Notes Towards a Zonal Aesthetics: Thinking-with the Autonomy of the Contemporary Work of Art[1]
CALUM HAZELL
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Abstract
This paper offers the “zonality” as a nickname for a speculative conception of the work of art as relatively autonomous and constitutively “siteless” site. Drawing upon the works of James Turrell, I argue that any such treatment demands strategic and hypothetical “dislocation” of the art object from the spatiotemporal horizons and socio-political conditions contextually at issue, and the recognition – performed and embodied in thought – of its “radical foreclosure” to anthropic determination or embrace. Ultimately, through my proposal for an aesthetic strategy in “thinking-with the artwork,” I propose provisional terms for a novel experience of the extractions, abstractions, and subtractions the zonal artwork practices upon, and undergoes in relation to, its ambient environment and the attendant human subject.
Keywords
Zonality, Thinking-with, Autonomy, James Turrell, Light
For the official version of record, see here:
HAZELL, Calum. Notes Towards a Zonal Aesthetics. Media Theory, [S.l.], v. 6, n. 1, p. 73-112, nov. 2022. ISSN 2557-826X. Available at: <https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/165>.
Introduction
I would like to develop a speculative presentation of a concept of “zonality” in light of 1) the work of art broadly construed and more particularly 2) the practice of James Turrell. My approach is speculative since it asks:
What conceptual and practical affordances might the artwork engender were it treated as if a zonal installation?
What might this identification suggest for the styles of material relation into which the artwork enters with discursive contexts, institutional settings, and geographic environments?
What demands might this proposal entail for and place upon contemporary understandings of the artwork vis-à-vis its authorship, viewership, and interpretation?
It is not my intention to supplant often recited (and, indeed, well founded) contemporary approaches conceiving artmaking as a socially embedded and historically situated practice, but to bring a zonality-concept to bear upon the artwork as a hypothetical (or less-than-thetic) proposition. I would like to say these are premised upon a shared basic assumption: Should the work of art exist within an ecology or entangled nexus of material and discursive factors, if it can be differently apprehended upon the heterogenous scales and axes out of which the latter is composed, then it ought to be just as possible to begin, as it were, from the artwork as such, from the artwork as a nontrivial component of that ecology, as it has been to begin from the intentions of the author, the interpretative strategies of the viewer, the manifesto of the artistic movement, the pernicious influence of the art market, the political and stylistic concerns of the historical paradigm, and the various strictures, limitations, and prohibitions of the dominant state of affairs. It seems to me that, without admitting or allowing for this conceptual possibility, we end up with methodological dogma according to which the artwork becomes little more than an ornament of prevailing historical conditions and political concerns. Ultimately, then, my hope is that the following can be considered less to undermine or gainsay the material-discursive ecology out of which the artwork is understood to emerge than an excavation of a specific hypothetical axis that might be speculatively and differentially built back into that reckoning anew.
Primarily, this paper is motivated by prospects for re-enlivening discussions as to the autonomy of the work of art with recourse to contemporary discourse about human decentring. And in reverse: I would like to contribute to non-anthropocentric currents in contemporary thought by placing the artwork at centre stage. I hope that, taken as a unit of analysis emphasising the nontriviality of thresholds, the transformative effects of enclosures, and the practicability of non-relations, a zonality-concept – which I have sought to execute in a variety of fields, most recently in relation to Yanomami shamanism and set theoretic nonwellfoundedness (Hazell, forthcoming) – can provide some assistance. Although much ink has been spilled attempting to develop frameworks recognising the agency of non-human actors and decentring and de-exceptionalising the human animal across the humanities in recent decades – owed at least in part to the important insights and prevailing influences of post-Deleuzian, relational ontological, new materialist, actor network, speculative realist, and agential realist thought – little to no scholarship has enlisted or reckoned with the artwork as such towards these ends. In a sense, it is little wonder. Given art is customarily (and basically agreeably) understood to name a set of socio-culturally embedded conventions and concerns, a historically situated and constructed tradition, and an emblematically and exclusively anthropic pursuit, how can it inform a conceptual strategy in deracinating and destabilising the human? Well in order to deracinate something, I think we must first be clear as to where and in relation to what it is rooted. In order to destabilise something, I think we must first be clear with recourse to what it maintains stability and is stabilised. In other words, it is precisely because the human is situated and situates itself in such proximity to art broadly conceived, because the “works” falling beneath this banner are placed there and marshalled by human agents (artist, viewer, critic, collector…), and because, as both a practice and a capacity, it defines the human negatively in relation to the non-human it is not that I consider art – and more particularly, the artwork – to articulate a promising conceptual site from where rigorous uprootings might be conducted. Making this strategy tenable requires contingent and experimental revisions as to what the artwork can be said to do in (non)relation to the human and what the human is understood to be for in relation to the work of art.
With these suggestions in mind, I give the name “extraction” to a formal operation comprising two interrelated gestures. The first pertains to the material “abstraction” of the artwork qua zonality from its ambient spatiotemporal environment and discursive socio-political contexts. That that abstraction should open out onto the artwork’s “minimal discreteness,” “less-than-thetic sitedness,” and “relative autonomy” does not mean it is entirely independent of its broader contextual conditions, but indexes the specific style of dynamic material relation into which the artwork enters with an “exterior” – which will be to say, “exteriorised” – state of affairs. The second mode of extraction to be explored concerns the positionality of the human in (and as means of) relation to the work of art. Instead of treating the artwork as an extension or realisation of the compositional designs of its author, or as “completed” by the interpretative strategies of its viewer, I want to conceive the former as a zonal installation enacting material deracination of the human through rigorous suspension of the anthropocentric axis upon which it is customarily instituted or envisioned. Qua zonal installation, the artwork is no longer structured teleologically by or sandwiched passively between intentional and interpretative anthropic poles – no longer is it a mere conduit for communication between its author and prospective recipients – but describes a minimally discrete architecture extricated from anthropic enframement via performative “objectivations” of the human term. Rather than acting as a bulwark against thought, I will argue that this dynamic requires reconceptualisation of artwork-human interface and offers provisional principles for a speculative practice in “thinking-with” the artwork in its constitutive extractedness from and radical indifference to the human subject responding to this demand.
I explore the first mode of zonal extraction through discussion of Turrell’s Roden Crater project and Skyspace series, and the second in cross-reference to his “Ganzfeld” installations. In the third part of this chapter, I will develop and consolidate these lines of enquiry by conducting a small experiment in two parts. This experiment takes as rigorous proposition and stepping-off point Turrell’s suggestion that his works enact non-symbolic and non-discursive presentations of the material of light. In the first part of my experiment, I will try to demonstrate how Turrell’s light can be considered to materially undergo processes of simplification, reduction, and objectivation – to identify, that is, the formal processes through which light would become non-symbolic and -discursive – via performative inhabitation (rather than passive illumination) of architectural units such as rooms, chambers, corridors, and apertures. In other words, this part of my experiment is concerned with inverting the customary relationship between built architecture and light so that the latter is no longer merely applied in service of the former’s visibility or disclosure, but would itself “become the revelation.” In the second part of my experiment, I attend to the relationship between the Turrellean objectivation of light and light’s objectivation of the human at greater length. Ultimately, I will argue that, through its treatment as zonal installation, the Turrellean artwork can be understood to engender material “liberations” of light via its employment or “unilateral entanglement” of the viewer as “experimental object.”
Where is the artwork qua zonality?
To begin, I will try to demonstrate the means through which a zonality-concept can be productively applied to the work of art. Initially, this attempt shall be developed through discussion of Turrell’s (as yet unfinished) Roden Crater project which has involved the artist purchasing and systematically gutting a volcano in Nevada’s Painted Desert for the construction of a series of naked eye observatories, viewing galleries, and light installations across a chthonic suite of tunnels, enclaves, and chambers. Treated as a zonality, I argue, the material situatedness of Roden Crater must be engaged with recourse to its 1) formal abstraction or “extractedness” from and 2) poietic reconfiguration of an external assemblage of spatiotemporal magnitudes and dimensions. Craig Adcock has emphasised the synthetic array of spatial scales assembled at Roden Crater, writing that the artwork “reveals the relationships that exist between different kinds of spaces, including the internal psychological spaces of consciousness and the external physical spaces of the world” (Adcock, 1990: 207). Whilst Mark C. Taylor points to Roden Crater’s synthesis of temporal scales, suggesting that the site “forms something like a sacred mountain that transforms the proportions of space and changes the scale of time. Human time simultaneously expands and contracts as it is woven together with geological and astrological time” (Taylor, 2012: 115). Following Adcock’s and Taylor’s suggestions in unison, we might say that Roden Crater marks a localised synthetic site at which heterogeneous spatiotemporal scales, dimensions, and “proportions” convene. These run from the anthropic psychological space and time of the observer, through the geological space and time embodied by the Painted Desert, to the astrological space and time encountered via naked eye observation of celestial phenomena.
It is my contention, however, that in order to gauge the kinds of reconfiguration or “transformation” Roden Crater enacts upon this heterogeneous context – in order to prevent us, in other words, from losing sight of the artwork in its specificity amidst its dynamic material entanglements – we must be clear as to how, qua zonality, it announces its relative autonomy, its “abstraction” and “disentanglement,” from its ambient setting. From one angle, Turrell’s technological reconstitution of the volcanic cone can be productively understood, following Gregory Bateson, as the institution of an “informational unit” within a contextual landscape: as articulating a “difference,” that is, “that makes a difference” therein (Bateson, 1987: 229). Roden Crater “is a difference” in the sense its material commitment establishes a localised discontinuity, a novel differential relation, that “makes a difference” both to the volcano’s internal architecture and to a diverse array of spatiotemporal magnitudes it modifies, reconfigures, reorients. Roden Crater simultaneously “undergoes successive transformation[s]” (Ibid) – it is “eroded by desert storms and winds” (Taylor, 2012: 109), is at constant threat of new volcanic eruptions – as a product of its local instantiation and effectuates successive transformations upon the heterogeneous forces from which it draws, that it cultivates, to which it stands in differential relation. In this respect, the introduction of Roden Crater into a scalable ecology of anthropic, volcanic, geological, and celestial magnitudes does not describe a trivial embellishment or ornamentation of the latter, but unleashes untold ramifications, amalgamations, and perturbations as it resynthesises the dynamic material environment into which it is integrated. That being said, though every introduction of a “differential” component modulates and reconfigures its physical context it would not be accurate to consider the difference each difference makes to be the same. Indeed, localised components, sites, and fields demonstrate their differential identity by virtue of the different kinds of difference they make to a given synthetic horizon. It follows that if we are to trace and investigate the specific effects and poietic affordances of some integrated X, if we are to treat that X in zonal terms, we must develop a vocabulary for establishing the particular kind of difference that that X might be said to make to that with and into which it is woven.
It is with these thoughts in mind I return to a point briefly raised in my introductory remarks. Namely, that an argument from the zonality for the constructed disentanglement, abstraction, extractedness of the artwork does not imply absolute dissociation from its ambient spatiotemporal environment, but names the particular style of relation into which it enters with it. Juliane Rebentisch treats this dynamic in reverse in her Aesthetics of Installation Art, arguing that the
contextual reference of art exhibited by site-specific installations should… be understood not as contrary to the autonomy of the aesthetic object but rather as one of the essential aspects defining this autonomy (Rebentisch, 2012: 223).
If the “contextual” environment into which the artwork is installed helps to define, rather than impedes upon, the material and formal “autonomy” of the artwork, it is because the prospects for thinking, and what I will come to call “thinking-with,” that autonomy entail the development of a vocabulary responsive to the modes of relation into which the artwork enters with it. In other words, it is only possible to define the “autonomy” proper to the artwork in relation to its heterogeneous and discursive contexts via speculative exploration of that which the work of art can be said to do to those contexts, or the kinds of “difference” it can be said to “make” to them. For Rebentisch, this requires we understand the situatedness of the art object in terms of the “distance” it achieves from its contextual horizons. “In a certain sense,” she says,
every sculpture, but also every installational intervention in public or institutional space, in fact constitutes “its own” space… by “making room” for [it], making it legible through itself. But this also means that it puts [that] space at a distance… In this sense, we could say that the work of art is constitutively siteless (Ibid: 251-2).
As a means of contextualising Rebentisch’s claim as to the “constitutive sitelessness” of the artwork, I would like to think about contemporary invocations of “site-specificity” applying to and classifying particular artworks and practices.
Given that each of his works involve a reconstituted or purpose-built architectural space or structure of some kind, Turrell’s practice is often identified with recourse to this term. On the surface, it seems appropriate. Roden Crater, for instance, involves the installation of a series of naked eye observatories specifically situated within the volcanic cone; the volcanic site of the Crater is spatiotemporally specific to the Painted Desert, and so on. The issue, however, with conceptualising Roden Crater – or any artwork for that matter – in this way is that it effectively precludes recognition of its dislocation – the “distance” it achieves – from the external contexts it is supposed to “reflect upon,” “reference,” or physically inhabit. Matthew Poole’s ‘Specificities of Sitedness’ essay, which shares something of the spirit of the Rebentisch extract above, acts as a corrective in this respect. “A principal problem for the production of and discourses of site-specific art – which we might also name context-specific art, or relational art, or dialogical art, or socially-engaged practice,” writes Poole, “is that we can consider that “art” per se, and artworks as such, are sites that are specific in and of themselves” (Poole, 2015: 85). Engaging the artwork as a “site in of itself” involves 1) speculatively foregrounding, playfully and hypothetically preserving, its material and aesthetic autonomy, and 2) “zoning in upon” how it instrumentalises, reconfigures, “makes room for” its external environment at strategic expense of its configuration and instrumentalisation via exogenous forces and processes. This approach is thwarted through the artwork’s treatment in “site-specific” terms, when it is presented as little more than “trivial appendage” (Ibid: 89) to a proximal (and ultimately ascendant) state of affairs. For it is precisely in accordance with their apparent and “specific suitability to a given site (either to produce a smooth continuity of given socio-political conditions, or to antagonise given socio-political conditions),” argues Poole,
that [artworks] lose their status as hypothesis, and become merely functional (and strictly unnecessary) excessive appendages of the already existing ideological vectors (whichever way they run or move) of the given site to which they are medially appended; i.e. they remain prosthetic (Ibid).
Reconceptualised as “hypothetical” proposition, the artwork is liberated from its “unnecessary” and “prosthetic” delineation unwittingly ascribed via its tautologous description as “site-specific.” The artwork is neither “merely functional” nor decorative or “trivial” embellishment of a proximal spatiotemporal domain or tangential socio-political conditions. Rather, it articulates a hypothetical autonomy “of itself” so that it should be recognised as its “own site”: as a performance and practice of its own anonymous utility.
Poole compounds the distinction in defining the “hypothetical” status of the artwork as
the happening of the “setting down” of itself as its own site under, or at the base of, a given subject’s presumed location; in the shape of a speculative proposition laterally dislocated from the subject. More properly the hypothetical quality of the artwork is a supposition: a positioning before or beyond (a passing through at a tangent) a given subject’s location. It therefore cannot be set down elsewhere (pros – towards + thesis – setting down) other than within and as itself; and it cannot come from anywhere else other than its own “set(-ed-ness)” to be set down from a given somewhere else (Ibid: 87).
It is in this way Poole’s suggestion that the artwork should be treated as a site unto itself and Rebentisch’s claims as to its “constitutive sitelessness” describe complementary rather than oppositional gestures. The art object is constitutively siteless precisely because it “sets itself down as its own site,” and insofar as specific unto itself, the artwork announces its own constitutive sitelessness: it cannot “come from anywhere else” because it does not require or summon an elsewhere – “another site outside of its own sitedness” (Ibid: 86, emphasis added) – to buttress its specificity. Poole’s contention that the “hypothetical quality” of the artwork follows from its “set[ting] itself down as its own site under or at the base of a given location” is important in this respect. Conceived of “at the base of” or “beneath” (hypo) a “presumed” (thetic) – that is, given spatiotemporal – “location,” the artwork becomes hypothetically abstracted from and discontinuous with respect to the heterogeneous scales, sites, and settings it materially exteriorises. I call these items “exteriorised” because projected, reconfigured, and suspended out of the artwork’s basal positionality. Roden Crater suspends the fossilised debris and ossified flora of the volcanic terrain, suspends the Painted Desert, suspends even the interpretative paradigm of the human attendant insofar as “elevating” them “above” it. This elevation should not be taken in the sense of a valorisation, but a “dislocation” arranging a novel synthesis, zonal “coherence,” regional product, contingent configuration out of those heterogeneous artefacts. They are “elevated,” then, because rendered as discursive materials of the artwork by the artwork for the artwork. Of because the material artefacts out of which it is hypo- or less-than-thetically installed, by because resynthesised and reconfigured due to its basal sitedness, and for because rendered as experimental materials in the service of its speculative operations.
My employment of the term “coherence” here details a reappropriation of the Whiteheadean formulation according to which “the fundamental ideas, in terms of which the scheme is developed, presuppose each other so that in isolation they are meaningless” (Whitehead, 1985: 3). Applied to the autonomy and processual discreteness of the artwork qua zonal installation, I substitute for Whitehead’s “fundamental ideas” those heterogeneous materials of the artwork’s hypothetical suspension. Thus, I say the artwork’s “zonal coherence” describes its discrete establishment as a site that coheres in and of itself via transformative appropriation, concrescence, and curation of the material artefacts it draws upon. These contextual materials come to “presuppose one another” insofar as cultivated, and in a sense “interiorised” – they “enter into the artwork” (Rebentisch, 2012: 267) – as incorporated components of the artwork’s less-than-thetic composition: they are given some new compound life, placing into novel concretions, as endogenously resynthesised by and from the artwork qua coherent zonal site. In this sense, the artwork instantiates a discrete “informational unit” or field about its zonal coherence: it “makes a difference” to its environment by reconfiguring and dislocating itself from it as a product of its hypothetical situatedness and autonomous composition. Consequently, we are faced with an ostensibly paradoxical dynamic according to which the artwork’s introduction into a heterogenous spatiotemporal context is coextensive with its own abs-, ex-, sub-tractions from it. For it is precisely in accordance with the artwork’s hypothetical installation as coherent zone it is dislocated from a landscape and proximal states of affairs. This abstraction, dislocation, and discontinuity of the artwork’s coherent situatedness can be considered to announce, once more, the nontrivial “difference it makes” to its contexts. Since, as Gilles Châtelet remarks,
to abstract is always to mutilate. Aristotle’s sensible nature (hylè) is always part of a whole; abstraction removes a piece from the flesh of the sensible, and this operation, always cruel, cannot be reduced to an inoffensive subtraction of determinations, which one can neutralize as and when one chooses (Châtelet, 2000: 18).
It is in this way the artwork might productively be conceptualised as an ex- and abs-tracted zonality that, following Châtelet, “mutilates” and delivers some formal “cruelty” upon an exteriorised/interiorised landscape. “Abstraction” names both the hypothetical or dislocated positionality of the artwork – that is, the formal consistency of its differential (non)relation to a heterogeneous external environment – and its “removal” (its ex- and sub-tractions) of so many dynamic properties and tendencies – so many “pieces of flesh” – from that environment toward their qualitative mutation. Qua zonal installation, the artwork is coherently situated at the intersection of its processual “exteriorisation” of a diverse suite of contextual dimensions, scales, and settings, and its transformative “interiorisation” of these artefacts as the basic materials of its autonomous composition.
Just as the ambient environment helps to define, rather than obscures, the “lateral” dislocation and formal autonomy of the zonal artwork, so does the artwork’s “suspension” of the former bring its heterogeneous consistency into new light. More precisely, I would like to suggest that, via its treatment as zonality, the work of art can be considered to potentiate its coherent interiorisation/exteriorisation of a diverse suite of scales, sites, dimensions, and magnitudes by rendering that assemblage newly practicable and navigable. Insofar as it describes an experiential affordance or mode of viewership, this navigational practice encompasses and encourages interdependent strategies of “zoning in” and “zoning out,” where “zoning out” details a discursive or exploratory traversal across heterogeneous material scales, and “zoning in” a stipulation, intensification, and localisation of spatiotemporal thresholds or parameters toward concretisation of new contingent syntheses. The images of certain spatiotemporal scales become concentrated, sharpened, and specific when we zone in upon them, and distorted and fuzzy, losing their specificity, when we zone out from them. Turrell’s Roden Crater provides some help in demonstrating this dynamic, especially as regards the practicalities of its geographic access. Deborah Menaker Rothschild relates that
in [Turrell’s] plans for Roden Crater, the way the viewer comes upon the site is of central importance to the design. Before arriving at the Crater, the visitor will have to walk about two miles, a journey that encourages the tempo of contemporary life to be cast aside in favor of the slower, meditative pace optimum for experiencing the stations of the Crater. During the walk the visitor will have time to take in the surroundings to get a sense of the crater’s setting within the Painted Desert, to absorb the character of the sky and light, and to notice the color and texture of the dry clay-like earth and porous cinder ash (Rothschild, 1991: 12).
For Rothschild, Turrell’s technological intervention upon (or italicisation of) Roden Crater facilitates a transformative aesthetic “experience” according to which the viewer is “encouraged” to navigate a heterogenous suite of spatiotemporal scales. They are obliged to “cast aside” – zoning out from – the “tempo,” rhythms, and accoutrements of “contemporary” urbanised life, and adapt to – zoning in upon – the “meditative pace,” diverse “textures,” and austere “characteristics” of the geological landscape. By extension, this landscape implies its own scalability (on an upward trajectory) out into space. For, as Turrell notes, Roden Crater “is located in an area of exposed geology, the Painted Desert, where you feel geologic time. You have a strong feeling of standing on the surface of a planet” (in Adcock, 1990: 158).
Where the zonal artwork stands in less-than-thetic relation to these diverse textures, dimensions, and scales, the preparatory journey is understood as curated not by the artist, but by Roden Crater as constitutively siteless site. In this way, Roden Crater abbreviates the positional and relational autonomy peculiar to the work of art as such. Roden Crater describes a nontrivial discontinuity, a minimally discrete installation, woven within a synthetic spatiotemporal continuum by means of its formal dislocation from that multi-scalar terrain. It articulates a topological singularity or “cut” that transforms, reconfigures, and curates the web of differential relations it “laterally” and “hypothetically” inhabits, that it exteriorises and suspends, “order[ing]” and forcing the viewer’s “experience” (Ibid: 161) of anthropic, geological, and celestial entanglements in turn. It is possible to shed light upon the poietic affordances facilitated by the artwork’s “ordering” of this heterogeneous complex by observing that terms “experience” and “experiment” are derived from the same Latin root (experior). Roden Crater grants a ligature of experiential and experimental navigational possibilities: the viewer zones out from the rhythms of “contemporary life” to which they have grown accustomed, and in upon the diverse textural and temporal consistencies of the geological and “planetary” landscape. Novel spatiotemporal coherences and contingent entanglements are cast, recast, and “cast off” as a matter of their traversal. They navigate forward and backward upon temporal axes and up and down spatial scales, generating new synthetic “images” in the process. They are estranged from themself as anthropic time and space bleeds out into the pores of the vast geological plane, combining with silt and shale, mudstone and clay, fossilised animals and plants, petrified wood and dinosaur tracks. And they are decorated by the cool light of the moon, or their flesh is bothered and pressed by a strangely proximal sun, or their path is illuminated by stars that are dying or long since deceased.
The dynamic I have sought to describe here regarding the artwork’s constitutive interiorisation/exteriorisation of its ambient environment finds intuitive expression in Turrell’s Skyspace series. These works have involved the artist cutting an aperture into the ceiling of a constructed chamber or existing architectural space, exposing the interior to an open sky. More often than not, the aperture will take a rectangular shape (or describe a rectangular absence), although some recent Skyspace projects – Third Breath, Revised Outlook (both 2005), Outside, Insight (2011), and Tewlwolow Kernow (2013) – involve circular or ovular apertures. I would like to suggest that the Turrellean Skyspace can be productively engaged with recourse to a zonality-concept about two speculative gestures. The first is to reduce the Skyspace work to the functionality of the aperture, the second is to treat the Skyspace – via that reduction – as a zonal installation. I reduce or treat as coextensive the Skyspace to/with the aperture to foreground a mechanism through which the artwork facilitates and hypothetically posits material interfaces between enclosed viewer and a portion of “open” sky. And I identify that architectural unit as a zonality to interrogate the artwork’s autonomous “sitedness” and processual interiorisation/exteriorisation of its discursive contextual horizons in greater depth. Or again: I treat the physical enclosure of the viewer and the speculative liberation of the sky as hypothetical affordances of the artwork qua aperture and explore the formal situatedness of the artwork-aperture in relation both to its prospective viewer and to its ambient environment via its presentation as zonal installation.
In The Art of Light and Space, Adcock’s reflections upon this series of works centre upon the Skyspace’s “undifferentiated” presentation of the sky for the viewer. “When the sky has objects in it – clouds, airplanes, telephone poles, stars – it looks transparent,” he suggests,
but when it is empty and lit by the light from the sun, it presents what is essentially an undifferentiated field of blue color whose distance and location are difficult to specify. In other words, the empty sky presents the viewer with what amounts to a homogenous visual field (Adcock, 1990: 137).
This presentation of the “empty sky” as “homogeneous visual field” is facilitated by the architectural characteristics of the aperture. As Georges Didi-Huberman writes in The Man Who Walked in Color, the demonstration of the sky’s “unlimited” heterogeneity requires a “minimum of architecture, that is to say, an art of breaks, partitions and edges.” Thus, he argues, the aperture is suggestive of “a sort of dialectic, a game, an encounter between contradictory things that will join together at their limits or will condense, or displace themselves, or all these at once, rhythmically” (Didi-Huberman, 2017: 51). The aperture operates as a “minimum of” or perhaps “negative” architecture, then, in the sense composed of and configuring its own structural and material absence. And yet the “break” or “partition” it establishes in the ceiling of the chamber and the “edges” delineating its parameters precisely describe those minimal or negative architectural properties that “present” the “unlimited,” affording new “dialectical games” and “rhythmic encounters” between the observer and the sky they observe.
I would like to contend that this rendering “homogeneous” the sky by – or as a poietic affordance of – the minimal architecture of the Turrellean aperture raises a series of conceptual and experiential possibilities for the viewer of a given Skyspace. The aperture might be generatively connected to Reza Negarestani’s notion of the “tension-space,” developed most notably in his essay ‘Synechistic Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,’ along these lines. Here, Negarestani suggests that the “aim” of a tension-space is to
reparameterize and reprogram tensions or magnitudes that mobilize the field of the subject by nontrivial orientations and spaces of navigation… [T]ension-spaces bring about the possibility of renegotiating the geometries of interaction between the universal and the particular… [allowing] new modes of judgment and action (Negarestani, 2015: 339-40).
In one direction, Negarestani’s invocation of notions of “universality” and “particularity” can be productively and respectively applied to the sky and the viewer as interiorised/exteriorised components of the Skyspace work. The sky might be understood as “universal” here in the sense it a) offers an “undifferentiated,” “uncontainable” (Kosky, 2013: 113), or virtual field of vision and epistemic “action,” b) arranges the material expanse enabling local “navigations” of, and accommodates the “universe” as, celestial, interplanetary phenomenon, and c) grounds the very possibility for situated practices of navigation, observation, and access through emittance or shedding of celestial light upon the surface of the earth. The Turrellean aperture functions as a “tension-space,” then, in the sense of dramatising our local, partial, or “particular” planetary vantage through delineation of fixed architectural parameters ramifying earthbound viewer into “universal” space. This apertural delineation enables playful experimental-experiential “reparameterizations” and “reprogrammings” of universal/particular or cosmic/planetary “tensions” by rendering the sky newly practicable, tangible, and “epistemically” navigable. Or, as Didi-Huberman writes, the aperture presents the sky in such a way that it is no longer merely
a neutral background for seeing things, but an active field of unpredictable visual experience. The sky is no longer vaguely “around” or “above” us, but precisely here, upon us and up against us, present because changing, forcing us to inhabit it, if only to show its encounter with us. The sky is no longer the “frame” or the “background” for seeing things – like an ambient ring, a pregnant blue surrounding the object – it is precisely here, itself central, itself framed within the lively edges that Turrell constructed for it (Didi-Huberman, 2017: 68).
This apertural activation of the sky – so that it is “invited,” as Jeffrey Kosky puts it, “to condescend to show itself to us” (Kosky, 2013: 113) – is also emphasised in Turrell’s own reflections upon the Skyspace series. “Generally,” Turrell suggests,
we are much like crustaceans. We build houses and inhabit them, then we run outside and get into a movable structure, and then go and get out of that into another shell – sort of musical hermit-crab games. And yet these tend to close us off from that feeling of being involved with nature, so that even though we make these structures, just like coral or anything else that makes a barrier, we do not have real knowledge of what we do. That is, coral has as much knowledge of the fact that it makes a Great Barrier Reef as we personally do of the fact that we make New York City and structures like that. We feel apart from nature, even though we do those things. It is that feeling of being apart that estranges us from nature. So I am interested in things that take away that estrangement (Saad-Cook and Turrell, 1988: 130-31).
Following Turrell, then, we might say that the Skyspace reconciles the viewer with the sky by counterintuitively boxing and framing the latter within the parameters of the aperture and containing the former within a little room. The Skyspace simulates the eremitical behaviours of the contemporary human animal by situating the observer within an enclosed space, only to subvert those behaviours by confronting them with the celestial or “universal” horizon from which they have become “estranged.”
Rather than being at odds with my discussion above regarding the navigational affordances of Roden Crater – through which, I suggested, the multi-dimensional or heterogeneous consistency of its ambient environment is brought into new light – I would like to suggest that the emphasis much of the secondary literature concerning Turrell’s Skyspace series places upon the aperture’s homogeneous presentation of the sky speaks to the artwork’s constitutive interiorisation/exteriorisation of its contextual horizons. Via its treatment as a zonal installation, the artwork achieves relational “distance” from its ambient environment by (re)creating or envisioning the latter as “simplified” or “homogeneous” material resource. The artwork formally disentangles itself from, “setting itself down as its own site” in relation to, its broader material context by reducing it, stripping it back, boiling it down, treating it as an “undifferentiated” milieu or “continuous” regional horizon. To encounter the sky as “homogenous visual field” is to encounter the apertural mechanism through which the zonal artwork installs itself as “siteless” site, but also that from which the possibility of experiential and experimental navigations of the sky in its heterogeneity – in its textural discontinuities, its aesthetic multi-dimensionality, its sensuous scalability – is derived. The Skyspace ‘exteriorises’ its ambient environment as homogeneous and “interiorises” or “contains” that environment – zoning in upon contingent constellations of matter, stipulating novel aesthetic entanglements – as heterogeneous. The zonal aperture, recalling Rebentisch, “makes space for,” or perhaps more accurately, is the very space that it makes for, the sky and the viewer. It composes and populates itself out of its interiorisation/exteriorisation of, from that which it does to, its sky. Qua zonality, the Turrellean aperture dramatises material “tensions” between sky and observer by virtue of both its liminal positionality – it is quite literally “between” the two – and its less-than-thetic situatedness, according to which it is installed “at the base of” or from “beneath” the “tension space” to which it gives rise. The aperture mediates and grounds generative and experimental viewer-sky interface with recourse to its own formal and structural invisibility and absence. As a “minimum of” or negative architecture – a passage, a cut, a hole, an opening – the zonal aperture hypothetically posits new modes of viewership but vanishes in the act, speculatively forces new strategies for seeing but cannot itself be seen.
Towards an objectivated viewership
In turn, the artwork’s autonomy – its “setting down of itself as its own site” – requires reappraisal of the inveterate terms of its relation to the human. More precisely, I have argued that via its treatment in zonal terms, the artwork must strategically and rigorously be extracted from its contemporary structuration in which it is placed and envisioned passively between its authorial and interpretative moments. I suggest that the material autonomy and minimal discreteness of the artwork should not be merely understood to announce the death of its author, not only the relativism of its interpretations, but a radical suspension and deracination of the very axis upon which the author, artwork, and observer are customarily, teleologically, and anthropocentrically instituted. In ‘Contingency and Complicity,’ Negarestani provides an indication of this autonomy in the context of authorial intention. “If we consider art as a material-driven process of production,” Negarestani suggests,
[the] anonymous materials [out of which the artwork is composed] enjoy an autonomy of their own; and such autonomy continuously interferes with the artwork itself regardless of the decisions of the artist – that is, whether or not the artist determines to be ‘open’ to their influence. In other words, the contingency of the artist’s materials cannot be the strict subject of the artist’s openness. Contingent materials cannot be directly embraced (Negarestani, 2011: 11).
Whatever their intentions for (and however “open” they may be to) the artwork, the artist is no more able to “directly embrace” its “anonymous” and “contingent” materiality than is the viewer to conceptually determine it. To suggest otherwise is to propagate a kind of category error, since, Negarestani continues, “the contingency inherent to artist’s materials does not entail any commonality with the artist’s intentions; if anything, such contingency bends, hijacks and punctures such schemes, sensibilities, and intentions” (Ibid: 13, emphasis added). Notwithstanding traditional characterisations of the artist as creative “origin” or “source,” then, the artwork is formally dislocated from, “does not entail any commonality with,” and only “hijacks” their authorial “schemes” and designs. As such, the artwork’s material autonomy and contingency can be taken to articulate both democratisation of artist and viewer (insofar as their claims to, about, and over the artwork are identically eschewed), and defetishisation of the authorial moment (at which the latter is “conceived” and “composed”) and exegetic event (through which it is “encountered” and “interpreted”). For whether conceived as a romanticised or Heideggerian “creator-figure,” “dead,” or merely the “first to have been seized by” a (possible) “mutation” or configuration of materials,[2] the artist cannot preside over the artwork in any determinate manner. The artwork is an autonomous and hypothetical vector that cannot be fully oriented (by the artist) in advance of, or reoriented (by the viewer) subsequent to, its material instantiation.
Aligning deflations of the artwork’s authorial and exegetic moments challenges its contemporary structuration more tangibly. It is not the case here that the artwork requires for its “unity” recourse to a formally and structurally ascendent readerly “destination” – the “removal” (Barthes, 1977: 147) of its artist gives neither rise nor “birth” to an all-encompassing and self-replicating interpretative paradigm – but that it is coherently “united” at the “origin” and “destination” it “sets down in of itself.” Qua zonal installation, the artwork both begins, as it were, and is aimed at its own “constitutive sitelessness.”[3] And it is with and from the zonal artwork, I suggest, that novel non-hermeneutic practices of thought can emerge. Suhail Malik explores the contemporary valorisation and structural ascendency of the interpretant at length in his 2015 essay ‘Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art.’ Malik begins by asking rhetorically: “What does an artwork mean for you? What sense do you make of it?,” before arguing that
[in] the paradigm of contemporary art, the answer is clear: it’s up to you. Constrained by the artwork’s subject matter (insofar as you can determine it), its material organization and presentation (including online transience), and the information you can glean from the press release, the artist’s “interests,” or what the art invokes, you respond to this configuration of mild injunctions. “Mild” because the parameters are open enough, loose enough, opaque enough for you to (have to) make your own way through the artwork. It asks you a question, making an open-ended assertion without definitive sense. You reply—usually not to the artwork but, in the best case, with a shift in your own system of ideas, values, even the very way you formulate your languages. You are the center of the artwork (Malik, 2015: 185).
In Malik’s estimation of contemporary art, the viewer is obliged “to make their own way through the artwork” via progressive negotiations with its “mild,” “open,” and “loose” “parameters” before ultimately arriving at, or indeed integrating itself as, its “centre.” In this way, he suggests, the contemporary artwork comes to “depend upon its receiving subject, the addressee of the work, who is taken to constitute it rather than arrive as latecomer after its production. Put colloquially, the art “leaves space” for the viewer, the viewer “completes” the work” (Ibid). The viewer is understood to “complete” the artwork, then, because articulating an essential and idealised function built into its very structure, or upon which that structure (as indissociable from the orientation of the artwork toward its hermeneutic reception) is predicated. Such that, for its part, the artwork could only ever remain “incomplete” without recourse – that is to say, without deference – to the “constitutive” mechanics of interpretation.
This deferential structuration, hermeneutic entrapment, or outsourcing of the “meaning,” being, or “centre” of the work of art cannot be undermined by simply allowing or “leaving space” for a nonfinite and “latecoming” array of prospective interpretants. For whilst every viewer might “negotiate” the artwork differently – whilst, in Adorno’s disapproving terms, they might each take into their possession something different from the work (Adorno, 2002: 266) – these particular negotiations serve only to reinforce the teleological axis upon which they are generally permitted and grounded. In other words, the centrality of the viewer to the completion of the artwork is structurally ensured in advance of the experiential (or “subjective”) act of viewership. And given that that experiential act of viewership is in principle infinitely replicable, then it can be considered to provide so many incidental expressions of or occasional inflections upon the artwork’s antecedent structural completion. The viewer is thereby integrated at/as the centre of the work without needing to negotiate its way towards it, without, in fact, needing to have viewed anything at all. In opposition to this dynamic, and as a means of building upon Malik’s cue, I propose that, qua zonal installation, the artwork must be rigorously extracted out of its contemporary anthropic enframement at which “subjective interpretation or experience” articulates its necessary “condition or telos” (Malik, 2015: 188). This extraction does not imply removal of the human from all consideration, but details a conceptual and radical aesthetic requirement for inverting the inveterate terms of human-artwork interface.
It is important to emphasise that this inversion does not amount to an anthropic quietism, or a silencing of the human in the face of the artwork’s material autonomy and processual anonymity. One reason for this, in a dynamic reminiscent of the Laruellean “Real,” is that its radical foreclosure to conceptual anthropic “embrace” does not render the artwork essentially “ineffable,” but rather “infinitely effable” (or infinitely tolerant) insofar as all attempts at its enunciation – to which the artwork is no longer “reducible” (Rebentisch, 2012: 239), through which it is no longer “centred,” and by which it is no longer subject to “instrumental command” (Ibid: 238) – are democratically aligned.[4] Indeed, insofar as “devoid of ontological, linguistic and worldly consistency” or “without-being and without-essence, without-language and without-thought,” the “indifference” of the Laruellean Real (Laruelle, 2012a: 30-1) is instructive here. Through its treatment as a zonality, the artwork does not make for its viewer “an open-ended proposition without definitive sense” but articulates a hypothetical proposition = X that resists, in its radical indifference, the “ontological, linguistic [or] worldly” “sense” that might discursively be made (out) of its anonymous value. The zonal artwork, to borrow from Rebentisch, thus “enables a specific [spectatorial] experience: an experience of distance – an unsettling of any immediate accessibility” (Rebentisch, 2012: 266) to the artwork as coherent, autonomous, and constitutively siteless site.
Rather than acting as an impediment to thought or a bulwark against its own (re)conceptualisation, I suggest the artwork’s hypothetical dislocation from the human can be considered to extend an invitation to think otherwise, to think, as it were, again and anew. I propose a practice in “thinking-with” for recasting the “experience of distance” the artwork “enables” in the form of an inverted mode of viewership. As a conceptual strategy, thinking-with the artwork comprises two interrelated gestures or techniques. The first calls for a performative and embodied recognition of the artwork’s processual autonomy and less-than-thetic sitedness. And the second, built from this performative recognition, relates a radical reorientation of thought – that is, a reorientation of the practice of thought as regards the artwork at root – so that it is no longer directed toward the artwork, but rather -with it, according-to it. Moreover, thinking-with the artwork is a basically non-anthropocentric and non-hermeneutic endeavour: no longer is the artwork “centred” upon the human, no longer does it stand as an “expression” or “extension” of the artist, no longer does it depend for its “completion” upon its author or interpretant, no longer does it merely “embellish” a given spatio-temporal setting, no longer is it shaped by “antagonistic” or “smooth” installation. Instead, it announces an innovative style of thought for precipitating deracination or uprooting of the human from its imagined proximity to/intimacy with, the work of art. Thinking-with the artwork reformulates and re-presents the human as subject(ed) to, that would be, an “object” in the service of, the material processes, experimental functionalities, and anonymous logic of the artwork qua zonal site. Although the strategy of thinking-with does precipitate “a shift” in the viewer’s “system of ideas [and] values,” it is not aimed at the artwork’s interpretative “completion,” but at a thoroughgoing “incompletion” of inherited strategies in viewership that the viewing subject would experientially undergo “decentring,” “objectivation,” or “unilateral entanglement” by the work of art. It is only possible to think-with the artwork, then, through purposeful foregrounding of the latter as a site that coheres sitelessly, through practiced recognition of the terms of its “lateral dislocation” from the spatiotemporal scales and settings contextually, relatively, and relationally at issue, and by thinking-according-to its suspension of, and the formal operations it conducts upon, the human attendant. Qua zonality, the artwork this practice would think-with is less a passive demarcation of “mild injunctions” than a call to experimental action tethered to an experience of the relational inversion between the human viewer and the artwork as such.
I suggest that such a practice can be productively applied to Turrell’s “Ganzfeld” series. As Christine Y. Kim explains, “Ganzfeld is a German word meaning “complete field” that is used to describe an unstructured region of stimuli that causes perceptual deprivation. The effect of a ganzfeld can be compared to the natural visual phenomenon of a whiteout that occurs during a blizzard” (Kim, 2013b: 250). In his text The Man Who Walked in Color, Georges Didi-Huberman extends Kim’s description of the “perceptual deprivation” experienced by the individual confronting the Ganzfeld, writing that
Turrell… became interested in the idea… as it is used in experimental psychology of vision: a colored field without any figure, absolutely uniform and occupying the whole of the visual field. The subject experiences the Ganzfeld as a light that gradually imposes its atmosphere, then its mass and density, finally its tactility (Didi-Huberman, 2017: 42).
What Kim’s definition of the term and Didi-Huberman’s reflection upon its appropriation in Turrell’s practice are suggestive of, then, is a visceral “perceptual” immersion of the viewer by, and, what is crucial here, amidst or in the artwork as “unstructured” or “absolutely uniform visual field.” Where I sought to invoke a navigational practice “from” Turrell’s Roden Crater and Skyspace works (enabling novel encounters with the multidimensional environment of the former and the latter’s “open sky”), I would like to suggest that, as regards the Turrellean Ganzfeld, the technique of “thinking-with” opens out onto a navigational strategy “in the zone” or “amidst the artwork” qua zonal installation. In this respect, the artwork dislocates itself “laterally” from its contemporary anthropocentric structuration, suspending and “exteriorising” the human, by precise means of the latter’s “interiorisation” as objectivated component in the service of an anonymous chromatic operation. Which is to say the viewer “enters into the work of art” (Rebentisch, 2012: 267) in such a way as to be deracinated from its constitutive “centre.”
Whilst different styles of a thinking-with emerge at Turrell’s Roden Crater and Ganzfeld installations – the former “ordering the viewer’s experience” of its exteriorised topography, the latter engulfing the viewer within a homogenous sensuous domain – both “(re)parameterise” material-discursive scales and thresholds and facilitate nonlinear and nontrivial traversals across them. Where the navigational affordances of Roden Crater are concerned, the viewer’s “casting off” or zoning out from inveterate spatiotemporal frames of reference does not amount to a total renunciation. Nor are these entirely obfuscated by the viewer’s traversal of the exteriorised geological landscape. Rather, they will retain impressions of the frames of reference habitual to the human animal. As they enter into new synthetic relations with geological and planetary scales and magnitudes, becoming embroiled within uncustomary rhythms, textures, and dimensions, they experience-experiment with their own desynchronosis, their partial spatiotemporal estrangements. Turrell’s 1976 City of Arhirit Ganzfeld, on the other hand, might be considered to dramatise the viewer’s nontrivial traversal across spatiotemporal thresholds via a navigational practice “in the zone.” Turrell describes how the viewers of his City
got down on their hands and knees and crawled through [the installation] because they experienced intense disequilibrium. You went through one space and then it seemed to dim because you can’t hold color without fold. So as you left the first room that was pale green your eyes developed a pink afterimage. The next room you entered was red, and you came into it with this pink, and it was just startling. So I used a progression of space to mix the afterimage color with the color you were about to see, also knowing that the color, after you were in it a while, would begin to dim (in Birnbaum, 1999: 226).
It is possible to map Turrell’s description onto the discussion at hand by reading the fields of colour constituting each of the rooms in the City of Arhirit as so many spatiotemporal dimensions or frames of reference. Treated in this way, the nontriviality of the viewer’s navigation comes to be reflected in the “afterimages” they experience passing from one saturated space into another. The viewer is forced to subscribe to and negotiate the homogeneous chromatic logic articulated by each of the rooms, and they carry the trace of each logic, and their reception of it, as an afterimage as they encounter a new chromatic dimension.
On one level, much like the desynchronosis we suffer when flying from one time zone into another, the viewer of City of Arhirit experiences “intense disequilibrium” progressively navigating the saturated spaces of Turrell’s installation. More particularly, Turrell associates that experience (and its associated behaviours) with the chromatic and textural homogeneity – the “color without fold” – they encounter in each room. When confronted with, or perhaps more appropriately, positioned within, the chromatic logic of the Ganzfeld, the viewer finds themself, as Turrell relates, “crawling on their hands and knees” for lack of distinctive textures, “figures,” “structure or information” (Adcock, 1990: 140) with which to coordinate or orient their body. Whilst in this sense, the Ganzfeld produces an undoubtedly unsettling, disorienting – even traumatic – sensorial experience on the part of the observer, it might also index a new epistemological and navigational practice. The Ganzfeld’s ligature of experiential and experimental affordances is neatly captured in two essays by Kim. In ‘Behind-the-Eyes Seeing,’ she notes that the Ganzfeld describes “a different kind of landscape, a new landscape of indeterminable space” (Kim, 2013a: 267) and in ‘Entering the New Landscape,’ how the “simultaneously stimulating and confusing” experience the Ganzfeld produces “facilitates the viewer’s encounter with… her own body and [her own] perception and represents the development of a vocabulary for a new landscape” (Kim, 2013b: 251).
More precisely, we might say the Ganzfeld “stimulates” a suite of experimental possibilities as a product of its affective “confusion”: the viewer is compelled to develop a new prepositional or deictic “vocabulary” by virtue of the homogeneous chromatic logic the Ganzfeld imposes upon them, and must radically reorient their body to navigate the “indeterminable space” with which they are faced. The language of this new vocabulary is forged out of corporeal and behavioural, rather than spoken or written, materials. The viewer checks their balance, they crane their neck to gauge the height of the chamber, they reach out and try to touch an interior wall, they span their arms to measure the width of a spectral corridor, they tap their foot to test the stability of an apparent platform, they inch toward the ostensible source of the light, they crawl on their hands and knees across the floor: these are the graphemes, phonemes, and syntagms out of which the vocabulary is made. It is a vocabulary “written” and “spoken” by human flesh navigating the homogeneous terrain forcing it to “rewrite” and “respeak” itself, a contingent language produced of the constructed confrontation of a specific chromatic regime and a specific human body. Here, the viewer’s inability to conceptually grasp, determine, or embrace the artwork issues a challenge to the “bourgeois” viewership of Theodor Adorno’s characterisation. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno chastises “those who brag of having “got” something from an artwork” who, in so doing, “transfer in philistine fashion the relation of possession to what is strictly foreign to it…” (Adorno, 2002: 266) Given that, via its treatment as a zonal installation, the artwork is radically foreclosed to conceptualisation, there is nothing here for the viewer to “get” or “take.” Nor do they “involuntarily and unconsciously… [enter] into a contract with the work, agreeing to submit to it on condition that it speak” (Ibid: 73). To remain with Adorno’s metaphor for a moment, we might instead say that the “contract” the zonal artwork draws up is signed by the viewer under duress, the terms of which require them to “speak” corporeally with a “language” forced by the artwork and composed of the flesh. Whilst their “entering into this contract” might be considered “involuntary,” the viewer is not an “unconscious” signatory: the experiences and experiments in which they are obliged to partake are as tangible demonstrations of the contractual terms stipulated by the artwork qua zonal site.
Thinking-with light: an experiment in two parts
Through its radical foreclosure to anthropic determination, the artwork orchestrates democratisation of the human so as to place the intentions of its author and the interpretations of its viewer(s) on a level plane. This dynamic, I have argued, need not be taken as signalling the death of thought, but the excavation of a conceptual site from where thought would begin anew. The viewer thinks according-to this democratisation 1) through the adoption of a new attitude-posture adequate to the artwork’s dislocation from, or “extractedness” with respect to, the human, and 2) via a recognition – performed and embodied in thought – of their formal deracination from and objectivation by the artwork as coherent zonal site. Another democracy emerges in relation to Turrell’s works that might be viewed as so many attempts at a formal “democratisation of light.” “Someone was talking to me about the difference between natural light and artificial light. Well, there isn’t any difference because in light everything reveals what it is,” the artist suggests in a 1983 interview.
When astronomers look at the stars, the stars reveal themselves in their light. When you do the flame test in chemistry to find out what something is made of, it releases a characteristic light of that material at that temperature. The same is true when we make a lightbulb. You heat tungsten and it gives off a particular light. If you heat xenon under high pressure it will give off a characteristic light and so there is no unnatural light – there is only light. I’m interested in light wherever it comes from (in Halbreich, Porter, and Craig, 1983).
Whether produced by the sun, reflected by the moon, emitted by stars, transmitted from the sky, or projected as a single beam on to the wall of a gallery space, for Turrell, “there is only light” or only one light: a simple, uniform, and tractable material “naturally” emanating from innumerable sources composed and composable innumerably. Turrell is less interested in the objects of light’s illumination, obfuscation, or partial disclosure than with the materiality of light qua light: with the “thing-ness of light,” he says in his paean to the latter, that it would “itself become the revelation” (Turrell, 2013: 49).
Treating Turrell’s paean as a stepping-off point, I will attempt to establish the parameters for a practice in thinking-with the zonal artwork qua light in what follows. This is going to take the form of a conceptual experiment conducted in two parts. The first is aimed at foregrounding light as the “object” of the Turrellean artwork as a means of tracing the material operations it conducts upon what I will come to call “minimal properties” of shape, colour, and architectural space. Through its “suspension,” “simulation,” and performative “inhabitation” of these, I argue that Turrell’s “objectivated” light both undergoes its own material “liberation” – its reconciliation with itself as such – and dramatises the artwork’s constitutive “disentanglement” from its ambient spatiotemporal, symbolic, and socio-political contexts via its treatment as a zonal installation. In the second part of my experiment, I would like to demonstrate how Turrellean light compounds its material liberation through “unilateral entanglement” and employment of its viewer as “experimental object.” Here, then, I distinguish between the Turrellean “objectivation” of light and light’s “objectivation” of the human term. Where the latter indexes a process a) deracinating the human from (imagined, assumed) proximity to the artwork so that b) remodelling the human as component material in the service of the artwork as such, the former associates the mechanics of the artwork’s auto-objectivation or “setting itself down” as coherent and extracted site. The human is an experimental object of, for, and “subject(ed) to” the zonal artwork, whereas, qua light, the latter is an “object” for itself because “laterally” dislocated from both the human and its “exteriorised” milieux. This experiment is designed to facilitate a radical presentation of a light that coheres in and of itself, and to demonstrate the means through which the human might undergo “objectivation” through contemplation of the artwork qua light.
1. How to reconcile light with light
Turrell’s artworks do not contain an “object” in the ordinary sense. They are works “without” object and, on account of their foreclosure to hermeneutic interpretation, not “about” anything. Here, my employment of the term “without” is derived from Anne-Françoise Schmid and Armand Hatchuel’s “generic epistemological” enterprise that aims at the “suspension,” underdetermination, and practised mutation of disciplinary bodies of thought. In their ‘On Generic Epistemology,’ Schmid and Hatchuel pose the question of the “without” via a string of interrogatives: “what is a mathematics without object,” they ask, or “a mathematics “without” number, a philosophy “without” a transcendental, a technical object “without” one of its classic properties?” (Schmid and Hatchuel, 2018: 126). Schmid returns to this formal operator less elusively in ‘On Contemporary Objects,’ enquiring: “what does an object become if we hypothetically subtract from it a property considered to be natural? [We] are then constrained to seek other types of knowledge, of knowhow, to constitute a new object X” (Schmid, 2015: 66). Applied to Turrell, then, I would like to ask:
What is an artwork “without” an object?
What is light “without” an object to illuminate or disclose?
What “other types of knowledge and knowhow” are we “constrained to seek” if to think-with these new objects, “subtracted,” as they are, of certain of their “natural properties”?
Turrell’s “rendering light massive” (Didi-Huberman, 2017: 36) subtracts it of its traditional symbolic ramifications. “I am dealing with no object, I am dealing with no image,” Turrell explains, “because I want to avoid associative, symbolic thought… I am dealing with no focus or particular place to look. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at?” (in Boetzkes, 2010: 119) Tentatively, it is possible to respond to Turrell’s question with recourse to such tautological constructions as: “we are looking at looking at light-without-symbol,” or “we are looking at looking without a particular image,” or again, “we are looking at looking without a particular focus.” This refinement of light – so that it formally dissociates its symbolic contaminants – is once more suggested in Adcock’s assertion that by “reducing the information in the structures he presents to his viewers, [Turrell] makes art out of light. The light is one step closer to itself. It has become the art, rather than being the illumination revealing the art object or carrying the iconographical message” (Adcock, 1990: 227).
When we look at looking at light-without-X (where X stands in for a particular property or condition), we refine, reduce, or apply Occam’s razor to light in such a way as to render it a simple and unified material whose customary “associations” and applications are “suspended.” What we are looking at when we look at looking at light-without-symbol, -icon, -focus, -image, or -object to illuminate, is a new way of looking-with or according-to light. This looking-with light qua light instantiates an apperceptive “knowhow” that “constitutes” a new material light-object, paving the way for new means of utilising and composing with light. As Turrell notes of his practice:
One of the difficulties of using light is that there isn’t yet a tradition of using it in our culture. On the one hand, it is no more unusual to use it than to use stone, clay, steel, or paint. These are materials that you honor, and to that degree I was interested in using light as material – not light in glass, scrim, or plexiglass, but light in the space itself and the qualities of space – making light without traditional physical form. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light – it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing… (in Ibid: 114).
Turrell’s simplification, reduction, and democratisation of light allows for its deployment as a kind of primary artistic or compositional material akin to “stone, clay, steel, or paint.” But although light is rendered a “simple material,” what is involved in that rendering – that would be, the formal operations of suspension – are anything but: they are tortuous and complex exercises inflicting Châteletian violence upon light’s symbolic and iconographic “properties.”
Where Turrell relates, in characterising his practice, the “difficulty of using light” given the usage he has in mind can be neither derived nor inherited from any established artistic “tradition,” a far greater difficulty seems to arise with the requirement to negotiate, navigate, and ultimately suspend that “rich tradition” in the plastic arts that is merely “about light,” or that uses it as a mere “record of seeing.” In other words, it is far easier to understand Turrell’s light “without” its customary symbolic associations in principle than it is to rigorously enunciate the mechanisms allowing us to practice-with light in these terms. Which is only to say the question remains: What are we looking at when we look at this light? I propose in this respect that:
- Turrell’s light is the “material” and “object” his works both “constitute” and are constituted by.
- This light – whether that of the sun, the moon, the stars, the sky, or the projector – always manifests certain visual and structural qualities, such as
- It always assumes a certain shape or configuration, and
- Is always presented as a certain colour or mixture of colours. To this I add that
- Irrespective of the ostensible source or origin of the light – “wherever it comes from” – every work involves an architectural unit or structure of some kind (a room, a gallery, a corridor, a chamber, a volcano…), and
- In some instances, the work will involve a combination of such units or structures.
On the most rudimentary level, setting aside “light” as the “object” of the work, let us call the shapes, colours, and architectural structures involved in each work (or in each presentation of light as an object) “minimal properties.” I use the term “minimal properties” simply to relate that – at minimum – each work will contain these three material aspects or dimensions that – as properties – are not commensurate with, and should be distinguished from, the “object” of the work (a term reserved exclusively for light). We immediately run into a difficulty. Namely, that these minimal properties, involved as they are in each presentation of light – but which are not themselves light, and are not themselves “objects” of the presentation – are symbolically discursive through and through.
The self-evident nature of this insight notwithstanding, it must also be regarded as crucial to Turrell’s reduced presentation of light. For although these minimal properties are themselves symbolically rich, and although the presentation of light qua light depends in part upon the suspension of light’s associative characteristics, Turrell’s light is always presented with recourse to shapes, colours, architectural units whose own infinitely associative characteristics are apparently preserved. So the question arises: How can Turrellean light be “without residue or supplement, without division or plays-of-light” (in Galloway, 2014: 154) – when contained within a square, when it is green, when projected in a room? This question is neither rhetorical nor intended to dismiss the idea that light can be presented “as its own revelation” out of hand. Rather, it is central to gaining an understanding of both what is meant by the term “suspension” in this context, and what Schmid and Hatchuel’s “without” means and does when applied to Turrell’s presentation of light. When we suspend something, we stop it in its tracks such that its mode of operation is – often momentarily – discontinued. In another direction, we suspend something by elevating it, by raising it in the air, fixing it upon a wall or hanging it from a ceiling. Although these senses of the term tend to be used in different circumstances, they can also be regarded as granting similar investigative and poietic affordances: we halt the operation of a particular object or process in order to stabilise and view it more clearly (perhaps in a purified or idealised state), and we elevate or secure something on a wall so as to fix it in place and to see it better. Both senses are at play in the Turrellean suspension of the symbolic and iconographical associations of light. Turrell’s light precisely negotiates, navigates, and ultimately suspends that “rich tradition” in the plastic arts that is merely “about light” by inhabiting the shapes, carrying the colours, and illuminating the architectural units that are the minimal properties of its presentation qua light. These symbolically dense minimal properties are stabilised and elevated so that their discursive attributes can be both elevated (or seen more clearly) and “subtracted” from light.
In this sense, the shapes, colours, and spaces that come to articulate the minimal properties of the Turrellean presentation of light performatively simulate light’s associative and inherited usages: they perform and simulate the ways light is “traditionally” mobilised for the illumination of other objects and spaces, and for “carrying iconographical messages” through association with symbolically saturated colours and shapes. But this performative simulation of minimal properties is also the very site at which discursions of light are “suspended”: these usages, embodied as they are in shape, colour, and space, are demonstrated, rendered visible, and clearly “seen” via their subtraction, just as they are subtracted from light via their demonstration. In other words, in order to effectuate the “liberation” of light it must be materially and formally dissociated from and subtracted of its customary functions and symbols. If it is to constitute a “new object” unto itself, light must materially undergo performative mechanisms of suspension that pave the way for its liberation. One of the reasons for this is that if we are to take seriously the notion that light has been acculturated by and confined to a tradition of narrow and prohibitive usage, then its prospective liberation cannot be a neutral or trivial concern. Were this possible, then those traditional or customary usages could not be considered to operate with or exert any real authority. There would not be any ostensibly “natural” properties to subtract from light. A “liberated” light would simply refer to an alternative usage.
Instead, then, light materially undergoes the mechanisms of its liberation via performative inhabitation of the minimal properties of shape, colour, and space. And since these minimal properties materially simulate the customary, traditional, or established associativity of light, then light’s performative inhabitation of these is oriented toward the suspension and subtraction of symbolic discursivity as “natural” attribute or property. In turn, this performative inhabitation casts shape, colour, and space as minimal properties not of the artwork, but of light itself, of light as the work. Shape, colour, and architectural space are rendered as contingent, occasional, and minimal conjugations or inflections upon a formally objectivated light. And, as minimal and occasional properties, they are constructed and offered in the service of light’s presentation qua light, its formal reconciliation with itself. Light does not “fill” the shape but, like the rectangular or ovular Skyspace aperture, the shape is light, sky light is the material of the apertural shape, light composes the shape. Likewise, light is not simply an abstract gradient or modifier that enables us to distinguish between different colours or different degrees of colour – light blue as a blue with “more lightness” than dark blue, dark green as a green with “less light” than its lighter variants and so on – but the colour is light, different colours present different conjugations of – minimal inflections upon – light. And no longer is light utilised for the illumination of “objects” or architectural spaces, but these spaces are precisely constructed for the formal objectivation of light. Such that the physical characteristics and metrical attributes of Turrell’s “empty spaces” (Beveridge, 2000: 310) – the height, width, and volume of the room and so on – do not contain, house, or parameterise light, but, as with the Ganzfeld works, they become-light and are subtracted of their quantitative, descriptive, and denotative qualities with regards to it.
Turrell’s uses of shape, colour, and architectural space do not amplify light’s associative discursivity, do not provoke or precipitate synthetic complexifications of light’s own rich symbolic reservoir, but stand as so many minimal or invariant properties in the service of light’s becoming, in Adcock’s words, “one step closer to itself.” It is important to emphasise, however, that light’s material undergoing its own liberation must be considered an ongoing and experimentational process. Each of Turrell’s works, each of his series of works, are lightworks, are works of light, are experiments in the material and formal reconciliation of light with itself. But these experiments can only be regarded as carrying a contingent status: each lightwork arranges different combinations and configurations of shape, colour, and architectural space as but one experiment in light’s material rendering qua light, one presentation of light’s material negotiations with, and performative inhabitation of, its minimal properties-cum-simulated discursions.
I will now begin the second part of my experiment as a means of associating light’s ongoing material negotiations – its undergoing the formal mechanisms of its (contingent) liberation(s) – with the viewer’s apperceptive confrontation with their own perception, where the latter is understood as an experiential-experimental practice forced through “unilateral entanglement” by the Turrellean lightwork X.
2. How to look-with light qua light
Introducing his practice on his website, Turrell poses the same question I presented above – “With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at?” – only here, he offers a response: “You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought.”[5] In this second part of my experiment, I will consider these two aspects of Turrell’s response – the recursive practice of “looking at looking,” and the “experience of wordless thought” – in greater detail. Previously, I nominated a series of tautological formulations as provisional means of responding to Turrell’s question: I suggested that “what you are looking at” when you are looking at light “without” recourse to “object, image, or focus” is looking at looking at light-without-X. In this way, the viewer’s “looking at (their) looking” – their perception of their perception – articulates one contingent suspension and subtraction of light’s symbolic associativity: their looking at their looking renders light “without” some discursive symbol X. The viewer is confronted by a particular configuration of minimal properties and they negotiate with this complex toward one contingent objectivation of light. Thus, the “material of light is,” as Turrell notes above, “responsive to your seeing” insofar as contingently brought “one step closer to itself” in response to the negotiations of the viewer. It is important to reemphasise here that this dynamic should not be taken to describe unilateral determination by the viewer of the material of light, but unilateral entanglement of the viewer by light as such. For when we “look at ourselves looking,” we must ask: But what is this looking that I am looking at looking at? Looking is a procedure, it is an ocular activity, and it is being observed in its verbal state by the looking that is “looking at.” This emphasis upon the occupation of the eye by light is suggestive of a partial reprisal of the Platonic theory of vision outlined in the Timaeus. Here, we are presented with a “fire naturally akin to daylight” burning within us that “flows from the eyes,” “issues forth… striking and pushing up against external objects.” For Plato, these external objects are rendered visible via “coalescence” of ocular and ambient light forming a “single, undifferentiated” and “completely homogeneous” body (Plato, 2008: 35-6). On account of the viewer’s experiential occupation with light qua light, I would like to offer an adjustment to the Platonic schema according to which light qua light precipitates poietic effluence or emanation of the eye toward its own occupation. The eye of the viewer is forced into a belonging-to – a becoming-long toward – the material objectivation of light: the eye is teased of, emanating an ocular fire and reconciled with an objectivated lightwork, returning light “one step closer” to itself. Following from this adjustment, the Platonic schema undergoes reduction from tertiary (eye/object/daylight) to binary (eye/light qua light) composition. In other words, no longer does light merely disclose external objects through its coalescence with an ocular fire, but sets itself down as the very “object” forcing the eye’s emanation.
What can be observed in the tautological form of my response to Turrell’s question, then, is that for the viewer’s mode of viewership to become recursive – in order for them to “look at themself looking” – they must proceed to subtract properties from light under formal duress. They can only “look at themself looking” insofar as the looking they are looking at is occupied with light qua light (or with looking at light-without-X). This means, in reverse order, it is precisely their confrontation with light-without-X they are looking at themself looking at. In this way, their recursive viewership is predicated upon their confrontation with some light-without-X, their unilateral entanglement by light as such. By extension, according to the terms of Turrell’s question and answer above, the viewer is “looking at looking” when “looking at no object, no image and [with] no focus” insofar as looking at looking “without” object, image, or focus. But these “without” operators are precisely forced through the material presentation of some light-without-X: the viewer is looking at “no object” because there is no object to look at but light, “no image” because there is only light-without- (or liberated from its) image(s), with “no focus” because the light-object precludes focused viewership. Consequently, a formal dynamic can be discerned at which
- Light arranges contingent presentations of itself qua light for the viewer’s looking, vision, perception, or viewership.
- Vision arranges contingent presentations of light qua light through its being forced into “looking at itself looking” at light qua Such that
- Vision is liberated out of its acculturated and internalised propensity to see “objects,” “images,” and “with focus” through light’s coherent presentation of itself qua
Here, dyadic relations of reception and transmission no longer apply. Instead, we are presented with a complex instantiation of relative degrees of recursion and fractalisation playing out on the parts of, and between, “looking” and “light.” This recursive and fractal relationality of looking and light is not merely descriptive but permits radical applications and reconfigurations of the former consequent of those “reduced” and objectivated presentations of the latter. If the looking (at light-)without-X is forced into becoming a performative practice of extraction and suspension with regards to the customary symbolic properties of light, then that looking that is “looking at looking” comes to look-with and according-to that performative and extractive mode of viewership. The looking that is “looking at looking” becomes a looking-with looking (at light-)without-X: the looking that is “looking at looking” looks according-to the performative looking that brings about (through “seeing”) contingent liberation of light.
In this way, the looking “looking at looking” can be considered to potentiate its own recursive positionality (with respect to the performative “looking” it is “looking at”). In a sense, the looking “looking at looking” benefits from formal recursion precisely because it cannot determine light: it cannot be a vision of light, but only a vision-with, such that it gets forcibly “freed up” to experiment with its experience of itself. What one is “looking at” when “looking at oneself looking” are the very performative means of vision’s poietic, practical, and apperceptive expansion. “Looking at looking” is to look-with light qua light and refers to the experiential and experimental practices “looking” is forced to undergo due to its apperceptive occupation with, and unilateral entanglement by, a given lightwork. As can be recalled, the second aspect of Turrell’s response to his question: “With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at?” emphasises the “importance” he would like to place upon the “creation of an experience of wordless thought.” To faithfully reproduce Turrell’s response, he says: “You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought.” Here, the second aspect of Turrell’s response, namely, “the creation of a wordless thought,” is presented as logically consistent with (perhaps a consequence or product of) “looking at looking.” In this way, it is possible to nominate the “creation of wordless thought” as a practice responding to the poieticisation of the recursive positionality of the looking “looking at looking,” that is, the poieticisation of a looking-with as a thinking-with-light. Looking at looking, the perception of perception, or what Turrell calls “behind-the-eyes seeing” (in Kim, 2013a: 267) describe the establishment of novel conceptual modes of viewership. They are collected under a “thinking-with-vision” because that vision, that looking, that is “thought-with” is “subtracted” and liberated (out) of focus, object, and image via its “looking at” light qua light. Turrell extends this suite of experiential and experimental conceptual practices with his notion of a “wordless thought,” or what might also be termed a “thought-without-words.”
In Photo-Fiction, François Laruelle writes that light “is hardly graspable conceptually speaking, it barely has any apparent support, more abstract than perception, more holistic and enveloping than language which is segmented, more fleeting than the phenomenologically immobile earth” (Laruelle, 2012b: 48). It is possible to potentiate Laruelle’s claim that light “is hardly graspable conceptually speaking” by invoking a “thinking-without-words.” I give this name to an experimental mode of viewership that would not “grasp” (at) light, but experiences its own envelopment and entanglement, its own “grasping,” by light “without” recourse to language. Thinking-without-words is an experience of light qua light, of a light “with no remainder,” that thinks-with or according-to the impossibility of grasping or determining light and emerges as a practical experimental possibility just when words fail us. Turrell’s “wordless thought” touches on Vilém Flusser’s notion of a futural cognition dissociated from the “alphanumeric code.” In Into Immaterial Culture, Flusser speculatively posits that once the latter
has been overcome, mental processes will undoubtedly develop, that were up until now repressed by letters: processes that are more familiar to mathematical thinking than to literal thinking, but different from mathematical thought because they will not be quantifying. Thought will no longer be incarcerated by letters; no longer chained to spoken language (Flusser, 2015: 10-11).
Drawing upon Flusser’s speculative description of these “mental processes […] no longer incarcerated by letters,” thinking-without-words expresses a cognitive site of reflection, investigation, conception, and action “no longer chained to spoken language.” But Turrell’s “wordless thought” goes further than merely seeking to liberate thought from its “repressive” linguistic embodiment, in as much as it facilitates revision and expansion of what counts as “language” and “thought” as regards the zonal work of art. The viewer’s experimental navigation of the Turrellean Ganzfeld offers an example as to what such expanded understandings of “language” and “thought” might look like in the form of an objectivated viewership. These navigational practices offer the body as the primary material of a thinking and speaking that does not think or speak of or for the body, but with the body as onto-epistemological instrument. In its experimental navigations, the body produces a language with gesture or movement, a language of surfaces, a language with the flesh. Thought-without-words connects both to an experience of thought “without” or subtracted of language, but also to a language “without” or subtracted of words. Given these are produced out of the viewer’s contingent liberation of light, and that that liberation is in a sense forced through an objectivated lightwork, then it follows that the “experience of wordless thought” is precisely “created” by light as such. As an “object” that coheres in of itself, Turrell’s light both refuses anthropic determination and revises the conditions and morphologies of anthropic viewership at root, liberating and subtracting from the latter its established behavioural customs. The flesh is shaped and performed by light.
References
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Notes
[1] I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Simon Dawes, Will Messenger, and Colin Leemarshall for their helpful feedback and comments on previous versions of this article. Thanks also to Darryl Hazell for your encouragement and support and for introducing me to Turrell’s work.
[2] À la Badiou: “What we have to understand is that works configure a new artistic sequence. In this configuration, a generic truth of the situation of a given art becomes progressively discernible. Individuals are incorporated within this truth by mutations in their way of relating to this art. These mutations affect the way the work is defined and how it is seen or heard. What is it to listen to music? What is it to view a painting? It’s mutations of this order that interest me, mutations which the creator was, basically, the first to have been seized by” (Badiou with Tarby, 2013: 73, emphasis added).
[3] I.e., as compared with the “death” of the Barthesian author: “Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is a place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted… [T]he birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes, 1977: 148, emphasis added).
[4] Following Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith’s characterisation of the Laruellean “Real” as “untranslatable in the sense of its foreclosure… [T]his is not a negation of the fact of translatability,” they suggest, “but instead a kind of manifestation of the superlative character of the Real. The Real cannot be captured by philosophy, but instead authorizes the equivalency of all philosophies, all knowings, as relative before the Real. Or, in other words, the Real is not ineffable, but infinitely effable” (Rubczak and Smith, 2013: xvii).
[5] See http://jamesturrell.com/about/introduction/.
Calum Hazell is a writer, artist, and researcher. Recent publications include 14 Stock Frequencies: Variations on the & Manifold (Lincoln: Centre for Experimental Ontology, 2022), Phosphene Tribute Act (London: slub, 2022), ‘Thinking-with the human that we are and that we therefore are not: Non-anthropocentric anthropomorphism at a thousand concrete worlds’ (Oscillations, Issue 2: The Human Hologram), and ‘Speaking-in-the-last-instance: Non-Standard Usage, Superposition, and the (H)interlinguistic State’ (Philo-Fictions, La revue des non-philosophies: N°5: Énergie, un sort à défendre, Paris : ONPhI Editions, 2022). Formal Shamanic Conduct: Zonal Installations in Supernatural Space (Agger: EyeCorner) and ‘Social Theatre Aggregate’ (Oraxiom, Issue 3: Encounters with Built Environments) are forthcoming.
Email: Calum.Hazell.2017@live.rhul.ac.uk
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