University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Light and space as experience: a study of the work of James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, and perceptual phenomenology

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Light and space as experience: a study of the work of James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, and perceptual phenomenology

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LIGHT AND SPACE AS EXPERIENCE:
A STUDY OF THE WORK OF JAMES TURRELL, OLAFUR ELIASSON, AND
PERCEPTUAL PHENOMENOLOGY

By

Monika Basse

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ART AND CURATORIAL PRACTICES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

August 9, 2016

Copyright 2016, Monika Basse

Basse 2

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Introduction……………………………………………………………….. 3
Chapter Two: Light and Space………………………………………………..…………20
Chapter Three: Light and Space through Color and the Physicality of the Body……….27

Chapter Four: Conclusion………………………………………………………………..43
Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………...47
Basse 3

Chapter One: Introduction
Light and space have been a source of fascination and study for artists since the
conception of art. They are some of the most basic element of our world and they shape
how we see and interact with the environment outside of our bodies. In the last fifty
years, artists working in California and in Europe have employed the elements of light
and space as tools with which to study perception and phenomenology. Through these
elements, artists have created works that bring viewers closer to understanding their own
sensory intake, bodily reactions both individually and within groups of people. German
art theorist Rudolf Arnheim writes in his 1954 book Art and Visual Perception, “For
without light, the eyes can observe no shape, no color, no space or movement.”
1
As
humans we rely on our vision in order to turn the various gradations of light and dark as
well as color into information. Interpreting our surroundings be they light or dark is such
a primal process that our bodies have developed an automatic function for it. With our
surroundings so full of sensory information, the elements of light and space, as well as
their various properties go unnoticed in our world. Arnheim continues, “Even so, we have
trained ourselves to rely on knowledge rather than our sense of sight to such an extent
that it takes accounts by the naïve and the artist to make us realize what we see.”
2
There
are several artists who focus on these elements and who are interested in bringing
attention back to these processes of reactions and deeper developments of perception. By
using light and space as two different elements through which to draw attention to the

1
Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, New
Version, Expanded and Rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 303.
2
Ibid., 303.
Basse 4

viewers’ perceptions and their own bodies, Los Angeles based artist James Turrell and
Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson are thus able to make the viewer notice aspects of
the phenomenological experience through the immersive environments.
Turrell and Eliasson share interests in perception, though they each use light and
space differently and come from very different backgrounds and places in the world.
Turrell was born in 1943 in Pasadena, California and emerged as an artist in the mid-
60’s, where he became one of the artists associated with the Light and Space movement
in Southern California,
3
although it should be noted that the idea of calling it a movement
is often questioned by historians and a point of controversy for some of the artists that
were considered a part of it.
4
Eliasson was born in 1967 in Copenhagen to Icelandic
parents.
5
The influence of California Light and Space had a significant influence on
Eliasson, and several of his works draw specific inspiration from the key principles and
artists involved with it. The artistic practices of Turrell and Eliasson are indicative of
these influences and the times of each of the two artists. They were both chosen for this
thesis for their sometimes-contrasting approaches to creating art with light as the subject,
to be explored further in this thesis, which leads to viewers making discoveries about
varying aspects of embodied experience, both sublime and technical, through the
respective artists’ immersive works.

3
Christine Y. Kim, “James Turrell: A Life In Art,” in James Turrell: A Retrospective,
exh. cat.(Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013), 37.
4
John Coplans, Doug Wheeler, exh. cat. (Pasadena Art Musem, 1968), n.p.
5
Madeleine Grynsztejn, “(Y)our Entanglements: Olafur Eliasson, the Museum, and
Consumer Culture,” in Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, exh. cat. (San Francisco: San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 15.
Basse 5

During the mid-twentieth century, New York served as the epicenter for the
American art world with its focus on Abstract Expressionist practices. However, during
the 1960s, the art world broadened. Artists in New York and beyond—in cities such as
Los Angeles—began opening art to other concerns. While the Minimalists were
developing a sculptural art that expansively activated the spaces and bodies around it
such as the work of Robert Morris, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd, in Southern California
artists began incorporating light and space as elements of the work. On both coasts, artists
were concerned with embodiment and context in which their work was seen, rather than
principally with making objects as final manifestations of the work, arguably as Abstract
Expressionists had done.
The artists working in the greater Los Angeles area were namely “more intrigued
by questions of perception than by the notion of crafting discrete objects.”
6
These artists
began creating artworks dealing with light and space in ephemeral and site-specific ways,
a departure from the interest in objecthood, shifting to rather more of an interest in
environment. This was the inception of the Light and Space approach that would grace
the Southern California art scene for the next two decades
7
through the work of artists
such as Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, Maria Nordman, Eric Orr, Larry
Bell, Judy Chicago, amongst others, all of whom incorporated light and space in their
practice through installations, performance, and non-traditional materials such as plastics.
These artists engaged with the environment around them, influenced by writings on

6
Robin Clark, “Phenomenal: An Introduction,” in Phenomenal: California Light, Space,
Surface, exh. cat. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 20.

7
Coplans, Doug Wheeler, n.p.
Basse 6

phenomenology, as well as by the Minimalist movement, and the general landscape, and
the natural light of the Southern California environment.
These artists’ practices were guided by their interests in exploring perception
through the creation of works that highlighted the use of the elements of light and space
as phenomenological tools rather than as objects
8
and the bodily experience associated
with this approach. The study of phenomenology is a key component of the approach by
these artists in the making of their artworks, and the Light and Space artists were
specifically influenced by the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl,
both of whom “saw phenomenology as a program for introspective research rather than
as a strict doctrine.”
9
Phenomenology was adapted in Light and Space as a framework by
which to engage the viewer by looking back at their own bodies and developing a sense
of their own perception. According to Dawna Schuld, a scholar of the Light and Space
artworks, “Irwin, Turrell, Wheeler, Nordman, and Orr bring phenomenology into practice
by creating situations that act as experiential snares, capturing attention through
disorientation and prolonging awareness via perceptual emergence.”
10
Light and Space
artists encouraged a shift from the creation of an object to the creation of an environment
in which the viewer was subjected to simultaneous sensory deprivation as well as
enhancement as a means in which to take note of the perceptual activities at play in the
body. The elements of light and space were not merely represented, but presented and

8
Michael Auping, “Stealth Architecture: The Rooms of Light and Space,” in
Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface, exh. cat. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2011), 80.
9
Dawna Schuld, “Practically Nothing: Light, Space, and the Pragmatics of
Phenomenology,” in Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface, exh. cat. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011), 108.
10
Ibid.,121.
Basse 7

explored in order for the viewer to experience them first hand.
11
The viewer engaged in a
more self-reflexive way, looking at his or her own perception and body through an active
embodiment of the work, more so than with previous art forms. The attention to Light
and Space arose almost simultaneously with Minimalism on the East Coast, which also
drew on phenomenology and highlighted bodily relations in space, but did not make use
of light itself.
12
The work of Merleau-Ponty and Husserl was adopted by these artists,
“fostering a kind of introspective practice that facilitates the means for experiencing
ourselves as bodies rather than merely having them.”
13
Thus these artworks are
appropriately phenomenal, as the perceptual experience of the viewer is brought about by
the situation that the artist sets up for the viewer to take part in. Schuld has even gone so
far as to say that “phenomenal” would be a more appropriate for the art movement
happening in California during the 1960s and 70s than “Light and Space.”
14

Now I will briefly address the history of Turrell and Eliasson, and their practices.
In the subsequent chapters I will discuss light and space as elements, and how Turrell and
Eliasson look at and use them differently. This will be followed by case studies in
exploring two particular works by the respective artists and the tools they use to engage
the viewer with light and space.

11
Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005), 11.

12
Bishop, Installation Art, 56.

13
Schuld, “Practically Nothing,” 109.
14
Light and Space is “misleading in describing this art, because it overlooks the essential
integrative ingredient, which is perception. To merely call it perceptual art, however, is to
overlook the ways in which that perception is embedded within the experience of
circumscribed conditions. Thus it may be more appropriate to term the work
phenomenal.” Ibid.
Basse 8

James Turrell and California Light and Space
Light and Space artists were largely aware of Minimalism and its
phenomenological emphasis. Turrell admired Minimalism for its clarity and directness; it
had “to do with feeling something all at once, with reading it and not being confused by
reading it in any literal sense of that term.”
15
Minimalism offered a platform in which the
objects themselves were no longer the point of focus in an artwork but rather their
“overall relationship to each other and to the space.”
16
Light and Space artists expanded
on the ideas behind Minimalist works by focusing on “the ephemeral character of the
viewer’s sensory experience.”
17
The dialogue between Robert Morris and Donald Judd,
for example, with the practice of the Light and Space artists is evidenced through Robert
Irwin’s thoughts on his contemporaries.
18
Irwin commented on the two artist’s works,
saying, “the Donald Judds were meant to be looked at, [and] the Morrises were meant to
be thought about.”
19
He took this seriously in thinking about his own work. The question
for Irwin in regard to Minimalism was beyond the materiality and rather an interest in the
concepts behind the reductive works that were being created. So too did other artists

15
James Turrell, as cited in Craig Adcock, James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 40.
16
Bishop, Installation Art, 56.

17
Ibid.
18
Adrian Kohn, “Work and Words,” in Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface,
exh. cat. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 162.
19
Robert Irwin, interviewed by Frederick S. Wight, “An Interview with Robert Irwin,” in
Transparency, Light, Space: Four Artists—Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin,
Craig Kauffman, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: UCLA Art Galleries, 1971), 68.
Basse 9

working in Light and Space form an interest in saying more with fewer materials and
moving away from the focus on the work of art as an object.
These are the general influences of California Light and Space, and since Turrell
was one of the founders of it he was subject to all of these interests, to a certain degree.
Minimalism and phenomenology are some of the cornerstones of his own work and
Turrell’s interests in light and perception have been a long-time passion that began when
he was a child.
20
Turrell’s works create many different kinds of spaces and use both
natural and artificial light. They range from projections and enclosed, immersive spaces,
to skyscapes and works of land art. Shortly after leaving graduate school at the University
of California, Irvine, the artist created one of his first major works, Mendota Stoppages
(1966), which was done at the Mendota Hotel in Santa Monica.
21
The hotel room served
as Turrell’s studio where he exhibited this work. Turrell invited viewers to come in to the
room, which housed the work; the room was completely pitch black, except for the bright
light of Southern California and commercial neon signs at night that was allowed in as
mediated by the openings that Turrell created to the outside. There he did a series of
daytime and nocturnal performance pieces incorporating this light as well as music.
Turrell instructed the audience how to move through the space, creating a link between
bodies, music, and light. The Mendota Stoppages were important because they “served as
research for several series of Turrell’s light works, including his projections, shallow
space constructions, and wedgeworks.”
22

20
Kim, “James Turrell,” 39.

21
Ibid., 37.

22
Clark, “Phenomenal,” 40.
Basse 10

During the mid-1970s Turrell also began to consider how to take his studies in
light out into the landscape.
23
One of his most notable and ambitious works is the still
incomplete Roden Crater, which was started in 1972 in the Painted Desert in Northern
Arizona. It is a vast space of tunnels, passageways and openings built by Turrell that let
the viewer experience the interaction of natural light with Turrell’s architectural space in
an immersive, meditative environment. By being part of a work that is in the middle of
the desert, and so far from civilization, the viewer is able to think of time in an expansive
way, beyond the constraints of the present day and get a sense of geological and celestial
time by looking at the changing sky and observing planets and stars through Turrell’s
skyscapes with the naked eye. Perception is augmented here when thinking of the space
as extending beyond the limits of the Roden Crater. “Turrell hopes to construct for us…a
sliver view to the vast emptiness of space in order that we might have the slight sensation
of moving on Earth relative to our vast surrounding cosmos—a great truth that is known
but almost never felt.”
24
One has a sense of being a part of the grand scheme of the
Earth’s life.
25
Turrell’s is also known for his “skyspaces” which give visitors the
opportunity to view the sky through a built environment; though typically less grand in
scale, these pieces still have the same effect of being all-immersive, introspective
experiences.

23
Michael Govan, “Spaces Inhabited by Consciousness,” James Turrell: A Retrospective,
exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013), 208.
24
Michael Govan, “Inner Light: The Radical Reality of James Turrell,” in James Turrell:
A Retrospective, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013), 28.
25
"Celestial Events," Roden Crater, accessed November 12, 2015,
http://rodencrater.com/celestial-events/.
Basse 11

Having graduated from Pomona College with a degree in perceptual psychology,
Turrell had a life-long passion for the psychological effects of different stimuli. From
1968-1971 Turrell collaborated with Robert Irwin and NASA psychologist Edward
Wortz in conducting experiments with sensory deprivation for the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art’s Art and Technology Lab.
26
Light wasn’t secondary, or simply a tool
with which to highlight a subject in a work the way other artists may use light, but rather,
for Turrell, light is the substance and the very subject of his work. As Turrell has noted:
“There is no object in my work. There never was. There is no image within it.”
27
This
statement begs the question then, as viewers of Turrell’s artwork, what are we
experiencing if there is no image or object? Turrell also stated: “My work is more about
your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing.”
28
In his
works, he encourages the viewer to see the light and space in a certain way, though he
acknowledges that he wants the viewer to recognize their own perception through the
help of his work. The focus then goes from seeing the point of view that Turrell creates to
the viewer’s own phenomenological experience.
The artist claims that an inspiration for his work comes from the allegory of
Plato’s Cave.
29
While the allegory “describes the illusion of reality, manifested in
shadows that are only projections of more perfect forms, Turrell focuses us on the reality

26
Schuld. “Practically Nothing,” 110.
27
Jeffrey L. Kosky, “James Turrell, Works with Light,” in Arts of Wonder: Enchanting
Secularity--Walter De Maria, Diller Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy (Chicago
& London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 94.

28
James Turrell, interview by Charles Miedzinsky, November 10, 1988, Artcast, podcast
audio, May 2014, http://archv.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/podcast/167.
29
James Turrell as quoted in Govan, “Inner Light,” 28.
Basse 12

of the projected light – not in its capacity to create shadows, but as a thing in itself.”
30

Turrell has stated that he wants to work directly with perception and thus
phenomenology.
31
The embodied experience of the viewer is the focus of his work, the
discovery of the corporeal self and the different methods with which to perceive the
environment around him or her when viewing it.

Olafur Eliasson and the 1990s Turn to Relational Aesthetics and Social Practice
Eliasson’s practice is, in part, inspired by the Nordic landscape of his native
Denmark and Iceland, but also by the urbanism that was growing in Berlin during the
1990s.
32
Additionally, he has been deeply influenced by the history and effects of Light
and Space artists, and has turned to light as a way to look at perception as well as to relate
something to viewers about his physicality and his body’s relation to the environment it
occupies. He has said: “I have a distinct physical relationship with the light…by looking
at the mountain, I can tell something about my own body.”
33
In this case, Eliasson is
discussing how light changes the way we interpret depth and space of our surroundings.
He recognizes a very symbiotic relationship between light and space and how these two
elements lead us to understand something about our own physical bodies in the world and
about how our perception of them can be altered. As an artist, Eliasson takes on the claim
made by Arnheim, pointing his viewers back to relying on their senses rather than

30
Ibid.

31
Turrell, interview by Charles Miedzinsky, November 10, 1988.
32
Pamela M. Lee, “Your Light and Space,” in Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, exh. cat.

(San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 38.
33
Eliasson and Irwin. “Take Your Time: A Conversation”.
Basse 13

previous knowledge to discover something about their world and their own
phenomenological perception.
However, the artists that emerged during the 1990s, including Eliasson, were also
interested in creating experiences where the focus became the viewer’s role in an
artwork. Rather than creating controlled environments as in the works of Light and
Space, these works were mediated by the artist, but left some of the control to the viewer.
As an example, this is seen in Eliasson’s work where he uses possessive pronouns in his
titles, such as Your compound view (1998) and Your only real thing is time (2001).
34
The
artists looks to Irwin as a source of inspiration for these titles, as evidenced in their 2007
conversation “Take Your Time,” which took place at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art in 2006.
35
He takes Irwin’s phrase “perceiving yourself perceiving,”
rewording it as “seeing yourself seeing,” making the described phenomenon more about a
corporeal experience. Eliasson’s titles suggest that the unique experience of each visitor,
as influenced by the environment, current disposition, and surrounding viewers, is the
priority of his work and one’s experience of it. Phenomenology thus provides a
framework for a more expanded view of embodied experience. And while each
experience might be unique, Eliasson is also interested in the shared experience, a
collective of unique viewers. Madeleine Grynsztejn, who curated the SFMOMA
exhibition, says that Eliasson’s work

34
Ina Blom, “Beyond the Ambient/ Jenseits des Atmosphärischen,” trans. Bram
Opstelten, Parkett, no. 64 (May 2002): 20-31.
35
Olafur Eliasson and Robert Irwin, “Take Your Time: A Conversation,” in Take Your
Time: Olafur Eliasson, exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
2007).

Basse 14

seems a direct response to art historian Miwon Kwon’s call
for ‘a public sphere, where one might bracket, temporarily,
one’s private, personal interests to imagine a collective
identification…’ Such an effort to imagine a democratic
public sphere anew is necessarily an exercise in abstraction,
and the (art) work to be done seems to be located in the
space of coming together of this different sort of intimacy
and publicity.
36

Eliasson creates works in which individuality can be addressed and how it fits into the
embodied experience of the surrounding viewers. Furthermore, the writings of Merleau-
Ponty seem to take on new life in the 1990s when artists and theorists began reexamining
phenomenology. Ideas from Merleau-Ponty such as—“Indeed, at the very foundation of
ourselves we find others”
37
—came to be seen again as compelling frameworks for
understanding a new interest in embodiment in relation to the visual arts.”
38

At this time, relational aesthetics gained ground wherein artists such as Carsten
Höller, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Douglas Gordon, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster made
“inter-human experiences” the crux of their work.
39
Art historian and curator Nicolas
Bourriaud wrote Relational Aesthetics in 1998 and claimed, “the social bond has turned
into the standardized artifact.”
40
In a way, social interaction has become the art object in
Relational Aesthetics where there was none. Eliasson isn’t associated with Relational
Aesthetics, but his interest in a shared experience of art engages with some of its ideas.
While all artwork aims to form a relationship with the viewer, Relational Aesthetics

36
Miwon Kwon, “Public Art as Publicity,” republicart, last modified January 2002,
http://www.republicart.net/disc/publicum/kwon01_en.htm
37
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge, 1962), 433.
38
Ibid.
39
Daniel Birnbaum, “Heliotrope,” in Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, exh. cat. (San
Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 135.
40
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, (Dijon: Les Presses Du Réel, 1998), 9.

Basse 15

makes this relationship the main point of the work. This is carried over in one of
Eliasson’s more recent pieces, The Collectivity Project (2015), in which viewers
construct and re-construct objects out of millions of white Lego pieces on the Highline in
New York City. It encourages members of the public to step out of their quotidian habits
and unconscious movements to consider their built environment, to interact individually
and collectively, and to form a temporary relationship to other people as they work
together with the Legos.
Also similar to the approach used in Light and Space works, through Eliasson’s
use of natural materials, he aims to focus viewers on the environment, whereby they can
acknowledge that nature is taken for granted as it is not as readily accessible in the urban
environment. Eliasson’s work aims to connect the viewer to a higher sense of cognition
and connection with his or her own perception and kinesthetic movement, all of which
lead to a phenomenological experience.
Grynsztejn has noted: “As theoretical ballast for these investigations, Eliasson and
those who write about him frequently call upon the discourses of phenomenology –
especially the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty – to articulate the necessarily embodied and
thus contingent act of perception in confronting his work.”
41
Daniel Birnbaum, currently
director of the Moderna Museet and who has worked closely to with Eliasson for the past
two decades, has applied these perspectives to his artistic practice, referencing Edmund
Husserl on the “the notion of alterity: the fundamental difference that cuts right through
the subject and its ability to be ‘other’ to itself.”
42
While the contemporaries of Eliasson

41
Madeleine Grynsztejn et al., Olafur Eliasson (London: Phaidon, 2002).
42
Birnbaum, “Heliotrope,” 137.

Basse 16

were focusing on relational aesthetics, he channeled these ideas to focus more on an
embodied perception.
43
Bringing the points together on the notion of alterity and
phenomenology, the notion of perception widened in Eliasson’s practice to incorporate
other viewers and not just the individual, leaving “behind traditional notions of creativity
and aesthetics in order to renegotiate the function of art in terms of (socialist) politics and
new modes of mass production and distribution.”
44
The individual who brought along
particular issues and biases relating to his or her racial, sexual, and socio-economic
differences, and contributed these to this new look of perception—this new focus, Bishop
argues, was “in contrast to Eliasson’s precursors, for whom a particular type of embodied
viewer (and experiential response) was pre-empted.”
45

While phenomenology was one of the major factors of California Light and
Space, as previously mentioned, the 1970s saw a general decline in interest in the subject.
This was as a result of the feminist movement and poststructuralist theory that was rising
at the time, which pointed out that the supposed “neutral” body in phenomenology was
not immune to racial, sexual, and socio-economic issues.
46
Edmund Husserl himself
wrote on this decline in his 1970 book The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology trying to defend his philosophy during a turbulent

43
Bishop, Installation Art, 77.
44
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969).
45
Bishop, Installation Art, 76.
46
See for example, Judith Butler, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description:
A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception,” in The
Thinking Muse, ed. Jeffner Allen et al. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1989), 98.
Basse 17

political era, and a time of scientific and technological progress.
47
However, in the 1990s
there was a resurgence of interest in phenomenology, this time as it applied to identity
politics and “difference” in the political agenda. The artists associated with Light and
Space began to be reevaluated during this period. As art historian Claire Bishop argues in
Installation Art (2005), “These artists address time, memory and individual history in
ways that are arguably truer to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking than the reductive interpretation
offered by Minimalism.”
48

Eliasson’s works also function to alert viewers to their social space: “Along with
the personal, subjective quality of each visitor’s responses to Eliasson’s works, a central
aspect of his oeuvre is its social dimension.”
49
The work of Eliasson differs from pieces
associated with Light and Space in that it “aims less to activate viewers than to produce
them in a critical attitude.”
50
Though the titles of his works that use possessive pronouns
as mentioned earlier, do imply that the works require an activated viewer. Since the
critical individual is favored in these works, a universal perception can no longer be
supposed, in contrast to the neutral body as expected in the work of Light and Space.
Perception is conditioned by the environment and the viewer’s own body and when
approached critically, this perception can change, sometimes drastically, especially when
influenced by other viewers. It is thus subject to the conditions of the environment as well
as other individuals surrounding the viewer contributing to the shared phenomenological
experience. Philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre has a model for exploring the

47
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, trans. by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

48
Bishop, Installation Art, 76.
49
Grynsztejn. “(Y)our Entanglements,” 55.
50
Bishop, Installation Art, 80.
Basse 18

relationship of the individual to others. According to Lefebvre: “The individual’s
‘private’ consciousness is complemented by a ‘public’ consciousness; they interact and
support one another. The ‘private’ consciousness refers across to the ‘public’
consciousness and vice versa; the one is meaningless without the other.”
51
Through
Eliasson’s works, the individual is given the means through which to acknowledge the
different levels of consciousness. It is a constant reconciliation of the self to the
surrounding individuals. Turrell’s work does this as well. Though the phenomenological
experience in his work is largely more reflexive on the individual, the work still makes
the viewer account for the general experience that the other viewers are going through as
well.
In terms of his technical approach, Eliasson’s works are not composed of
materials that are meant to distort or confuse the viewer; rather he lays all the aspects out.
“Unlike other artists who deal with light and perception … Eliasson makes no attempt to
conceal how he produces his effects.”
52
For Eliasson, part of the discovery in his work is
the ability to see what it is made of and how it works within the space. In The Weather
Project (2003) at Tate Modern in London, Eliasson made the materials transparent and
one’s awareness of them part of the experience of the piece. The work was installed in
the Tate’s Turbine Hall and viewers were quickly able to realize that the illusion they
were seeing was the result of two hundred sodium bulbs reflected in three hundred

51
Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (London: Verso,
1991), 195.
52
The author makes a point to mention that James Turrell is a relevant comparison.
Birnbaum, “Heliotrope,” 132.
Basse 19

mirrored ceiling panels, which were combined to look like a sun hanging in mist.
53

Though the illusion of light and space plays a role in Eliasson’s work, it is not the
primary concern for the artist. Rather, Eliasson’s emphasis is on viewers’ discovery of
their own perception and how it is informed by the other viewers of the piece, as well as
by their own bodies creating shapes and varying patterns in the mirrored ceiling. The
viewer is meant to get involved with the full phenomenological effect of the piece, by
getting an embodied experience through visual perception and also by walking
throughout it, engaging the physicality of the body. As with Turrell, this and many works
by Eliasson are not objects that a viewer stands in front of, but an environment that the
viewer is engaged in. Eliasson has talked about the motivation behind his practice: “The
very basic belief that is behind my work is that objecthood or objects as such, doesn’t
have a place in the world if there’s not an individual person making some use of that
object.”
54
In striving to encourage the viewer to form a connection to his work, Eliasson
calls upon the viewer as the creator of the work. For Eliasson, his motivation in bringing
art into the public eye is about making the individual aware of his or her impact in
relation to his or her surroundings and others who share the space.

53
Grynsztejn, “(Y)our Entanglements,” 11.
54
Olafur Eliasson, interview by Madeleine Grynsztejn, in Olafur Eliasson on the
Importance of Audience in Contemporary Art (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, December 2013).
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Chapter Two: Light and Space

Light and space are the driving forces behind the artworks that Turrell, and, in
some cases, Eliasson produce and thus these subjects are examined in this chapter
through a critical and theoretical lens. Arnheim has theorized about the subject of light
and space, and his writings will be examined and critiqued here in order to provide a
framework for looking at Turrell’s and Eliasson’s work.
Arnheim explored the viewer’s relationship with art through visual perception in
his book from 1954, Art and Visual Perception. There are several aspects to the physical
world that Arnheim touches upon, one of them being light. He incorporates optics and the
physiological aspect of our eyes into his writing in order to ground the study of
perception, a subject otherwise explored in art through phenomenology. Though
Arnheim’s writings are more than sixty years old, some parallels can be found to
Turrell’s approach to art making. For example, Arnheim stated: “By varying the
steepness of the gradient, one can control the shape of the curvature perceived. A gradient
changing at a constant rate produces the effect of an inclined plane by reflecting the
physical fact that the angle of inclination is constant throughout the surface.”
55
The
gradient is realized in Turrell’s work and he takes this aspect to how we see and perceive
light to his advantage and manipulates it in order for the viewer to have an introspective
experience with their environment, a process which is intentionally planned by Turrell.
Turrell’s work is largely illusionary: he is known for creating environments or
situations using light and space in which the edges of the room are contorted such that the

55
Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 311- 312.
Basse 21

viewer’s perception is challenged to the degree of losing all sense of bearings. His work
is seamless, and the lack of visible technical aspects within the environments create an
uninterrupted, smooth, and in the case of his enclosed works, believable illusion. The
viewer is immersed fully in the world that Turrell has created. Turrell’s works use natural
as well as artificial light; they are featured in enclosed spaces, as well in spaces that
engage the outdoors. He explores the multitude of possibilities in creating illusions by
isolating light and space as subjects and showing the viewer in the different ways these
subjects exist in our world.
Again, there are connections to be drawn between Arnheim’s and Turrell’s work:
“A judicious distribution of light serves to give unity and order not only to the shape of
single objects but equally to that of a whole setting.”
56
This is a phenomenon that crops
up a lot in Turrell’s work given that his spaces look like unified fields of light where the
source of the light is unknown and there are no shadows to reference. Understanding of
the space is obscured through perceptual light effects and the sense of orientation is
challenged. For example, Turrell’s City of Arhirit (1976), was so disorienting that several
visitors to the piece stumbled and even fell down due to this unified field of color.
57
Art
historian Jeffrey Kosky has noted of the artist’s practice: “Turrell’s light defies the
purposes of disenchantment. It does not make a clear space in which we might see
distinct objects. Instead, Turrell creates viewing chambers where we are brought to see
the light we most often forget in our everyday fascination with the objects it makes

56
Ibid., 313.
57
Wil S. Hylton, "How James Turrell Knocked the Art World Off Its Feet," The New
York Times Magazine, June 13, 2013. Accessed September 15, 2015.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/magazine/how-james-turrell-knocked-the-art-world-
off-its-feet.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1.
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visible.”
58
What we are then witnessing as viewers of Turrell’s works, when encountering
his installations, is our own perception of light brought to our attention in a very clear
way by making it central to his work.
The two artists are both sensitive to bodies occupying space and consequently are
aware of the parameters of the spaces they create and the ways in which a viewer might
walk about in them. The often-changing light in their work combined with the way a
viewer moves throughout the artwork alters how the light affects certain subjects, people,
and the way the edges of the space are seen.
During his creative process of producing art, Eliasson also employs a certain
technique that separately can be found in the writings of John Dewey’s philosophy of
looking at aesthetics and art through a lens of experience rather than as final objects.
Dewey claims in his text Art as Experience: “The artist embodies in himself the attitude
of the perceiver while he works.”
59
Eliasson is no exception to this and creates works that
exemplify its technical aspects: its creation. Unlike Turrell’s focus on the general,
presupposed, and controlled experience, Eliasson is interested in the critical aspects of his
viewers, how they interact and he seeks to exemplify the ways in which his works
function.
Turrell notes that, for him, “light is not so much something that reveals as it is
itself the revelation.”
60
This seriousness of purpose—wherein light is not an element
leading to a representation but is the experience that comprises the work—is important to

58
Kosky, Arts of Wonder, 94.
59
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, New York: Berkeley Publishing Group,
2005), 207.
60
James Turrell, quoted in James Turrell; Occluded Front, ed. Julia Brown (Los
Angeles: Lapis Press, 1985), 43.
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consider in moving forward. If light is of such importance to these artists, what is to be
gained from this study and what can we consider about this subject in our lives? Kosky
proposes that “Light clarifies. It makes a clearing, and it clears a space in which objects
can appear distinctly, but it can do this only if, at the same time, it withdraws, disappears,
or remains invisible, nothing itself.”
61
Turrell creates illusions: mesmerizing, and
meditative experiences that leave the viewer with larger questions about light and how it
functions outside of art. Eliasson attempts to demystify this illusion of light in the work,
to demonstrate how his work is built, and engage the viewer in this process of creation.
Space is the second subject of interest in this thesis. Space, however, can be
quantified as the containment of volume. If we seek to define space, we see that while it
can be measured, it is not something that itself has mass. Perception of space in our
environment determines a sense of either closeness or distance. Our understanding of
space is thus based on a constant mediation between ourselves and our surroundings.
Depending on personal preference, this factor makes us want more of it or to fill it up.
Space can be hard to judge, even with multiple senses at our disposal so our perception is
easily confused, leaving us disoriented. These are all conditions that affect perception and
interaction with an immersive installation that deals with light. Space is altered through
the way light presents it, and therefore, it becomes another focus in the work of Turrell
and Eliasson. Each artist uses space as a means through which to address light so that it is
the focus of the work, leaving room for an embodied perceptual experience.
Light and space share a symbiotic relationship in the work of the two artists.
These elements interrelate—they support and/or challenge each other—in the artists’

61
Kosky, Arts of Wonder, 92.
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works; and it is through this relationship that the viewer is able to experience through
their awareness of their body. Light and space are subjective for each viewer and, though
they can be explored empirically, they affect the individual on a phenomenological level.
If the focus of the artwork is light and it is meant to be interacted with, how must the
artwork be conceived in terms of space? Where does the human body fall into the system
that has been set up by these artists?
Physical space affects an artwork in a multitude of ways and can change how the
viewer conceptualizes it. Will the artwork be something that a viewer can interact with or
is it meant to be seen from the outside. This brings up a question of accessibility, which is
very closely tied to physical space in a way that light isn’t. We interact with our
environment through the limits of our physical body. Light cannot create physical
barriers or openings; it creates a means in which to see the surrounding space. We mostly
interact with light, but are confronted physically with the limits of space. Brought
together, these two elements give us a sense of form and the world outside of our bodies.
In his study of the art experience, Dewey speaks of the concept of form in our
natural world, saying that it “marks a way of envisaging, of feeling and of presenting
experienced matter so that it most readily and effectively becomes material for the
construction of adequate experience on the part of those less gifted than the original
creator.”
62
While the aim of all art is to give people an experience, Turrell and Eliasson
achieve this in different ways from one another. Both artists work toward making the
viewer aware of his or her own perception, yet Turrell employs space in a way that
encourages the viewer to appreciate its expanse, giving three dimensional spaces the

62
Dewey, Art as Experience, 213.

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illusion of being seamless environments of light effects, while Eliasson uses space in his
work with light as a way in which to engage the viewer to occupy it and interpret his or
her relationship with the surroundings, making the space more tangible.
While Turrell’s work deals mainly in light, he is also cognizant that a viewer must
be able to move about the space he has created in order to have a unique experience with
it, not entirely constricted to the more generalized view of phenomenology. As Turrell
noted of his work in a 1988 interview:
Because as you come to this, the fact of the work is active
as you move around or sit over time or do something, it
changes. You’re not looking at anything you’re looking
into the space. You’re actually looking at space as
opposed to looking at something on a surface and then
reading it. So that it’s about you seeing as opposed to your
looking at this record at how I might have seen it in time.
63

Here Turrell indicates his relationship with perception, a phenomenon that he considers
as a part of his work. Space is an enabler of a unique perception of artworks. No viewer
will have the same experience as any other. Depending on the duration of his or her visit
as well as his or her own proportions, and trajectory through the space, a viewer will have
an individual experience that is unique to him or her on a personal level and in direct
relation to the environment mediated by Turrell.
Similarly, Eliasson has spoken about his ideas about space, citing various projects
such as Green River (1998), Your Rainbow Panorama (2006-2011), and again, The
Weather Project:
So if I have a sense of the space, if I feel that the space is
tangible, if I feel there is time, if there is a dimension I could
call time, I also feel that I can change the space. And

63
Turrell, interview by Charles Miedzinsky. Artcast, November 10, 1988.
Basse 26

suddenly it makes a difference in terms of making space
accessible. One could say this is about community,
collectivity. It’s about the sense of being together.
64

As the artist makes clear, his work is meant to be interacted with and not simply with by
a single person. Space can give us as the viewer in a public arena the sense of being a part
of a group or collective. Place several strangers in a room together in a museum and ask
of them to interact with an artwork, and each individual will have a multi-faceted
interpretation of the work. In the environments that Eliasson creates, the presence of
others is an effect that cannot be ignored. Space can give us the sense of responsibility
and make us acknowledge the fact that we are a small part of a whole.
Through our experiences of their works, Turrell and Eliasson have made us
cognizant of the phenomenological elements at play and ask us to consider their
significance in our everyday lives. In drawing the viewer in to a certain perception of
reality and of these elements, Turrell and Eliasson have to employ a variety of different
strategies. In the case studies that follow, the artists utilize color as a means to highlight
light and space through and enable viewers to recognize our changing surroundings, as
well as to notice our own physicality and the ways our bodies activate our surroundings.

64
Olafur Eliasson, “Olafur Eliasson: Playing with Light and Space.”
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Chapter Three: Light and Space through Color and the Physicality of the Body

In exploring the elements of light and space in their work, it becomes apparent
that Turrell and Eliasson have employed color as a way to shape perception of these
media for the viewer. Color is a modifier that is much like light in that it does not occupy
physical space or add any physical mass to the area or plane on which it is projected or
which it covers or permeates. In fact, color is a product of light and can be changed
depending on how much light there is. In a similar way, space changes our perspective
and can add dimensionality and depth to an otherwise flat color.
Beyond the use of color as a strategy to engage with the perception of light and
space, Turrell and Eliasson make use of the physicality of the body in order to engage
viewers with their artworks. The works by Turrell and Eliasson discussed here rely on the
physicality of the viewers and their movement through the artworks in order to be able to
perceive them in full. While color engages visual perception and affects the viewers’
emotions, the viewer’s body in space engages the viewer in the artwork through means of
walking, completes the sensation of being in a fully immersed environment, and makes
sense of the space which it occupies.
The two pieces I examine here are Breathing Light (2013) by Turrell and Your
blind movement (2010) by Eliasson. Both pieces are ideal case studies in order to explore
how light, space, color, and the physicality of the body work together in each of the
artist’s oeuvres; each of the works is concerned with light and space where the modifier
of the experience is the perception of color and the embodied experience through
kinesthetic movement of the body.

Basse 28

Turrell’s Breathing Light
Turrell’s Breathing Light is an immersive viewer experience, which I had the
chance to experience firsthand. On view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the
work is housed in the Resnick Pavilion with its own entrance. Through the mediated
space, the viewer enters the self-contained installation, which is wholly cut off in terms of
physical experiences of the outside world, and thus enters the world of Turrell. Breathing
Light suggests that there is some sort of rhythmic sensation of the light quality to be
found within the space. It allows itself to be read as both the viewer breathing in light, or
that the light itself is breathing. Upon entering the pavilion through the side entrance, the
viewer is greeted with a dark tunnel, leading him or her to the work. Before being able to
interact with the artwork, the viewer must take off his or her shoes and replace them with
small booties supplied by the museum. This is not only a way in which to maintain the
cleanliness of the work; it is also an act that presupposes a meditative space and “it marks
the beginning of the encounter and elicits an attitude of reverence.”
65
This technique was
also used by Doug Wheeler in the 1960s as a way to encourage the viewer to attend to the
space in a more meditative way had the viewer’s shoes remained on.
66
Here Turrell has
created an introduction into what is to be expected: an experience that asks viewers to
take their time. The result is an introspective experience for the individual viewer.
Upon climbing the stairs, the viewer is able to walk into Breathing Light. What he
or she is met with is a long sloping space whose floor, ceiling, and walls all meet at
curves. The whole space opens up to a larger section that is created to give the illusion

65
Schuld, “Practically Nothing,” 114.
66
Ibid.
Basse 29

that it goes on for an immeasurable distance. This is the “Ganzfeld,” a phenomenon that
underlies almost all of Turrell’s work “which distributes light across an undifferentiated
field so that the experimental subject experiences the sensation of looking at pure
color.”
67
The Ganzfeld causes perceptual deprivation, which leaves the viewer physically
disoriented and unsure of what they are seeing. The Ganzfeld effect was a study that
came out of Turrell’s work with Robert Irwin and Ed Wortz while they were
collaborating for LACMA’s Art and Technology Program in the late 1970s, noted earlier.
Drawing on these earlier experiments, Turrell has become a master of
manipulating light and the way he has arranged it in this artwork takes advantage of the
extent of human perception and the ability to trick the brain into sensing an illusion. The
visual cues, or lack thereof, make it difficult for the viewer to reconcile his or her position
in the space. Such a reductive artwork leaves little for the viewer to actually interpret,
creating for a sublime and meditative experience. This minimal quality of Breathing
Light as with other Light and Space works makes apparent that “the mechanisms of
attention and engagement are best shaped and understood when there is practically
nothing to attend.”
68
Viewers are left to look at the work introspectively, and as Irwin put
it, perceive themselves perceiving.
69
This is also where Turrell employs the strategy of
using color in order to get viewers thinking about their relationship to the space and the
ever-changing nature of it. This is what makes the light “breathe,” so to speak; it
produces subtle changes in color, giving a dimensionality—almost a materiality through
physical engagement— to the light. The key here is that the change is subtle and even

67
Ibid., 111.
68
Ibid., 108.
69
Eliasson and Irwin, “Take Your Time,” 55.
Basse 30

though it is prolonged, has an effect on the viewer’s own breath, which becomes slower
as a result. Before the viewer can realize, the room has completely changed from red to
lavender, to blue, and to other deep, saturated colors. In this way, Turrell asks his viewers
to slow down and take their time with the piece, to notice the rhythms of the changing
colors and where they will go next.
In an interview with writer Charles Miedzinski,

Turrell spoke about the
importance to him of viewers taking their time with his work:
There are some things that happen in seeing that require time.
I think these have the same amount of importance as a
symphony to which we’ll give two and a half hours. So time
is required for that development. Time has become very
precious in this culture and so because of that I don’t mind
thinking about it. If times means that much to you, I want a
lot from you. The fact that you must bring something to it I
think is important.
70

Given the fact that the interview took place in the late eighties, it is clear that Turrell was
ahead of his time in thinking about how much faster the world was moving with each day
as a result of the exponential progress in technology. The accelerations Turrell noted
would increase exponentially with the rise of Internet communications in the 1990s and
following. Contemporarily, the state of our world is that we often do not give art, or very
many aspects of our lives the time of day to consider them and really spend some time.
Every facet of Breathing Light—from the structure of how a viewer can enter to its
size—all has to do with taking time with the work. This slowed pace enacts the breath of
the viewer to engage with the rhythm of the light, so the light here, connects to the body.

70
Charles Miedzinski, “A James Turrell Retrospective: Affirmations of Perception and
Spirit.” Artweek 17, (1986): 1.
Basse 31

Considering the deceptively simple layout of Breathing Light, and therefore the
lack of sensory input from the external world, it takes the viewer some time to notice the
actual complexity of the work. This effect is linked again to Arnheim’s observations
about perception. Arnheim states: “Just as sensitivity to light decreases automatically
when the eyes are looking at a very bright field, so the different kinds of color receptors
adapt their responses selectively when one particular color dominates the visual field.”
71

He goes on to write about how this amounts to leveling, and how the viewer might
perceive the color based on the lighting of a given object or plane incorrectly. Thus there
is some time required in adjusting to Breathing Light and its complex mechanism. Our
body’s system of processing visual input is often unreliable in this regard, as there are
many factors that trick the mind into believing the viewer is seeing something that is not
there. This kind of illusion also occurs when the viewer, looking out from Turrell’s
Breathing Light into the adjacent hallway, doesn’t see the walls as white anymore. The
body attempts to reconcile the visual cues it receives and thus the walls are perceived to
be the color that is complementary to the current color he or she is experiencing in the
piece. This discovery can only be made if enough time is spent in Breathing Light. Other
artists who have created light installations that feature color employ the technique of
evoking an afterimage or aftereffect.
This immersive experience cuts the viewer off from the world outside and leaves
the viewer at the mercy of Turrell’s illusion to understand this controlled environment
and the way he or she perceives it. By depriving the viewer of most sensory information,
Turrell makes the viewer aware of the boundaries of the introspective gaze caused by the

71
Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 334.
Basse 32

reductive environment. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith described these
Ganzfeld environments by Turrell as producing the disorienting experience for the viewer
of a “fullness of emptiness.”
72
The piece provides a kind of self-fulfilling relationship in
which the viewer, in receiving so little sensory information from the piece, is able to
discover something about his or her own perception. Breathing Light is an exploration in
the power of focusing on light and space through the engagement of color and the way it
can cause a disorienting perceptual experience.
In this piece it becomes apparent very quickly that, while sight engages the viewer
on an emotional level, it can be easily deceived and thus cannot be relied on for
experiencing the work. His work is seamless, and its construction avoids letting the
viewer notice the mechanisms at play. The viewer sees no bulbs, no wires, and no other
technical aspects to the work. In the illusion that Turrell has created, the space looks and
feels deceptively flat. The depth perception is off, leaving the viewer wondering how far
the space actually stretches. For example, moving over to one side of the room, the
viewer encounters the wall quite suddenly. Since there are no corners in this space and
Turrell has made the wall and floor meet at a curve, there is no way to tell when the shift
happens by simply looking at the space. Moving cautiously, the viewer prods with his or
her feet and outstretched hands to figure out where the wall is in relation to him or her,
although this is limiting, given that the viewer isn’t actually allowed to make contact with
the walls. Through this exercise, Breathing Light encourages the viewer to acknowledge
the physicality of his or her body within the space. Given that walking around is what

72
Roberta Smith, “Venice Biennale: The Enormity of the Beast,” New York Times, June
2, 2011.
Basse 33

helps the viewer establish the scope of the work, there is a heightened sense of the body
in space as it leads the viewer around. Approaching the edge of the platform into the
secondary space that is not permitted for entry, the viewer is here also deprived of any
visual information about the confined space. The way the light plays with the visual field,
the space seems to go on for forever. Sight is an important aspect to this work in
exploring it through emotion brought about by color; however it isn’t a reliable method of
measuring distance. So in this case, the viewer is left to try the other senses at his or her
disposal in order to comprehend the size of the space. Bending the body forward and
letting the head enter the space to get a sense for the physicality of it, the viewer gets a
momentary uneasy feeling of vertigo. Breathing Light slopes downwards and the viewer
is unsure of his or her stability in this position.
These effects have long been noted in relation to Turrell’s work. For example,
journalist Wil S. Hylton remarks that seeing some of Turrell’s work “requires a degree of
surrender. There is a certain comfort in knowing what is real and where things are; to
have comfort stripped away can be rapturous, or distressing. It can even be dangerous.”
73

Turrell’s work has the ability to make the viewer feel disoriented and there have been
several cases where visitors to his work have felt disoriented, needed help balancing
themselves, and even fallen down.
74
Such experiences leave lasting impacts on viewers
and being in Breathing Light the viewer’s instability acts as a reminder of the physicality
of the body in the space. Even auditory input doesn’t help the viewer in that using one’s
voice as a way to measure an echo seems to defy any laws of acoustics and doesn’t

73
Hylton, "How James Turrell Knocked the Art World Off Its Feet.”
74
Ibid.
Basse 34

deliver a sound back. The viewer is left disoriented and at the mercy of the artist’s work
in reconciling their position in this seamless and all-encompassing space.
While in a lot of ways this is an introspective experience for the viewer, this work
isn’t encountered alone. Breathing Light—like the great majority of Turrell’s room
environments—is always overseen by staff so even if the viewer were to come alone,
there is another person to share the space with. Maneuvering the hazy space, the viewer
and the others around him or her can interact with the work, trying to make sense of the
disorienting environment together. This is a departure from previous approaches to
making works of art through the framework of phenomenology, in that it acknowledges
and even encourages the unique possibilities of interaction. Through the physicality of
the body in space, the viewer is able to perceive the entirety of the work. This connects to
Arnheim’s insights about perception and art: “The whole work must be simultaneously
present in the mind if we are to understand its development, its coherence, the
interrelations among its parts.”
75
While it is deprived of a lot of sensory information, the
work challenges the viewer to explore the space through the movement of his or her
body, all at once engaging with the environment around him or her and becoming aware
of his or her own physicality in the space.

Eliasson Your blind movement
Eliasson’s Your blind movement, 2010, was one of sixteen works included in his
exhibition at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev, which I was able to see in 2011; these

75
Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 374.
Basse 35

installations swept entire rooms in monochrome color, shadow play, reflection, and
included natural elements such as water. Your blind movement is a particular experience
in exploring light and space through color. It takes the form of an immersive installation,
whose entry is controlled by two doors, that occupies an entire room filled with fog
which visitors are invited to traverse, giving visitors the sense of being immersed in a
cloud. Above the viewers, installed in the ceiling of the piece, are different colored lights,
casting a rainbow effect in the fog. There is a similar feeling in Your blind movement as
there is in Breathing Light that has to do with the sense of being unable to perceive the
spatial parameters or boundaries of the installation.
Eliasson creates this effect in a similar manner. However, because of the density
of the fog, it is almost entirely impossible to discern how many other visitors the viewer
is sharing the space with. Eliasson’s approach also differs from Turrell’s in that his
environment is not a seamless illusion; instead, his tools—fog machines, light bulbs, and
other mechanical devices—are all visible to the viewers before they enter. However, once
inside the piece, the fog is so dense that if viewers were to stretch out their hands in front
of them, they would barely be able to see the outlines of their fingers. Feet and the floor
are similarly hard to distinguish, and the whole space seems to consume the viewer. This
can be a bit of an eerie experience given the fact that there are others sharing the space
with the viewer and he or she will come upon them quite out of the blue.
Similarly to Breathing Light, however, once the viewer adjusts to the environment
of Your blind movement, the experience of Eliasson’s piece can be quite meditative at
times. The fog separates viewers from other people, making them very aware of their
own bodies and unlike Turrell’s work where the viewers are visually aware of the other
Basse 36

people sharing the space, in this work by Eliasson the viewer is aware of other people
primarily through sounds and noise levels in the room, not through visual cues. The
cacophonous atmosphere is caused by other viewers’ squeals of glee and cries of shock as
they come upon friends and loved ones or exclamations of sudden surprise upon bumping
into a stranger. Nicolas Bourriaud has described this effect as the “collective elaboration
of meaning.”
76
Your blind movement does not suggest an introspective experience, but
rather depends on the viewer as well as the others around him or her to complete the
piece. The different viewers interact, helping each other navigate the space. In some
cases, individuals advise one another where to go; given that some may have already
explored the space, they might have a better idea of the parameters of the work. Each
viewer has a unique experience, which is built upon the relation to others and their
emotional reaction to the colors in the work. Ultimately individual experiences are part
of a collection of experiences within the space of the work.
In Your blind movement, Eliasson disperses color across the space, such that one
section of color blends into the next. This effect is created by hanging colored light bulbs
at the top of the piece, and the fog is seen through the different hues. In Your blind
movement the different colors are seen as the visitor moves through the space, from one
band or section of color to another section of color. This is different from Turrell’s
Breathing Light, in which the color changes in the entire room at once, and is
mechanically driven and timed by the artist.
The active participation of the viewer in Eliasson’s work differentiates his
motivations from those of Turrell. Breathing Light embodies the view of phenomenology

76
Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 15.

Basse 37

of the 1960s in which the emphasis was placed on the singular and controlled experience
of the work by an individual visitor. Thus the work of Turrell requires less of the viewer
in terms of an active experience. The artist completely dictates the rhythm of the light
that is experienced within a tightly controlled environment. By comparison, in Your blind
movement Eliasson recognizes the possibilities of experiences that viewers might have
based on their movement within and throughout the space.
In Eliasson’s piece, though the viewer has a difficult time distinguishing shapes in
all the haze, color is the one element that seems to evade the problem of being
indistinguishable in this environment. As the viewer makes his or her way through the
space, the upcoming color is quite easy to see once the viewer is close to it. This gives the
viewer a sense of what’s to come. In this way, a viewer may avoid an area or pass
through the scheme completely.
Eliasson is very well aware of color theory and colors’ effect on a viewer and it
shows in this piece. He has commented: “Color has in its abstraction enormous
psychological and associative potential, and even though this has been collectively
cultivated to the extreme, individual differences in experiencing colors is extreme.”
77
In
this piece, color is utilized as a strategy to acknowledge the individuality of the viewer. In
terms of his or her reaction to it, although the experience overall is collective, Eliasson
realizes the power of experiencing color and thus provides the viewer an opportunity in
which to experience it over the wide expanse of a room and, by eliminating most other
distractions, drawing focus to it. Viewers draw on their experience of color to determine

77
Olafur Eliasson, “Words on Color, 2001,” in Olafur Eliasson (London: Phaidon Press,
2002).

Basse 38

the scope of the space and their relationship to light as it changes in different tones and
hues as they make their way along. What is interesting is the viewer’s own interpretations
of the colors and the effects they have on the individual, in varying degrees of intensity.
While each individual has his or her own interpretation of the colors, there are
some general reactions that various colors tend to elicit. Arnheim quotes Ernest
Schachtel, saying, “that the experience of color resembles that of affect or
emotion…Emotion strikes us just as color does.”
78
Blue evokes a calm feeling yet also a
sense of drowning. Yellow makes the viewer feel predictably happy. Yet red gets a strong
negative reaction and the viewer is reluctant to enter that part of the space.
79
These are
common reactions, and they were my own. But they are not universal, and the depending
on the viewer’s state of mind, the different colors in Your blind movement may illicit
strong opposing reactions from viewer to viewer. In this way Eliasson gives viewers
moving through this work a strong emotional experience relating to their
phenomenological perception of color. These colors are arranged in the order of the
rainbow, so the artist does not predetermine the emotional responses in his own
arrangement of them.
In both case studies, one can notice that color plays a crucial role in the viewer’s
perception of light and space. It is an added benefit to both Breathing Light and Your
blind movement in that a viewer can connect to an artwork on a deeper level if he or she
has an emotional reaction to the experience of the work. In this way, if we understand
light and space works as allowing visitors to discover something about their bodily

78
Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 336.
79
Ibid., 368.
Basse 39

perceptions in conjunction with emotions that are propagated by the colors in these
works, we can see that they potentially create a very powerful and subliminal experience.
In these works, the viewer encounters the mechanisms of their perception through
their various senses. Art historian Caroline A. Jones speaks of the modernist approach to
the segmentation of the senses in her introduction to the catalogue Sensorium (2006):
“More and more often, the desired aesthetic seems to be one of disorientation itself.
Leaving us open, unbounded, or fragmented is not meant to produce us as psychotic, but
to make us available for re-organization in terms we might be able to negotiate for
ourselves.”
80
Many of the works by Turrell and Eliasson are disorienting in their own
right. The way the light is arranged in Breathing Light gives the illusion of the physical
space being flat. In Your blind movement, the dense fog and intense light make it difficult
for the viewer to make out the full contours of the space. This disorientation is primarily
based on vision. While we have previously seen how sight is key in the
phenomenological experience of the works, the physicality of the body is also important
for the viewer to reconcile their orientation and place within the work. As viewers, we are
able to re-organize our way of thinking of our role in the space through the
acknowledgement of our bodies.
Eliasson’s work Your blind movement is also a study in the physicality of the
body in space. The title itself suggests that visual cues are deprived in this piece though
sight is important in interpreting the piece. While it has an emotional impact on the lone
viewer in its use of color, Your blind movement is also a study in what the viewer must

80
Caroline A. Jones, “Introduction” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology,
and Contemporary Art (Cambridge: MIT Press :The MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2006),
39-40.

Basse 40

partially forgo relying on sight and use tactile senses in order to get a sense for the space
around them. In the “Take Your Time” catalogue, Madeleine Grynsztejn mentions
Eliasson’s Room for one color (1997) in her essay “(Y)our Entanglements,” yet the
description is also applicable to Your blind movement. She suggests that it “demonstrates
Eliasson’s debt to the insights of phenomeologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Varela as
well as Henri Bergson and Edmund Husserl, with whom he shares the conviction that
human experience, including perception, is embedded in a corporeal self.”
81

Awareness of one’s own body is essential to interpreting Eliasson’s work. In Your
blind movement, the viewer is encouraged to move around the entire parameters of the
room in order to explore it and its dimensions. In this way, the sense of touch is key to
the viewer since being able to walk far enough in a certain direction will take the viewer
over to each wall and thus be able to determine the size of the room given that the dense
fog doesn’t allow for the viewer to take in the room in full. As suggested by the title, the
hazy work renders the visitor “blind” to the surroundings, and one traverses the space
without the help of sight but instead using other senses (touch, sound, etc) to navigate the
piece. Utilizing these other senses, visitors become very aware of the limitations of his or
her own body, cautiously progressing forward, attempting to discern his or her own place
in the work. It is important that viewers are conscious of their bodies in the space since
their presence impacts others through either negative, positive or neutral interaction.
Your blind movement also addresses a few questions that Eliasson has about
bodies in space which he has asked about the function of art in general: “How do we
configure the relationship between our body and the space? How do we then reconfigure

81
Grynsztejn, “(Y)our Entanglements,” 29.
Basse 41

it? How do we know that being in a space makes a difference?”
82
Eliasson has
commented on this piece specifically in terms of space by saying: “And as you tip-toe
along, you leave one way of seeing behind and invent a different one. I find it remarkable
that we are capable of doing this, using different senses…we realize the reality we live in
is our own construction and it can be changed by the way we engage with it.”
83
Eliasson
not only wants to make viewers aware of their own perception in this piece, but he also
aims to get viewers to question the way that perception works and if there aren’t other
ways in which to sense our environment, adapt to it, and engage with it that makes us see
the space and the relationship to other individuals differently.
Seeing Your blind movement from a single position in the room would be to
ignore the changing color pattern and the shift of other visitors in the piece; by adding the
dynamic of movement through walking, the piece is completed. Eliasson says of this
work: “In this moment of transition, physically and mentally, I see the potential of
creating a space which gives the transition a form.”
84
Movement is not just something
that Eliasson wants viewers to do with their bodies; he also wants movement to engage
viewers with their bodies by getting them to perform mediated motions of feeling their
way around the piece, discovering the different sections of color, and engaging with other
viewers. The trajectory of each person interacting with this work is different and thus
Eliasson acknowledges that the work is perceived by each visitor in a unique way. Your

82
Olafur Eliasson, “Olafur Eliasson: Playing with Light and Space.”
83
"Danish Artist Olafur Eliasson: 'The Reality We Live in Is Our Own Construction' -
Spiegel Online," Spiegel Online, last modified April 27, 2010,
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/danish-artist-olafur-eliasson-the-reality-we-
live-in-is-our-own-construction-a-691464.html

84
Grynsztejn, “(Y)our Entanglements,” 15.
Basse 42

blind movement gives viewers a sense of awareness as they pass through the space and
makes them cognizant of experiencing this piece through their own bodies as well as
through interactions with others’ bodies. In addition to forming an emotional connection
that is activated by color, the viewer walking through an artwork forms a connection to
the space and the physical body.
Breathing Light and Your blind movement encourage visitor participation in
which viewers’ bodies become the vehicles through which the entirety of the work is
experienced. The combination of sight and the physicality of the body in experiencing
these works is what Jones calls sensorium: “the subject’s way of coordinating all of the
body’s perceptual and proprioceptive signals as well as the changing sensory envelope of
the self.”
85
Through the different mechanisms of perception that the viewer goes through
in experiencing Turrell and Eliasson’s work, the viewer has to adjust and reshape those
same mechanisms in reacting to and interpreting the environment around him or her. It is
an experience of discovering the limits and adaptive responses of the corporeal self.
Rather than being subject to a mediated environment, the artists leave the work of the
encounter to the viewer. Our perception is subject to our surroundings and our movement
is a way in which to acknowledge that perception and question the structures of our
environment.

85
Jones, “Introduction,” 8.
Basse 43

Chapter Four: Conclusion

The works of Eliasson and Turrell bring up intriguing and innovative explorations
in the field of contemporary art. The two artists expertly create immersive and multi-
sensory artworks that encourage viewers to notice light and space in an entirely different
way than it is experienced everyday through adapting the viewer’s perception of the work
and simultaneously making the viewer aware of his or her own perceptual processes.
While we get so lost in our day to day and constant intake of new information and
sensory input, these two artists ask us to take our time and consider light and space and
allow ourselves to dwell on the complexities phenomenological experience. By looking at
examples of works by the two artists we discover something about our own perceptions,
our emotions, and our bodies. By interacting with Turrell’s and Eliasson’s works, I have
argued that the viewer is able to step back from everyday life and take a moment to
consider the phenomena of light and space themselves, through the artist-created
immersive environments that alter and limit typical stimuli.
Caroline Jones makes relevant arguments about installations such as these:
“Installation art proposes to meet our desires for disorder, freedom, chaos—its aspirations
to power can be linked to the Gesamtkunstwerk, to sensory mixing and abundance, to
overflow and excess.”
86
The works of Turrell and Eliasson can make a curatorial student
consider what it means to present the kinds of environments that the two artists create
within an institution. Their installations have an enormous impact on viewers, leaving
them to consider the questions brought on by the artists long after they have left the
installations. While Turrell’s and Eliasson’s works have a deep relationship to art history,

86
Jones, “Introduction,” 19.
Basse 44

the viewer doesn’t need to be able to place the works art historically in order to
understand them experientially. These artists’ works are ultimately about you, the
individual, and the interpretations you bring to them through your experiences with them.
Your phenomenological experience is what completes these works.
Curators Carmen Gimenez and Nat Trotman of the Guggenheim Museum in New
York discuss some of the introspective aspects that go into exhibiting Turrell’s work,
which was featured his 2013 exhibition there:
One of the things that makes Turrell’s work so powerful is the
way that it addresses each and every viewer individually,
through the function of his or her perceptual faculties and a
striking immediacy of experience. Even the largest installation
feels personal, which contributes to the contemplative
atmosphere that accompanies them.
87

Similarly, Grynsztejn speaks of Eliasson’s practice: “Olafur’s practice is one of constant
inquiry and investigation. Not resolution, not final statement, but ideas and questions, and
play and joy and discovery, and false starts and dead ends.”
88
The experience that Turrell
and Eliasson take their viewers on is a journey that is guided by personal involvement
and curiosity. These artists inform viewers’ ways of seeing and point them in directions
not considered before. The artists let the viewer discover their work on their own terms,
namely through their perception.
As curators, we are constantly considering different way in which to communicate
with our audience. The curator’s challenge is to convey information to an audience with

87
"In Conversation with Guggenheim Curators Carmen Giménez and Nat Trotman on the
Recently Opened James Turrell Exhibition," Artsy, 2013, accessed January 10, 2016,
https://www.artsy.net/article/editorial-in-conversation-with-guggenheim-curators-
carmen-gimenez.
88
Madeline Grynsztejn, Madeline Grynsztejn on Olafur Eliasson’s Model Room (San
Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, September 2007).
Basse 45

varying degrees of art historical, critical, and theoretical knowledge. If the concepts or
language is too complex, the viewers who are not as well versed in these subjects are shut
out. If the language is too simple, the historical, social, and theoretical integrity of the
work is compromised, not to mention, the understanding of the work is lost. In the works
of Turrell and Eliasson, the two artists are able to interact with viewers of varying levels
of knowledge and backgrounds by making the work about the viewer’s
phenomenological perception itself. Through their works of art, these artists ask viewers
to consider themselves on a corporeal level: how they react to and interpret their
environment through sight, emotion, and the physicality of their bodies. Perhaps this is
what makes their works so successful: the viewer in each case can feel like he or she is
being taken on a journey, one in which his or her physical presence has an impact, is
important.
As a curator, one must employ that same line of thinking when creating
exhibitions of such installation based works. Through the use of a controlled environment
in the case of Turrell and one that lets the viewer have more control, as in the case of
Eliasson, the work gives the viewer a chance to explore the deeper phenomenological
processes at work. In experiencing these works, as Dawna Schuld argues, “We take the
work with us: our heightened senses, now attuned to the subtleties of the conscious
fringe, encounter a more vivid world than the one we left behind.”
89
The works leave the
viewer with an experience not just of the piece, but with the tools to look at our work
more critically in terms of perception.

89
Schuld, “Practically Nothing,” 121.

Basse 46

My own personal views in terms of the viewer’s relationship with art are that I
favor the immersive art experience in which the viewer completes the work. It creates a
more personal and intimate relationship to the artwork. The viewer in this case, is able to
respond to this artwork, perhaps more than in the case of a work that cannot be physically
engaged with. Immersive, multi-sensory artworks like those of Turrell and Eliasson
create small worlds in which the viewer leaves his or hers and enters that of the artists.
The work is reflexive; it offers the chance for the viewer to look back on him or herself
and discover the phenomenological mechanisms at play. This leaves viewers with a sense
of wonderment and the curiosity to explore the limits of their corporeal selves. The
ability to give the viewer a sense of being subjected to the artist’s world is a powerful
feeling. Art has the power to connect with viewers when there are no words to describe
the phenomenon. In fact, art cannot be effective if it does not resonate with the viewer.
As curators we must strive to build those connections between viewers and the artist’s
work.

Basse 47

Works Cited

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Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. New
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Artsy. "In Conversation with Guggenheim Curators Carmen Giménez and Nat Trotman
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2016. https://www.artsy.net/article/editorial-in-conversation-with-guggenheim-
curators-carmen-gimenez.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In
Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 1-26. New
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Bishop, Claire. Installation Art: A Critical History. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Blom, Ina. “Beyond the Ambient/ Jenseits des Atmosphärischen,” translated by Bram
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Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses Du Réel, 1998.

Brown, Julia. James Turrell; Occluded Front. Edited by Julia Brown. Los Angeles: Lapis
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Butler, Judith. “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique
of Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception.” In The Thinking Muse:
Feminism and Modern French Philosophy. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
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Clark, Robin, and Michael Auping. Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface.
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Coplans, John. Doug Wheeler, exh. cat. (Pasadena Art Musem, 1968), n.p.

Crary, Jonathan. “Robert Irwin and the Condition of Twilight.” In Robert Lehman
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Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Berkeley Publishing Group, 2005.

Basse 48

Eliasson, Olafur. “Olafur Eliasson: Playing with Light and Space.” Filmed February
2009. TED2009 video. Posted July 2009.

Eliasson, Olafur. Interview by Madeleine Grynsztejn. San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, December 2013.

Eliasson, Olafur, Madeleine Grynsztejn, and Mieke Bal. Take Your Time: Olafur
Eliasson. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007.

Govan, Michael, Christine Y. Kim, Alison De Lima Greene, E. C. Krupp, Florian
Holzherr, and James Turrell. James Turrell: A Retrospective. Los Angeles: Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013.

Gropius, Walter. Yes! Voices of the Worker’s Council for Art. Reprinted in Voices of
German Expressionism, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1970; reprinted London: Tate,
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Grynsztejn, Madeline. Madeline Grynsztejn on Olafur Eliasson’s Model Room. San
Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, September 2007.

Grynsztejn, Madeleine, Ólafur Elíasson, Daniel Birnbaum, and Michael Speaks. Olafur
Eliasson. London: Phaidon Press, 2002.

Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,
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Hylton, Wil S. "How James Turrell Knocked the Art World Off Its Feet." The New York
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art-world-off-its-feet.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1.

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technology, and contemporary art. 1st MIT Press ed. Cambridge: MIT
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Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy. Chicago & London: University of
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Lefebvre, Henri. The Critique of Everyday Life. Translated by John Moore. London:
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Basse 49

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith.
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Creator Basse, Monika (author)

Core Title Light and space as experience: a study of the work of James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, and perceptual phenomenology

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 07/26/2016

Defense Date 07/24/2016

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