this outside-inside-outside light!!

James Turrell 2009

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:James_Turrell-Zuoz-048.jpg

Book www.hatjecantz.de/controller.php?cmd=detail&titzif=00002602&lang=en or AMAZON