The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

In today's contemporary art world, most people would consider the status of California Light & Space artist James Turrell (b. 1943) to be nothing short of paradisiacal. He has three concurrent, major museum exhibitions going: a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and solo shows at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. At Lacma, time-sensitive tickets limit the number of people admitted at any one time, with posted suggestions as to how much time should be spent with each work so the visitor's eyes can adjust for optimum viewing. Houston is exhibiting seven of Mr. Turrell's "immersive light environments" that date from the late 1960s to the present, along with what the museum calls its "beloved light tunnel," "The Light Inside" (1999). "Aten Reign"(2013)—a hyperpretty, computer-controlled, colored-light installation—occupies the Guggenheim Museum's famous rotunda.

Each exhibition affords viewers the kind of pure, unencumbered-by-things perception commonly associated with religious ecstasy and revelatory near-death experiences. Add to this heady mix Mr. Turrell's continuing, ultragrand project to turn Roden Crater—an extinct volcano in the northern Arizona desert—into a celestial observatory that's one giant work of art, and you've got an artist whose oeuvre comes as close as any out there to being timeless and universal. Or so it may seem.

Mr. Turrell—a handsome man with an oracular presence, a long beard and a full head of silver hair that he often tops with a black cowboy hat—is the son of an aeronautical-engineer father and a mother, trained in medicine, who worked in the Peace Corps. Mr. Turrell earned a pilot's license at 16, studied perceptual psychology at Pomona College and art as a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. Perhaps influenced by his Quaker parents, he registered as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war.

LACMA/James Turrell/Florian Holzherr

'Afrum (White)' (1966)

"Afrum (White)" (1966), in the Lacma exhibition, was Mr. Turrell's ingeniously simple breakthrough work: a rectangle of brilliant white light projected into the corner of a room to give the illusion that it was a luminous, hovering box. A year later, at age 24, he had a solo show of several such projections at the Pasadena Art Museum, and was credited in many quarters as being the first artist to put light itself on display as art.

But Mr. Turrell didn't just slide down a beam of light and land, sui generis, in the Southern California art world. Los Angeles—with its shiny custom-car culture and surfer-Zen regard for the Pacific horizon—already had a "finish fetish" art style that emphasized light reflections on shiny surfaces. As early as 1963, Larry Bell was experimenting with mirrored boxes and Craig Kauffman with vacuum-formed plastic, and by the mid-1960s, Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler were busily dematerializing the art object by including a gauzy electric-light surround as part and parcel of their minimalist wall works. (Mr. Irwin, who's about to turn 85, has one of his miraculous scrim pieces, "Scrim Veil—Black Rectangle—Natural Light," from 1977, reinstalled at the Whitney Museum through Sept. 1.) But where light is concerned, Mr. Turrell—whose daunting output falls into such categories as "Space Division Constructions," "Veils," "Perceptual Cells," the "Magnatron Series," the "Tall Glass / Wide Glass Series," the "Window Series" and "Skyspaces"—is clearly the head honcho.

A Skypace is essentially a beautifully placed and tailored hole in a ceiling (or the open top of a specially built enclosure) that reveals a crisply cropped sliver of sky that seems to exist as a flat shape on the ceiling's own plane and at the same time accentuates one's perception of changing natural light. In 1974, Mr. Turrell's first Skyspace was installed in the residence of the Milanese collector Giuseppe Panza. Since then, Mr. Turrell has executed more than 80 such works around the world.

They're not cheap. Much of the proceeds of their sales, however, have been pumped—along with funds from the DIA Foundation and other helping hands—into the Roden Crater project. Completion dates for this remote complex of architecturally and sculpturally fastidious tunnels, ramps, stairs, platforms and a Skyspace iteration, have been set, variously, at 1990, 2000 and 2011. As of now, it looks as if the Roden Crater might take its place—although much more serviceable and beautiful in its incompletion—alongside the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota, which was begun in 1948 and is still being worked on.

Mr. Turrell isn't bogged down in a probably neverending Roden Crater enterprise, however. In the Lacma retrospective, there's a spherical Perceptual Cell entitled "Light Reignfall" (2011), into which a viewer (after paying about double the cost of an ordinary ticket to the show) is slid, face up in a big drawer, in order to experience a personal 10-minute lightshow. More democratically, spectators at the Guggenheim can stand, sit or lie supine and look up at the smooth, 60-minute color cycle of "Aten Reign," a cone of concentric ovals ascending toward the museum's famous skylight.

The purposes of Mr. Turrell's art are profoundly simple: To make the viewer realize that his art takes place within one's perceptual apparatus—indeed, consciousness—rather than outside of it, embedded in a configuration of inert material, and to make the viewer aware of the act of perception itself. "Seeing oneself see," Turrellians call it. By doing this, viewers shake themselves free from a more earthbound kind of aesthetic perception that is rooted in objects, making judgments of good-better-best among them, and improving one's taste. (Mr. Turrell has said that "Taste is repression.")

Do Mr. Turrell's work, and its wonderful, breathtaking arc from "Afrum (White)" to "Aten Reign," truly escape taste? Which is to ask, do they fly free from history, style and the vicissitudes of culture? Although the attempt is both noble and exhilarating, the answer is no.

photograph by David Heald - Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Installation view of 'Aten Reign' (2013) at the Guggenheim Museum

After a while, looking up at "Aten Reign," one notices in the first layer of scrim, stretched overhead, a couple of individual threads, a bit of dust, an incipient wrinkle. Inexorably, one begins to pay attention, as it were, to the man behind the curtain. And the nested ovals are necessarily tints of one color or two closely neighboring colors at a time, a convention in high-end room décor redolent of Los Angeles in the 1950s. As shapes, they evoke the post-Surrealism and abstract classicism of such earlier Southern California artists as Helen Lundeberg and Frederick Hammersley. And on a track parallel to the pop-culture influences of custom cars and surfer's bliss, those two painting styles fed directly into the work of the "finish fetish" artists who were Mr. Turrell's artistic contemporaries in mid-1960s Los Angeles.

That doesn't mean Mr. Turrell's art falls short in its ambitions. Its inescapable Southern California flavor merely reiterates the truth that particular times, places and, yes, tastes, cling to works of art even as cosmically intended as "Light Reignfall" and the Roden Crater project. Such human traces are, in fact, what give visceral life to art that wishes to be abstractly universal.

Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.

A version of this article appeared August 15, 2013, on page D7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Can the Light Set You Free?.