James Turrell at the Guggenheim

I didn’t care for the Turrell show at all. Maybe it was the heat and schlep for me to get to the museum, maybe it was the hoards of tourists there, and just maybe I found it dull and lifeless. The main piece is ”Aten Reign” (another pretentious title in a season of pretentious titles) that takes up the grand rotunda of the museum. This is according to all the hype "the installation to end all installations", that is made up of changing colored lights and shades of the spectrum that uses the skylight as a canvas. I suppose one could say that this installation is spectacular-wow, but given this already spectacular Wright architectural masterpiece this Turrell work in itself was not that impressive to me. What I found at the museum was a very crowded scene of managed chaos with lots of morons lying on the floor of the rotunda staring up at the changing colors as if they were expecting it to open up and Lady Gaga to explode from within ready to put on a show, or maybe for some acrobats to come swinging down, after all it is very theatrical, spacy and sci-fi and somewhat Cirque du Soleil. Besides all the prone bodies on the floor there are also wooden slotted benches around the perimeter of the rotunda where you can sit and watch the light show. These instruments of torture are slanted (great for the back) and when I managed to push a little old lady off one (joking) and squeeze myself into one of them I was forced back with my neck pushed up. I stayed in this uncomfortable position looking up as “Reign” went from bright white to violet and then I was out of there, not staying for the rest of the pretty colors to make their appearance. The place was a zoo with the guards yelling at people who were lying too far out on the floor to move their heads before someone stepped on them turn off the phones, no pictures, and then there was the din of all those voices. This hardly makes for what the critic for The New York Times called a blissful experience or the possibility of “seeing God.” God almighty is more like it. The other installation that I stood in line for 30 minutes to view is called “Iltar”and when I googled it I got back that it was a pseudonym used by Luke Skywalker when he visited Borgo Prime and is also a character in an Edgar Cayce piece on the Mayans, either one of them is fitting for the sensibility of JamesTurrell. The piece is housed in a darkened room and if I had known that I was going to have to go into a darkened space I wouldn’t have waited in this long and winding line. Inside is a painted (I guess it was painted) rectangle with two pairs of low-watt light bulbs that are on each side of the shape, and if you stare hard and long enough you might see some gentle changes appear within the rectangle. Groovy. Turrell is seen in the art world as some kind of visionary, part of the L.A. light and space school that took off in the early sixties who likes to mouth new age like slogans about his art including these two gems: Talking about his vision he calls it “seeing yourself seeing” or “light is not the bearer of revelation-it is the revelation.” Heavy stuff. Hey I have nothing against light used as a medium in art, I love Dan Flavin’s hard edge no frills minimal neon pieces that don’t go in for the now you see it now you don’t school of light works, maybe that’s the tough New Yorker in me.