Seeing seeing

Sight gives us the ability to understand our environment, but do we think about the act of seeing? Don’t we just see, in the same way that we just breathe?

The ability to see is a wonder, a mystery to us, as is the connection between sight and thought. Images inhabit our minds continually, so much so that we are rarely aware of the process of seeing, or of instructing our mind to see, the mechanical process just happens. Nor are we likely to “see ourselves seeing”, as James Turrell describes, that is, to seek to understand not only the mechanism of sight but the limits and possibilities of individual perception.

James Turrell wants us to explore ‘perception’, not through pseudoscientific exploration of sight’s mechanics but through probing of spaces in which aspects of “seeing”, from the physiological to the sublime, are revealed. To Turrell the subject being space and the material being light are one and the same. He wants you to feel the presence of light inhabiting a space and to acquire maximum effect not just through your body but through a whole body and psychological experience. It is about creating spaces that allow us the opportunity to realise that our ‘seeing’ is conditioned by limits, physical or learned by perception.

Turrell’s interest in light as the material of his art emerged around 1967 during his studies at Pomona and Irvine. Turrell has created a number of exhibits and several series of works for interiors which provide various perceptual situations, for example, movable ceilings or redirected exterior light. Turrell’s work has been linked with the works of nineteenth – century Luminists by using materials of light to affect the medium of perception using light in its material aspect instead of recording light in a natural sense say the action of light through clouds or vistas, storms like artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederick Kensett. The likes of Turrell turn away from operatic landscapes, baroque or gregarious work, adapting a view that is classic, contained, private, introverted, exploring a state of ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’. Like Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman, light comes out of them, they glow. They are dematerialised – you feel what you see, you respond to what’s around you physically like a drop in temperature within a space.