A frequent joke about why Californian artists fetishised the surface of their work was because you could only see New York art through art magazines, and the paper was shiny. Born in California (1943), James Turrell and his compatriot Robert Irwin were key figures in the "light and space school", a movement in which "perception" rather than the object is key to "experience" of the artwork, that is the "artwork" is a mere light conduit for experience. At Albion, Turrell is presenting a group of light pieces from his youth. Unlike his later work, the light rooms and Roden Crater, which create a condition for the experience of light, here light is the medium in which "sculpture" is created. Perhaps, slightly akin to Minimalism's sense of materiality at the time, the immateriality of light was Turrell's first steps into creating work in which the viewer truly became an eye.

James Turrell's exhibition (light and television pieces, as well as drawings from the '60s) at Albion runs through the 17/12/04.

For more images of the exhibition click here.

This interview was conducted live at Albion on 13/10/04.

Sherman Sam: How long have you been here in London?

James Turrell: Oh a few days, I came on… I don't remember, oh I came on the 12th and leave the 17th.

SS: So you've got a great example of London light these few days. [It had been raining.]

JT: I know London [laughs]… I lived in Ireland for a while and it's much the same.

SS: Do you think you'd have made what you made if you'd grown up here?

JT: That's hard to say except one thing I want to remind you of is that if you look at Caspar David Freidrich, Constable and Turner, or all of the Gradite School of Amsterdam, plus of course Rembrandt and Vermeer, then the Impressionists -- none of them came from the South of France; they might have gone there after they got a little money, out of desperation at the end of their lives. You know, in a way light is precious here. So many of the people who are interested in light are in these kinds of environments. In California it just happened to come, people say it's due to the light but then all this huge backlog of painting about light as a subject is in this area where there wasn't a lot.

SS: Well, what I learnt from having lived here a couple of years was that a lot of painters here are very concerned with light in their work, even when they're abstract painters, which is something I never considered when I was studying in California.

JT: We take it for granted there's so much of it, we even have to protect ourselves.

SS: Yes, most of my friends that live in California all sit in darkened rooms.

JT: Well, the big thing there is, through the time of the surfers and surfing situation in the '50s and '60s, it served the "tan fascist" culture. I was red-haired before it all turned white, and the red-haired people have the different skin cell that is very susceptible to cancer, so for me I didn't tan so it didn't work. But then again, California didn't work for me.

SS: So that's why you're in Arizona, where there is more light?

JT: Yes, There is more light in Arizona, that's true, even more than California. In LA you always have the late night and early morning low cloud, sort of like fog just like San Francisco. But then the smog does some beautiful things to the sunsets; it holds the light a different way. It has a sort of whitish quality…

SS: Do you find Arizona light much harder than California light?

JT: It's a harder light. It has more clarity and crispness but at times it's quite hard. If you go to a place where there isn't much moisture in the air and very low humidity, that makes for a very crisp light, as long as you don't have the pollutants. Also high altitude does that too. So where I am in Arizona it's 7,000 ft, so it makes for a different light. It's a very beautiful light, especially at the beginning and end of day. You have that side-raking light which brings such clarity and beauty. But then the softness you get in the snow, because some light is absorbed. You have these broken storms, we don't have a full overcast, then there's this amazing light, very soft light in snow.

SS: So the Crater is open now? I read that it would be soon.

JT: No, it won't be open for some time.

SS: So we can't have a special KF visit…

JT: [laughs] No, not now, sorry. There was a time when I had a brief lull, which was good, and had some people come but we're just heading into.

SS: It's an incredible project I think, Roden Crater.

JT: Nothing better to do…

SS: Well yes, we have to find projects to keep ourselves busy in life.

JT: I mean something takes time, and give it time. If you go and see the Watts Towers, that is something that when I was young inspired me; that idea just to make something like that. Of course Arizona has all these projects like the Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti, so in a way it's a place that kinda attracts that because of the inexpensive land, the openness, and also they had the Biosphere, you remember that… terrific uniforms. [laughter] Now that's something Frank Lloyd Wright forgot and Paolo Soleri never thought of. I will have to think about that…

SS: So these works are from the '60s when you were young.

JT: Yes, started when I was 23.

SS: 23?

JT: Yes the first one was made in '66, those were the Stu for Afro; these ones are right across the corner. Then I figured out how to do it with projectors, the first show. Len Picus, LP associates, Len is a gem of a man, he fronted me the projectors.

SS: Do you feel strange re-visiting your work? About what… 40 years later?

JT: 36, it is interesting.

SS: Do you see changes in your work?

JT: Yeah, it's interesting to see. They are in a way… old friends, but some of them I look at and wonder what was I thinking. And some colours too. But you know these are the beginnings and you start out with a fresh naivite.

SS: Now reflecting back, they seem closer to Minimalism -- as if light were a solid, physical entity. In your more recent work, the light is more painterly… that is more immaterial.

JT: Well, in a way this is the most painterly, in the sense that I looked at the room itself and the framework of the room as the picture plane, so that when you put the light on the wall it cannot lie on the same plane as the wall, it either lies in front of it. Or it has the quality of going through it, or some of the pieces here make a kind of a hypothetical space that is sort of three-dimensional, but if you notice the form does not really solve the three-dimensions, so there is a strange dimensionality. And in that way this comes out of painting predominantly as opposed to sculpture, although architects talk about enlivening the space between or making it positive, which I've rarely seen. So I make these spaces that somehow contain or apprehend the light and these first ones were much more painterly -- almost like Malevich, and he talked about laying on the paint so that it was almost like without dimension. Well, paint has much more dimension than light, so you really get this quality of just light making the space and if you see the white one it really falls off to the right and becomes quite deep and attaches itself to the other wall. It has this plastic malleability that is amazing to me so you know it took me a while to know about that. When I was at art school they teach you the colour wheel; we should really teach the spectrum. People think you take blue and yellow together you make green, but if you put blue and yellow light together you get white, which is a shock to many because it's not how you think of it, and the more colour you put together in paint the more muddy you get and you never get black, more mud quality…

SS: Or sort of grey.

JT: Well, this isn't even grey, it depends on which pigment you put on. But do that with light, the whiter you get.

SS: I suppose art schools are quite retrograde entities. You have teachers teaching you from their experience.

JT: Yes, of course! That's kind of all schools. So all schools are teaching things that were. My thing would be kinda more difficult to teach, cause it's not one particular thing. Maybe people do not need to know this at all [laughs].

SS: Well it would be lessons in moving earth, landscaping and zonal planning presumably…

JT: Yes. But art teaching is a strange thing. In a way you need to teach this attitude for "how to prospect for this mother load", it's like mining… It's like this personal thing, I think it's quite a difficult thing to teach. It's like in flying, which I take great pleasure in, and in a way you have to live with that. You have to have this idea of teaching judgement as opposed to the mechanics which is a particular thing to learn.

SS: What do you mean?

JT: Well what risk to take, what not to take. It's an art too. You have to be seen as stepping out and at same time the master of it. It's like making your own instrument and playing it or assembling it, you have to do it all as an artist in a strange way…

SS: And be your own business manager.

JT: Yes, and you can be sure that the Democrats aren't looking out for you, but do you want to be a Republican? No! [laughs] So how do you do this?

SS: So you vote Nader right?

JT: Well you know there's a man I respect.

SS: His politics seem more European, at least in terms of approach.

JT: That doesn't work very well, does it?

SS: No, no.

JT: But he can still run and people throw mud at him but it doesn't stick but everyone wants to be angry with him for upsetting an election but he actually gives a choice. I think we had a choice because in the election before the last one there was the possibility in the primaries to have Bradley or Mccain, but we didn't choose those.

SS: But you are going to vote?

JT: Oh no. I'm sorry I don't. I was arrested and did time. I worked for the American Foreign Services Committee and "improperly" advised someone.

SS: So you're not allowed to vote… forever?

JT: Well, it depends on the state, and very few states allow it. You have to have either an American Presidential pardon or you can get something in a state…

SS: That seems outrageous.

JT: There's a bumper sticker that says "Question Authority", you ever see those… well, the problem with that is actually authority answers! [laughs]

SS: Guess you learnt that one the hard way!

JT: There's nothing like self-righteousness, and I was terribly self-righteous.

SS: And not so now?

JT: Oh I don't know about that, it's sort of like warts, they kinda grow back. You have to watch it all the time.

SS: I think that's something they really do teach you at art school.

JT: Self-righteousness, oh absolutely. They may not teach you the skills to do your work but they teach you the attitude. You come out of art school with attitude!

SS: Just one last question, I think I've punished you enough for today, do you think that the Roden Crater project is a bit both backwards and forwards thinking?

JT: I think there is something there. My work is both backwards and forwards. You know, to talk about painting again, I like the compositional style… the reason I like Agnes Martin is that she has this anti-composition, its sort of overall. When you go to the Grand Canyon, take your camera and point it, each photo is sort of equal. You don't get the sense of it, because there is a sweeping wholeness of it all. Larry Poons had that quite a bit in his early work, which I still find quite amazing…This idea of staring into the fire -- the strength of light comes through when it doesn't carry a message. That's the one thing when you go see a film, you don't see the quality of light and that's sort of the medium but you're really reading the story. So that this hour of light is almost the same quality of looking into the fire, sort of staring at it, which is sort of the compositional nature of, say, Agnes. So for me that sensibility is very powerful and light has that power when not divided and made use of; generally we use light to illuminate other things. For me I enjoy the thingness of light, so to see it where light isn't revealing other objects but is the revelation itself requires that I sort of stay away from that. You'd think it would be difficult to make a career out of it, in the sense that you have something which has no image, and there is no object -- perhaps it "objectifies" itself, and there is no particular place of focus so without that what are you left with… And that's something I found in my stride… Here you see the early work has the most image; these are sort of object, thingness, even with some image quality to it. And that's how I began.

There is this Buddha that they took out of the Southeast that is now in Berlin. It says "Without image is the highest principle." "To have no image is the highest principle," but with image, how do you approach the imageless? It's the same for me, without form how do you put forth the formless? In a way I sort of try to do that, to get to the formless or the space between or the positive emptiness… because there is something that is so powerful with light. It's sort of a life beating around the bush to damn well beat it out… of the bush! And that's been the approach I guess…

Sherman Sam is on staff at of KultureFlash, and is also an artist and writer. He contributes regularly to Contemporary, and recently to Third Text. His drawings are in the Flix project at the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, and will be in the touring show Plan D in Porto, Portugal (Jan 2005) and at the Model and Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo (April 2005).

Image © the artist, courtesy Albion