Spirit & Light & The Immensity Within
By Lynn M. Herbert 

Morley, S (ed) 2010, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Herbert opens the essay by describing what light may mean to us:

‘Science tells us that light initiated life on earth; plants and animals could not exist without it’.

‘In the beginning there was light …’

Light  - gives us the ability to see the world around us as well as enlightenment ‘makes known that is which inside us’.

‘Light is intrinsic to our spiritual and physical selves’.

Yet despite these qualities we often take it for granted Herbert suggests and quotes Rudolf Arnheim’s eloquent summation as follows:

‘Light is one of the revealing elements of life .. It is the most spectacular experience of the sense .. But as its powers over the practice of daily living become sufficiently familiar, it is threatened with falling into oblivion. It remains for the artist and the occasional poetical moods of man to preserve the access to the wisdom that can be gained from the contemplation of light’.

James Turrell according to Herbert is one such artist. – ‘His medium is light -  not paintings that depict light, not sculpture that incorporates light but simply light itself’. His gift is in ‘affording us the opportunity to have a unique and intimate experience with light and to feel its transcendent power’.

Herbert also quotes from William Blake :’If the doors of perception were cleaned, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite’. Herbert suggests that viewing Turrel’s works leads to thoughts about the spiritual aspect of life, which in her view has become an unwelcome word in contemporary art. Herbert quotes psychology and philosopher William James who suggest the spiritual is ‘the great world, the background in all of us, is the world of our beliefs’. Herbert explores some of James Turrel’s work and the impact and sense of encounter/ experience of feeling a connection with the universe –in his words ‘The sky would no longer be out there, away from us, but in close contact’.

Herbert also discusses the work of Robert Irwin and Mark Rothko in relation to art and the sublime.

This article helped me – with some artists to look at for ideas, inspiration and to learn and grow more in my ideas ... and to give me the words to express what I m hoping the light does in my movie – I m hoping that it is an encounter however this is intimate in the sense that it is my domestic space reflecting the rooms, perceptions, filters of my interior.

Artist - James Turrell

BIO JAMES TURRELL

 “My work is about space and the light that inhabits it. It is about how you can confront that space and plumb it. It is about your seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking into a fire.”

James Turrell (California, 1943) is an internationally acclaimed light and space artist whose work can be found in collections worldwide.
Over more than four decades, he has created striking works that play with perception and the effect of light within a created space. His fascination with the phenomena of light is related to his personal, inward search for mankind’s place in the universe. 
Influenced by his Quaker upbringing, which he characterizes as having a ‘straightforward, strict presentation of the sublime’, Turrell’s art prompts greater self- awareness though a similar discipline of silent contemplation, patience, and meditation.
Turrell began his artistic career in California in the early 1960s as one of the leaders of a new group of artists working with light and space. Over the past two decades, his work has been recognized in exhibitions in major museums around the world, including the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California and the Panza di Biumo Collection, Varese, Italy.
Whether harnessing the light at sunset or transforming the glow of a television set into a fluctuating portal, Turrell’s art places viewers in a realm of pure experience. His large-scale, often architectural works incorporate the complex interplay of sky, light and atmosphere in motion across expanses of ocean, desert, and city. 
The recipient of several prestigious awards such as the Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, Turrell currently resides in Flagstaff, Arizona, in order to oversee the completion of his most important work, a monumental land art project at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano the artist has been transforming into a naked-eye celestial observatory for the past 33 years.

PUBLIC WORKS

1. THE AMERICAS:

- PS1, Long Island City, Nueva York. “Meeting” 1980 (Skyspace).
- Live Oak Friends Meeting, Houston, Texas. “Live Oak Friends Meeting” 2000 (Skyspace).
- Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, Tennessee. “Blue Pesher” 1999 (Skyspace).
- Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas. “The Light Inside” 2000 (Architectural Lighting).
- Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, Arizona. “Knight Rise” 2001 (Skyspace).
- James Turrell Museum, Colomé, Salta, Argentina. “Unseen Blue” 2002 (Skyspace).
- Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas. “Tending Blue” 2003 (Skyspace).
- Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Washington. “Light Reign” 2003 (Skyspace).
- De Young Museum, San Francisco, California. “3 Gems” 2005 (Skyspace).
- Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. “Sky Pesher” 2005 (Skyspace).
- University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois. “Hard Scrabble Sky” 2005 (Skyspace).
- Ponoma College, Claremont, California. “Diving the Light” 2007 (Skyspace).
- Jardín Botánico, Culiacán, México. “Encounter” 2007 (Skyspace).
- Franklin Park Conservatory, Columbus, Ohio. “Light Raiment II” 2008 (Architectural Lighting).

2. EUROPE & MIDDLE EAST:

- Israel Museum, Jerusalem. “Space that Sees” 1992 (Skyspace).
- Verbundnez Gas AG, Leipzig, Alemania. “Massed Light” 1997 (Architectural Lighting).
- Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria. “Color to White” 1997 (Architectural Lighting).
- Zug Railway Station, Zug, Suiza. “Light Transport” 2003 (Architectural Lighting).
- Peugeot Design Center, Velizy, Francia. “Ship of State” 2004 (Architectural Lighting).
- Center for International Lichtkunst, Unna, Alemania. “Third Breath” 2005 (Skyspace).
- Yorkshire Sculpture Park, York, Inglaterra. “Deer Shelter” 2005 (Skyspace).
- Engadine Hotel Castell, Zouz, Suiza. “Piz Uter” 2005 (Skyspace).
- Salzburg Fundation, Salzgurg, Austria. “Blue Pearl” 2006 (Skyspace).
- Louise T. Blouin Foundation, Londres, Inglaterra. “Light Raiment” 2006 (Architectural Lighting).
- Kunsthalle Museum, Mannheim, Alemania. “Four Eyes” 2007 (Architectural Lighting).

3. ASIA:

- Kawanishi town, Prefectura de Niigata, Japón. “House of Light” 2000 (Skyspace y Architectural Lighting).
- Chichu Art Museum, Isla de Naoshima, Japón. “Open Sky” 2004 (Skyspace).
- 21st Century Art Museum, Kanazawa, Japón. “Blue Planet Sky” 2004 (Skyspace).

4. AUSTRALIA:

- National Gallery of Art, Canberra, Australia. (Skyspace sin nombre) 2009.

Sourced from http://www.bodegacolome.com/museo/biografia-de-james-turrell.php?lang=en

The Sublime - Definition and Research

The Sublime

sublime

səˈblʌɪm/

adjective

adjective: sublime; comparative adjective: sublimer; superlative adjective: sublimest

1.1. 
of very great excellence or beauty."Mozart's sublime piano concertos"

2.synonyms:

3.exalted, elevated, noble, lofty, awe-inspiring, awesome, majestic, magnificent, imposing, glorious, supreme; Moregrand, great, outstanding, excellent, first-rate, first-class, superb, perfect, ideal, wonderful, marvellous, splendid, delightful, blissful, rapturous; informalfantastic, fabulous, fab, super, smashing, terrific, stellar, heavenly, divine, mind-blowing, too good to be true, out of this world "a sublime vision of human potential"

4. 

5.antonyms:

6.poor, lowly, ordinary

7.


▪                      producing an overwhelming sense of awe or other high emotion through being vast or grand."a sense of the sublime"


8.




9.2. 
(of a person's attitude or behaviour) extreme or unparalleled."he had the sublime confidence of youth"

10.         synonyms:

11.         supreme, total, complete, utter, consummate, extreme; Morearrogant "the sublime confidence of youth"

12.         





verb

verb: sublime; 3rd person present: sublimes; past tense: sublimed; past participle: sublimed; gerund or present participle: subliming

1.1. 
CHEMISTRY
(of a solid substance) change directly into vapour when heated, typically forming a solid deposit again on cooling."the ice sublimed away, leaving the books dry and undamaged"


▪                      cause (a substance) to sublime."these crystals could be sublimed under a vacuum"


2.




3.    
archaic
elevate to a high degree of moral or spiritual purity or excellence."let your thoughts be sublimed by the spirit of God"

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/the-sublime-storm-on-the-surface-of-the-sun

Thoughts gleaned from The sublime

Morley, S (ed) 2010, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 From the introduction:

‘Today we are constantly learning of new realities too vertiginously complex, it seems, for us to fully encompass them in our minds. Astronomers now believe for example that the visible universe contains an estimated 100 billion galaxies and that each galaxy also consists of stars emitting rays in myriad variations from glimmering cool reds to radiant hot blues and whites. ‘Wow’ often tends to be our initial lost for words response to such intimations of otherness or infinity.

…The sublime experience is fundamentally transformative, about the relationship between order and disorder, and the disruption of the stable co ordinates of space and time’.

Concept of sublime – became important in 18^th C art in relation to nature. Morley suggests that now it is the power of technology that is ‘more likely to supply the raw material’ for contemporary sublime. Sublime arose in importance after WWII AbEx artists desired to evoke sublime feelings of transcendence and exultation. It diminished then returned in 80s – reaction against trivialization of art in Pop art. Artists to look at

-       Bill Viola

-       - James Turrell – space & light

-       Mike Kelley – more disturbing aspects

-       Doris Salcedo, Anish Kapoor, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fred Tomaselli – trauma/sublime

Meaning of sublime

Latin – sublimis – elevated, lofty

Sub – up

Limen – threshold, surround or lintel of the doorway

Limes  - boundary or limit

Middle Ages:

Sublimare – (alchemy) purifying process by which substances turned into gas on being subjected to heat, then cool and become a newly transformed solid.

History of the Sublime

17^th C – Du Sublime translation of Longinus (Roman era) author

true human nobility discovered with confrontation of the threatening and unknown – art that challenges our capacity to understand and fills us with wonder

1750s – word used – away from the self  - attention to intense experiences which lay beyond conscious control & threatened individual autonomy challenging traditional systems of thought/religion.

1757 – Burke – sublime – nature vastness/obscurity – a side of horror/fear transformative power of fear- self survival

1790 – Immanuel Kant – Critique of Judgement

3 types of sublimity:

·      the awful

·      the splendid & lofty

·      the limits of reason – complex experiences we cant make sense of – ‘indiscernible, unnameable, undecidable, indeterminate and unpresentable’, independence of nature

1800s – Hegel – saw the sublime ‘not so much as voiding the power of reason but as a moment of fusion with the Absolute in which the beautiful is fulfilled and declared that sublimity was the way by which the divine manifested in the natural world’-  opposite of the void-

Nietsche –  sublime individual as -  freedom - abandonment of reason – Apollian –     light/sanity instead Dionysian intoxification wine/madness

1900s Freud – psychic stability found by the ego suppressing ‘undesirable urges and traumatic memories and these are transformed into purer morally and socially acceptable forms’ – only partially repressed these produce the uncanny and unsettling ambivalence – fera originating in ‘what is known of old and lomg familiar things’.

mid 20^th C – Walter Benjamin – modern life – technological society causes one long uncanny or sublime experience: ‘disorienting psychic condition of traumatic shock’- destabilizing consequences

Carl Jung – mystical and alchemical parts of sublimity self becoming more self aware – individuation

Georges Butaille – self is forced to ‘remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy’.

The sublime and contemporary culture

·      70s and 80s – culture and values are socially constructed rather than from a timeless essence – t’he sublime addresses unresolved problem in social constructionist argument because while we may no longer believe in eternal essences or values we still often sense that our lives are fashioned by forces beyond our control’.

·      Assertion that our lives are not totally accounted for by saying they are produced wholly from cultural signs and systems – this is where thought comes to an end ‘and we encounter that which is ‘other’.

·      Creates more questions!

·      Linked to time – heightened awareness – nature vs culture

·      Self- transcendence is not linked to a higher being (secular world) – rejection of idea of self/spirit that moves upwards towards and essential thing instead about Immanent transcendence – transformative experience that happens hear and now.

·      Contemporary artists shy away from describing their work in such terms as has kitsch, trivialized associations as well as the sublime being employed by totalitarian regimes eg Nazis to seduce masses.