There's a lot of people who'd agree with James Turrell's family. Not least now. Art doesn't seem very important when there's a global pandemic sweeping the entire planet (death toll as I write:15,400+ and rising) and compared to health, safety, friends, family, nature, and love it's not. I'm pretty certain that, despite all these blogs about it, I've never made the case it is.
But, like most of you, I'm holed up at home and we all need some kind of distraction at the moment. One friend is watching old episodes of Brookside, another is getting her daughter to do puppet shows, and a few seem to be using the time to do some of the ol' keep fit. Good on them. We need to do what we can to lift the spirits, alleviate the boredom, and keep ourselves as healthy as possible. Habits formed in the early days of this crisis could become quite entrenched. Good ones are advisable (he types trying not to look at the empty bottles of San Miguel waiting to be recycled).
To keep me busy I am, of course, writing. I'm also keeping my cultural diary updated even though that mostly consists of crossing things out or pushing them forward to dates in the future before, probably, later crossing them out anyway. Most exhibitions I have planned, I accept I'll never go to. Possibly the likes of the Tate and the V&A will reschedule shows but it seems unlikely.
One show, however, simply moved online. Online exhibitions have never appealed to me before but I've never been isolated at home or social distancing before. I've never lived through a pandemic before. Very few of us have. James Turrell's The Materiality of Light (at the PACE Gallery, Piccadilly) became my first ever online exhibition and this, therefore, is my first ever review of an online exhibition. I suspect it won't be the last but I certainly hope that, eventually, I'll be going back to writing about both visiting actual exhibitions and having ice creams, pints in beer gardens, and walks in parks afterwards - and appreciating all of it more than I ever have done.
Sagittarius, Medium Elliptical Glass (2019)
It wasn't, necessarily, the best choice for an online exhibition as it definitely seemed like the sort of thing you were supposed to experience in situ. Turrell likes to do big outdoor works in the deserts of America so even a London gallery is probably a little cramped and contained for him.
Try spending eight days alone in my small flat, mate and then tell me about "spaces within spaces". For that's how Turrell describes his work. "Luminous portals", "instruments for altering our perception", and "the radiance of pure colour" are also themes bandied about in the press release. What this means, in reality, is they are oval sprites of colour, sometimes more than one colour, against a different coloured background.
Sagittarius, Medium Elliptical Glass (2019)
Sagittarius, Medium Elliptical Glass (2019)
Which was fine. It'd probably have been better in the large gallery space than online, of course it would - or why would we even go to galleries?, and I'd possibly have spent longer taking it in had I been there. Online it was pretty - and pretty underwhelming but, right now, that doesn't really matter. I was looking at nice things for a while and that was enough.
The promise of a transcendental experience never really materialised but, again, how could looking at some pretty lights or, in my case, some online images of pretty lights be anywhere near as transcendental nature as living through a time when almost the entirety of the world is looking death straight in the face while everyday norms collapse all around us. Even Picasso would struggle to match that show.
Sagittarius, Medium Elliptical Glass (2019)
Sagittarius, Medium Elliptical Glass (2019)
Sagittarius, Medium Elliptical Glass (2019)
James Turrell's art, in more normal times, would deserve a more thorough consideration and before I can return to visiting actual real life galleries I'm hoping more exhibitions will appear online. Maybe I'll even feel more inclined to write about them in more depth.
For now, I simply thank the PACE Gallery for moving this online. For giving me a tiny glimmer of my normal life when I am, like everyone else, awash in an ocean of uncertainty. I imagine James Turrell would like to leave London for the desert now and stay there. As a man with an enduring love for London, I'd be quite inclined to join him.
The Materiality of Light (2019)
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