Many artists (most famously Daniel Buren and most recently Maurizio Catellan) have challenged the iconic architecture of the Guggenheim Museum. But James Turrell, with his immersive, cinematic light installation Aten Reign, succeeded. He turned our city’s most elegant space into a peepshow, and everyone inside seemed to be enjoying the show. The artist blocked off the museum’s signature spiraling balconies and installed a low ceiling, about twenty feet above the ground floor. He cut an elliptical opening at the center, evocatively egg-shaped, and set four higher, stepped ceilings above that, with successively smaller openings. He washed these ceilings with programmed fields of light so that the whole environment morphed, almost imperceptibly, on a one-minute cycle, from color to color: from cupric blue to screaming magenta to ice white to mossy green, and then on and on, rhythmically, relentlessly. These shifts evoked dusk and dawn. And they created illusions of depth and compression, as if the ceilings were closing and opening like a camera aperture, or rising and falling like a telescope.
For full effect, a visitor had to stare straight upwards for about half an hour. The darkened gallery, lit only by the installation, was packed tight with visitors lying on mats in the middle of the floor, leaning against the walls, and standing in a ring between them, all surrendered to the spectacle overhead. The rotunda, a soaring space, was dark, cluttered and compressed. Turrell had, with just a few elements, disguised the architecture of the museum and undone its modern allure. I overheard one visitor say that the scene reminded him of an ashram, with everyone mindlessly tuned-in and blissed-out. It felt less innocent than that to me. Dim and damp, washed in oily pools of color, the place had the claustrophobic, illicit feeling of an adult movie theater. We’d gathered in this majestic place to lose ourselves in unthinking private reverie. It was unseemly.
Aten Reign, 2013, by James Turrell. Photo courtesy of James Turrell.