James Turrell & Dale Chihuly – the brains and body of colored light

Below, a child greets the light in James Turrell’s Skyscape at the Henry Gallery. (Image from the Henry Gallery’s flickr pool.)

James Turrell likes to describe his grandmother telling him that the point of silence for Quakers was to “go inside and greet the light.” Nobody in Dale Chihuly’s childhood asked him to greet the light. With his brother and father dead by the time he was in his mid-teens, his mom had a bar she frequented whose exterior bled neon colors in the night rain. He remembers being happy she was having a good time.

I once asked Henry senior curator Elizabeth Brown what she thought of a comparison between Turrell and Chilhuly. She told me she thought nothing about it, because they “have nothing in common.”

Nothing? Nothing but the bottom line. They both deal with colored light.

Turrell comes out of Southern California’s minimalist movement and Chihuly out of decorative arts, a field that modernism rejected and Chihuly helped bring into the postmodern mainstream.

Nobody mistakes Chihuly’s work for a church, unless it’s the church of whoopee.
He gives shape to excess and makes it shine. Turrell dematerializes the object, and Chihuly makes a fetish of its production. Next to Turrell’s aesthetic virtue, Chihuly’s vulgarity is startling, but at his best, he has his own kind of virtue.

On the black surface of a glass pond (Milli Fiori) flowers bloom. There are water reeds, swamp grass, irises and lilies; water snakes and coconuts, heavy orbs with bright shining wings.

Chihuly celebrates the physical, and Turrell the mental. If Chihuly’s work were a fictional character, it would be Falstaff. Turrell is Prospero.

When Prospero says, “Our revels are now ended,” he’s relieved. Revels are not his thing. Asking Falstaff to tone it down is like like asking Beyonce to join a convent.

Audiences for Turrell and Chihuly diverge. They are each other’s road not taken. What if these audiences woke one day transported to where they never wanted to be, on Turrell’s high or Chihuly’s low? Would they afterward see the world with new eyes or be freshly confirmed in what they felt all along?