George Lindemann Journal "A View of the Heavens Needs Some Retouching" @nytimes by WILLIAM GRIMES
“We are going to get it back as close as we can to the original state, but we want it to be easier to maintain and use less power,” Mr. Turrell said in a recent interview.
What to do, when to do it and how to pay for it have been the subject of intermittent discussions, interrupted by the demands of Mr. Turrell’s booming career. When Alanna Heiss, the founder of PS1 and its director until her retirement in 2008, commissioned the work back in the late 1970s, Mr. Turrell was known primarily on the West Coast and in Europe.
In the last decades, his increasingly bold experiments using light to shape space have captured the imagination of an ever-widening audience. Last year, his work was celebrated in three retrospectives, at the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
Meanwhile, at PS1, “Meeting” languished. The work, in a former classroom on the museum’s third floor, is a chaste, minimal environment, a conscious allusion to the Quaker meeting houses that Mr. Turrell visited as a child. The central feature of the work is a rectangular cutout in the ceiling, framing the waning light and weather. (The room opens at 3 p.m.) Concealed tungsten light tubes emit a carefully modulated orange glow, intense around the edges of the opening, paler on the walls. Wooden benches with inclined backs line the walls in this environment mixing daylight and artificial light.
On his website, Mr. Turrell leads with an explanatory remark about his work. “I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some ways gather it, or seem to hold it,” the comment runs. “My work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing.”
When Mr. Turrell was in New York, supervising the Guggenheim retrospective, he paid a visit to “Meeting” and proposed a restoration and an upgrade. The drywall around the opening in the ceiling needed a touch-up. The walls, because of multiple repaintings, needed to be taken back to their original state. In the late 1990s, a second layer of flooring and carpeting were added to the room.
Photo
“We need to adjust the height of the benches, or lower the floor, to restore the original distance,” said Peter Eleey, PS1’s curator and associate director of exhibitions and programs. “Now, your legs are a little higher, and it alters the sitting posture slightly, which changes your angle of vision.”
The movable steel cover for the ceiling has been a vexing problem for decades. Early on, it was hand-cranked by museum assistants, who would race to the roof when rain began to fall. (At one point, a wall switch was installed, giving collectors and curators who visited the work in its early stages the impression that the roof cover worked automatically. It was purely for show.) A mechanism with a moisture sensor, which was tried for a while, could not distinguish between high humidity and actual rainfall. Mr. Turrell has proposed a more advanced device, similar to the ones on new cars, that reacts only to water droplets.
Perhaps the most critical change involves lighting. In other projects, Mr. Turrell has abandoned incandescent lights and achieved the effects he wants using LED lights, something he has proposed for “Meeting.” “Going to LED will make it easier to repair and maintain, while using less energy,” he said.
The scope of the work and the financing are still being discussed, with Mr. Turrell radiating can-do optimism, and the museum hedging its bets. Mr. Turrell said that the actual work could be done in well under a year, once city permits are obtained. Although a firm to carry out the restoration has not been named, Janet Cross, of Cross Architecture, would seem to be the obvious candidate. Ms. Cross has worked with Mr. Turrell since the late 1980s on many projects, notably his magnum opus, the transformation ofRoden Crater, an extinct volcano cinder cone near Flagstaff, Ariz., into an artwork exploring Mr. Turrell’s ideas about light and space. She also did the renovation on his garden-level floor-through apartment on Gramercy Park West, now on the market for $2.85 million.
“One question is, what’s the difference between conservation and renovation,” Mr. Eleey said. “In each case, as James proposed things, we had to ask ourselves, would this change the nature of the work, as opposed to restoring it?”
The costs remain unknown, as do the means of covering them. Mr. Turrell has suggested that the owner of the work, Mark Booth, might step in and play a major role, and perhaps donate the work to MoMA, to boot. Mr. Booth, who took MTV to Europe, helped Rupert Murdoch get his British cable network off the ground, and later served as the chief executive officer of the jet-rental company NetJets Europe, is an avid collector. Recently, with his wife, Lauren, Mr. Booth donated “Gard Blue,” Mr. Turrell’s innovative 1968 light projection, to the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, Mr. Booth’s alma mater. Mr. Eleey described the proposed participation of Mr. Booth as “a nice idea.” Nothing, he said, has been decided. Mr. Booth did not return calls seeking comment.
Ken Johnson, writing in The New York Times in 2011, described a late-afternoon visit to the room, when the skylight framed a drifting puffy cloud and a bird in flight. Staring into the center of the frame, he wrote, “an aura of intense orange appeared around the edges of the blue rectangle. A lighter shade of orange light coated the walls of the chamber, creating a gorgeous contrast between the warm glow of the inside and the royal blue above, wherein a single bright star twinkled.”
Mr. Turrell, recalling the long and arduous gestation of “Meeting,” said, “This was a piece I was pleased to make in those days, and PS1 was a place where you could do things like that.” He received a small amount of grant money to make it, but reached into his pocket to bring it to completion.
“It was probably the best investment I ever made,” he said. “A lot of people wanted to do things with me after seeing it.”