James Turrell
Uses light itself as the material, and has been reshaping an Arizona volcano since 1977.
James Turrell was born in Los Angeles in 1943, took a degree in perceptual psychology, and is a Quaker and a pilot — all three matter. He works with light as a physical substance rather than as illumination: projections that appear to be solid objects, Ganzfeld rooms in which the eye loses any surface to focus on, and the Skyspaces, chambers with an aperture cut to the sky so that the sky reads as a plane. Since 1977 he has been converting Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in the Painted Desert, into a naked-eye observatory. He was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1984.
The major works are architecture and are commissioned rather than traded — a Skyspace is built into a building and cannot be moved. What circulates is a narrower field: editioned light works and glass pieces with their controllers and technical specification, holograms, prints and the aquatint portfolios such as Deep Sky and First Light, which are well documented and are the accessible part of the output. Electronic works carry component obsolescence questions, and the installation specification, lighting programme and calibration form part of the work.
If you own a work by James Turrell
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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