Private temple where I go to find god or no god, self or no self, I’d rather not share the boxes with anyone and, miraculously, I don’t have to, solitary worship a gift of the residency I’m on, the leave I’ve taken. At the beginning of each new semester, though, I make a ritual of taking my students to The Color Inside, a James Turrell Skyspace installed on the roof of the University of Texas’s Student Activities Building.
The Skyspace is a naked-eye observatory in the heart of the main campus, where visitors view the sky through an opening in the ceiling called an oculus. During sunrise and sunset, colored lights illuminate the walls and contrast the natural skylight in the oculus. This affects the way we see the sky and produces the experience of James Turrell’s art. While Turrell considers his art only visible during sunrise and sunset, the Skyspace is available for observation during the day.
We go at sunset, watch for an hour and eleven minutes as an orchestrated sequence of colored lights rewrites the way our eyes read the color of the actual sky. Turrell has done his research: optics, color theory, physics of light, physiology of perception—brain and eye. Cast upward from hidden holds, projected color creeps across, quickly saturates the pristine white walls and ceiling framing the oculus. It starts slowly, it’s under way before we fully know, and then it’s in full swing. Our carved portion of oval sky has shifted register, degree: ordinary blue (beautiful enough) grows deeper, electric, morphs turquoise, celadon, emerald, aqua, cerulean, celery; fades dove gray, then white, stone, maybe, beige, pumpkin, mud brown, now black, now back: blue again, our feet touch ground, then off, onward, elsewhere, gone. Sometimes—chance operation—a flock of birds or an airplane floats by.
Framing the experience through a question—How do we make something out of nothing?—foregrounding the processes of perception and their malleability, my notes read not unlike a discussion of migraine: All we do is perceive. Everything is relative. One thing (re)invents the next. We are always translating. Perception is a form of translation. Language is a form of translation. Everything associates. The brain is a simile-making machine. Everything exists in time. Everything creates its own time line.
“My work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing,” Turrell explains, showing us the pliancy of the mechanics by which we navigate and name, by which we make and are made. A romp. “This affects the way we see the sky …”
I tell them it’s funny: He turns the blue sky brown! Didn’t the surprise geese crack you up? Notice how long he withholds red, then really lets us have it. I tell them it’s political: he’s showing us exactly how much to believe our own eyes. I tell them it’s personal: we compare notes—when the sky pushed in, when it pulled out, when the walls fell away, how our vision spun, if yellow has a secret or a scent, whether the oculus is a pupil, a periscope, a microscope, a bird’s egg, a god’s eye—and discover how idiosyncratically each of our bodies and minds “produces the experience.”