“It looks like the rings of Saturn,” said one observer, craning his neck to grab the attention of his companion to his left.
Nearby, another individual, standing amid a small huddled mass people, blurts out, “It makes my eyes bug out.”
Still others remain silent and still, not verbalizing their thoughts as they lay supine as if glued to the floor, their eyes turned skyward, mesmerized by a series of mysterious and monolithic elliptical bands, which float above their heads, changing colors at regular intervals.
These curious confessions and astonishing physical displays are not the manifestations of some form of mass hypnosis; it’s simply just another summer afternoon at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, and visitors are attempting to understand and gain optimal viewing perspective of the facility’s latest large-scale, site-specific installation, Aten Reign — the centerpiece of the James Turrell exhibit, which runs from June 21 through September 25.
The Guggenheim’s James Turrell show, a study in the effect of natural and artificial light in a space and how these elements and variables are perceived, runs concurrently with similar events at The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Says Peter Read, Jr., director of fabrication at the Guggenheim in New York, this is the largest one-man national retrospective undertaken in modern times. “92,000 square feet of Turrell is on view right now across the country,” Read notes.
It has taken a significant team effort on the part of Turrell, his office and all at the Guggenheim to present this exhibition, which includes the show-stopping Aten Reign and the re-creation of other historical pieces, such as Afrum I (White), Ronin and Prado (White). It all required a considerable amount of heavy lifting by in-house construction and fabrication departments to create the proper physical environment for the desired lighting effects.
“The geometry of the presentation spaces is always critical for Turrell,” says Read, who credits the Guggenheim’s Richard Burgess with directing much of the exhibit’s dry-wall construction. “It’s very exacting, what [Turrell] wants built for the pieces. It’s typical of his work that, although he deals in light, there’s a lot of legwork done to get to the point where the light can be projected.”
Leading Light
One of the leading lights and installation artists of the last half-century, Turrell, 70, son of an aeronautical engineer (and himself a Quaker), creates designs that expand our minds and prompt self-reflection, making us aware of how our brains interpret visual stimuli and how we perceive the world around us. (It’s a process Turrell famously describes as “seeing yourself seeing.”)
Turrell has been seriously messing with our minds since the late 1960s. While big solo museum exhibitions in New York are, for him, a rarity (the previous one was in 1980), he has been featured in solo gallery shows, and his work has also been featured in spaces from Pittsburgh and Vienna, Austria. He’s also created more than 70 “Skyspaces” across multiple continents, and is currently working on a massive land art project near Flagstaff, AZ, Roden Crater.
While smaller in scale than an extinct volcano, Aten Reign at the Guggenheim is one of Turrell’s most provocative installations to date, one that’s conceptually and inexorably linked to the Guggenheim’s exterior architecture. It was Turrell’s intent to present the installation’s collection of ellipses as a kind of inverted mirror image of the building’s outer bands. In fact, if viewed as one continuous work, Aten Reign’s ovals and the outer architectural bands of the building seem to form some facsimile of a deep-space wormhole. Cosmic? Yes. Out there? You betcha. But that’s Turrell: reality warps when approaching his work, and time and space collapse all around when viewing it.
Attached to the bottom of Aten Reign’s rings is a large oval-shaped enclosure, which fits snugly against the building’s interior rotunda ramps, ensuring that the lobby retains both natural and artificial light. This enclosure blocks any attempts by museumgoers to pull back the curtain to see how the structural magic happens. In essence, when visitors enter into the fabricated lobby enclosure, they step foot into a room within a room, and are prompted to gaze through Aten Reign’s vortex-like elliptical bands and experience the heady mixture of artificial LED and natural light raining from ceiling oculus/skylight, nearly 100 feet above their heads.
Perception
Light fixture placement and the manner in which light is projected onto the elliptical bands is vital to the success of the piece. Turrell’s use of LED blue light is especially evocative, capturing the depth and breadth of the boundless and layered Western summer sky, alluding to the reported expansive beauty of the artist’s long-time (and as-yet-unfinished) astronomically aligned earthworks project, Roden Crater, situated outside Flagstaff, Arizona.
One needs to stand directly underneath Aten Reign to feel its full effects, however. If the viewer focuses intensely on its ellipses, to the degree that all other objects in the observer’s field of vision melt away, this act of deep concentration can induce a kind of altered state. By meditating on each successive ringlet of this monolithic mandala-like object, we seemingly access increasingly higher dimensions of consciousness.
When the LED lights are inactive we observe strange, though large, white curves, offering a kind of mental and optical respite, as if a master chef had just served us a palate-cleanser visual dish before proceeding with the main course: mind-nourishing, saturating colors.
Just before the artificial lighting resets and as the lobby’s natural luminescence drains from the space (like water receding from inside a huge bowl-like receptacle), we venture up to one of the sight ramps to approach Aten Reign from a different perspective. As the lights return, we’re stunned by the fluorescent glow radiating from visitor T-shirts, sneakers and even nail polish. This visual effect seems so deliberate we wonder if Turrell had sprayed the joint with Luminol and installed a giant UV light in those massive rings. Surely, there’s a kind of lesson in this discovery about the hidden properties of light.
“Even when the person is wearing white it looks pretty amazing,” says Jaime Roark, associate director, exhibition design and production.
Aten Reign simply messes with our perception: one minute five huge elliptical rings seem close enough to touch and the next they appear as circular forms on a distant horizon. This is, perhaps, why some have called Turrell’s art hallucinatory and why others have, reportedly, lost their balance from its dizzying effects. Migraines are common and bodily injury has occurred, all in the name of experiencing the Master of Light’s handiwork. No doubt Turrell’s longtime interest in sensory deprivation as well as his research into the intricacies of the so-called ganzfeld effect (i.e. infusing a space with single color of light) has informed many of the pieces being shown at the Guggenheim and across the country.
“I think, the intent is to have a psychological effect on you,” says Richard Avery, technical and production specialist for the Guggenheim’s in-house fabrications department. “Different psychological effects can be created, either through the deprivation of light — sensory deprivation — or the oversaturation of light, a particular color can have an intense effect on your mind.”
Exoskeleton Trussing
If the conceptual aspects of these artworks is fascinating, so is the precision of their execution. “Turrell had done things like this in the past, but not on this scale,” says Read. “I know Turrell, in his mind’s eye, had a clear vision, but it was up to us to come back to him with a technical design and say, ‘This is how it can be done.’”
“How it existed in the space was something we didn’t know initially,” adds Roark.
Ramping up the pre-installation jitters, Team Guggenheim knew full well that they would need to avoid damaging in any way the artistic frame for Aten Reign — the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building and its famous rotunda. “We all care about the building,” adds Roark. “We try not to be frivolous with the attachment points we make to the building.”
Interestingly, the Guggenheim’s recent Maurizio Cattelan exhibit hung thousands of pounds of art, which was supported by circular trussing. A similar concept would be applied for the James Turrell exhibit: through the use of aluminum trussing, suspended by chain hoists anchored to the skylight’s concrete support arches, Aten Reign could be safely secured to landmark building.
To ensure that the internal structure of the installation was concealed from the public eye, double-sided PVC Newmat scrim would need to be employed. The inside or white translucent layers of this scrim, stretched via sharkstooth tension tracks, provide pristine projection surfaces for the LED lighting fixtures, which are slotted along tracks placed on plywood planks lining the installation’s oval-shaped truss framing. (Visitors are allowed only to see the projection, or white side, of the scrim. The black, outer layers are unseen by average visitors and “prevent any ambient light inside the rotunda from affecting the piece or permeating the inner white,” says Roark.)
The Guggenheim awarded the manufacturing and design of the trussing to Xtreme Structures & Fabrication (XSF), a Sulphur Springs, TX-based company with extensive experience in custom-designed projects.
Early on XSF president Michael Wells made the museum aware that the install would be a tight fit, with only “a couple of inches of tolerance from wall to wall,” according to Wells. “My designer Cliff [Clifton Robbins] was laying out the whole thing in AutoCAD, and I got to thinking about how this trussing could be designed.”
Wells devised an ingenious solution that would solve a complex geometric problem and not put undo stress on the building: interconnecting and relatively lightweight 12-by-12-inch aluminum truss rings that could carefully and neatly buttress the circular ramps of the museum’s multi-tiered rotundas, secure the camouflaging double-sided scrim, and create an exoskeleton that forms the installation’s outer shell.
Following a couple of rounds of structural engineering fine tuning, manufacturing and welding of the custom-designed trussing system began, but not without a new set of challenges. Wells explains: “If you put a smaller oval truss ring on top of a bigger oval, you have a gap [between them],” says Wells. “Now, if you consider the face of a clock, you have 12 o’clock, three o’clock, six o’clock and nine o’clock. Those particular points on both ovals are parallel to each other. They’re tangents. Attaching a truss from one 12 o’clock position to its corresponding 12 o’clock position on another truss is pretty easy to do. But creating a piece of truss that goes from 1:30 on a high truss to 1:30 on a lower truss — that involves maneuvering a complex 3D angle, and that was the biggest challenge of the whole project.”
Wells claims that 127 different types or categories of aluminum trussing were needed to create the oval rings for the Aten Reign installation. “It’s probably close to 200 actual pieces,” says Wells. “I think the longest one measures ten feet. We had to roll the tubes, which is how you get the oval shape. We also added a fifth cord to some of the trussing. Usually a truss has four main members, but we needed a fifth in order to create a shelf on the inside of each oval for the lighting.”
Due to space limitations, XSF couldn’t build the complete installation in one go; they had to construct the piece and test it incrementally. “We’d put together two or three levels at a time, take them apart and then put the next two or three levels together and then take them apart,” says Wells. “We test-fit everything, 100 percent, in our shop before we sent anything out.” All in all, XSF was involved for “several months.”
Jersey Facility
After working on the project for nearly 90 days, XSF delivered, via tractor-trailer, the trussing in mid March 2013 to meet the deadline for the opening of the exhibit — June 21, the summer solstice. The Guggenheim then began large-scale mock-ups of the Aten Reign installation at an off-site warehouse facility in Jersey City, NJ, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Given the sheer magnitude of the piece, the museum had no other choice but to go off-site for pre-assembly. Much like XSF, the museum does not have access to an unoccupied space big enough to assemble the entire installation in one piece.
Courtesy of XSF, easy-to-understand labels (i.e. Tier One, Piece One would be identified as T1-1) were taped to aluminum trussing, identifying each piece to accommodate efficient and rapid (or the most rapid) assembly conceivable. Tolerances of every piece of truss were tested, including those relative to the tension created by the stretched scrim — the projection surface. “There was a series of strident tests designed by our engineers,” says Avery. “We would simulate twice that amount of tension on the truss, using weights and other things. It would be tested over 24 hours. We did that for every single piece of the truss.”
As the piece progressed, 950 Philips Color Kinetics LED iColor Cove MX Powercore (g2) RGB wide beam lighting fixtures were slotted into Cove MX mounting track systems and placed along plywood planks. (The blue — that stunning blue mentioned earlier — is a custom channel designed by Philips for Turrell that Mary Ann Hoag, exhibition lighting designer at the Guggenheim, refers to as “royal blue.” Color Kinetics Data Receiver IntelliPower and Data Enabler IntelliPower units are utilized for data control/delivery and power integration.) For optimal effect, the lights were situated at the base of each of the five 11-foot-high “cones” or ellipses.
“For the first mock up, we brought all the materials together and showed everyone how it was going to work — and that it would work,” says Read.
“Turrell’s assistant came and got inside of it, just to make sure the actual process worked the way we all expected it to,” says Avery. “Once all of the pieces were assembled, it would all be taken apart, due to space limitations, and the next section would be assembled.”
Turrell had roughly one week at the end of the Guggenheim assembly process to create a program for the lighting. “He spent about 10 days programming the piece,” says Read. “It was a few days looking at it and a week on the computer to create the sequence that he chose.”
“I see why Turrell is such a brilliant artist,” adds Avery. “It wasn’t until [Turrell] was actually programming the lights that I could see it. I couldn’t have imagined it.”
On-site Installation
Despite all of the pre-assemblages in Jersey City, there were still some doubts about how — and if — the piece would fit in the museum. “Richard [Avery] took some quick measurements [in Jersey City] and he got real nervous, ‘It’s not going to fit. It’s not going to fit,” says Wells. (For the record, a museum rep reports, “Xtreme did do precise work and did provide smart solutions for the assembly, but the core model, with all the critical dimensions was produced by [the Guggenheim’s] Avery.”)
“It was crazy,” says Roark. “The part of the installation we couldn’t test was the actual physical connection to the building. There were still unknowns.”
The Guggenheim had to be re-measured and, as it turned out, the trussing exoskeleton was accurate within 1/8th of an inch. “They called me saying, ‘Don’t worry about coming. This thing’s perfect.’” says Wells.
The top ellipsis of the Aten Reign piece, outfitted with scrim and lights, was composed first and then lifted with chain hoists a few feet off the ground. This process was repeated for each 11-foot ellipsis until the iconic cone shape was formed. Six 1-ton Stage Maker SM10 chain hoists, arranged in a circular array, were secured from a total of 12 anchor points drilled into the museum’s concrete “web walls.”
“There’s [a total of] 15,000 pounds from those points,” says Avery. “Even though we had tested the points before, we went ahead and re-tested each one again.”
Precise computerized load distribution models offered crucial information about the complex geometry of Aten Reign during the rigging process, which was overseen by Christopher George. “The loads changed every time we moved them,” notes Avery. “The relationship changed between the circular ring of motors and the elliptical bands. As the bands got higher, the way the loads were distributed on the building was changing, too. We moved each ellipsis, maybe, five feet at a time. We would adjust each hoist until we had the loads more evenly distributed on the building. Then we would move it some more and then we would stop and look at the loads.”
Perfect Fit
At the installation’s conclusion, it appeared that everything went as planned. The visuals are brilliant, the trussing perfect and the rigging precise — and the landmark building was not damaged in any way by the massive project.
“We had such a short amount of time to fit this into the building,” says Avery. “We didn’t have the time to take the installation apart and send it somewhere and have it corrected if something was wrong. So, we really owe Xtreme some applause for doing a great, great job on fabricating the truss. This was one of the most complicated installations we’ve done. At least from the technical side of it. I know I lost a lot of sleep over it.”
“Teamwork was crucial,” says Roark. “There was so much expertise that went into this project.”
“We have incredibly highly skilled people who work together amazingly to make this happen,” concludes Read. “The other aspect of this is Turrell, himself, who really embodies artistry. Those two things are key to the project: the teamwork to make it happen physically and then the integrity of the artist who it was done for. That’s really, to me, almost as remarkable as the piece itself.”
