ART: Perceptual Cell: Light Reignfall, Dark Matters, and Breathing LIght - James Turrell at LACMA

personal photo taken without permission at LACMA

I once went to an immersion chamber for a "float" during my later Flower Child years.  I lay in warm salt water, heated exactly to 98.6 degrees, with my visual field limited to the top of the plastic tank, dimly seeking drug-free transcendence. 

That experience eluded me, and the promise of it still mostly recedes, trusting I know it when I know it.

I always go easy on Earth Art, Light and Space Art.  Probably because I won't discard my environmental politics or my zen aesthetic, I critique not, and don't explain.  

The Turrell palette, I think, is entirely modern. Those new tubes of paint only, derived from chemistry - hansa, napthol, quinacradone; the bright cheerful hues replacing the old European masters palette. Turrell triumphs with this ascendance.

The Joffrey Ballet dances a Gerald Arpino ballet called Light Rain, I recall as I wait. I expect to have a rain experience, joining willingly while the sky releases.   

I lay down on a flatbed with a drawer-front,  a panic button is placed in my hand, and I recall MRI's and morgue storage drawers.

Attendants wear white lab coats, and the circle dome looks like 20's Futurist architecture. I opt for the "soft" program, a less active viewing experience.  

The Light Reignfall chamber experience is a very lovely: blue.  I will always possess the memory of Turrell blue.  It is manganese and pthalo, darkening to periwinkle with the intensity only illuminated rays achieve.

Distance is not perceptible in the chamber. Limitation is structured by the body's cone of vision, and a half-dome sky arcs above one's reclining body.

A madly flickering field of intense colors yields each to the other, then holds  - did pink ever so sharp and hard, negate its affectionate nature here? 

Did red ever look so soft, manifesting the root chakra, muladhara energy so powerfully?  

Yellow green is sour wretched vilest bile. 

Yellow wishes it were sunshine, and fails.

Wait for the instant that blue moves to violet. It is a fleeting violet, that only flowers and dioxazine purple give. Did you see it?  Trust that you marked it, like viewing a nano-particle. 

I see the blue light

coming for me

Inexorable

so gentle, so kind

body boundary dissolves 

periphery lost

I blue

Watch forever dawn

it is here now

it is over now

not ever forever

everlasting

ever ending never 

doctor my eyes

Are they open or not?

Don't know

No matter.

I see anyway

I see always

I can't talk about it.

Dark Matters, which I view after the chamber, is a dark traverse to a seat for 10 minutes of black silence.  Darkish brown orange shapes emerge but take no form and fade.  I am reassured when the young woman who invited me to share the viewing with her tells me she saw the same thing.  It's easy to find a metaphor for this:  Plato's Cave, and the subjectivity of vision.  

I wish I would go to Kentucky, have that total dark cave experience now.

I attend the last environment of the day, donning booties to enter Breathing Light.

 While waiting, I look up the stairs at the room's occupants.  I see them moving within deep bright color fields.  I love mounting the stairs, as if to a high altar, and enter the room. 

The air seems dense with color, palpably foggy.

A downsloping white floor forces attention to one's balance, and at the end a beautifully defined lozenge-shape seems to be a wall.  It is not; the guard warns us not to step off - it is open and deep below.  He demonstrates with a dancer's gesture - dipping a sweeping leg and pointed toe into the void.  He won't state how deep it is. He is grumpy and I turn away.

Looking backwards, the waiting area below is framed by a neon inset around the the breathing room's entry, and then also deeply colored itself, mostly with saturated opposite hues to the upper room.

The guard will not let me take a seated yoga position, and so I rotate, watching below and then rotating back to the void-wall. The spaces glow with the now familiar Turrell kaleidoscope.

It's over now.  I love the celebration Turrell makes. 

Long attention to photographing and painting the natural world has gifted me; I no longer seem to require an external reset to move to a certain awareness of the fleetingly lovely. 

I do love this created manifestation, to be called up when I wish for it.