Contemplative Recovery: The Artwork of James Turrell

Abstract

Contemplative Recovery: The Artwork of James Turrell Jeffrey L. Kosky Light is not so much something that reveals as it is itself the revelation. One way to understand modernity is as the age in which contemplation is repressed, marginalized, or otherwise forgotten. An important emblem of this transformation is light. As light becomes less and less something we desire to see and more and more something we use in order to see, the world becomes not a radiant appearance whose beauty is to be admired but an object to examine and grasp. An acknowledged master and pioneer of the use of light in modern art, James Turrell makes work that defies the modern obsession with a certain kind of light: the direct or focused light that illuminates an otherwise darkened space so that we can see objects clearly and distinctly. Absorbed in Turrell's work, we give ourselves over to a vision of the light itself. Offering neither object to grasp nor image to see, Turrell's art separates what modern forms of lighting connect—seeing from controlling, touching from mastering—and introduces us into a domain where our gaze makes the transition to wonder and admiration. In Turrell's work, then, aesthetic vision can be understood as the heir to contemplation. This makes his art a useful site for recovering something operative in contemplative traditions but repressed from mainstream interpretations of modernity—the leisure and freedom of human being and its correlative, the wonder and beauty of the world. Theologians and philosophers, as well as literary or art critics, and cultural commentators in general, who are concerned about the increasingly rare opportunity for cultivating these habits in human beings and for approaching the world that opens to them might do well then to attend carefully to the work of this great contemporary artist. Delumination of the world and the struggle for illumination A familiar old story connects modernity with the dream of enlightenment. But this seemingly simple story is in fact more subtle, as the modern dream of enlightenment is in fact a wish for a certain kind of light—a light that clarifies and, thanks to its clarity, lets us see solid and stable objects. Solid and stable objects require well‐defined limits and edges; they appear in distinct places defined by sharp borders that contain the objects held in place there. This distinctness is possible only in a clearly lit space. Along these lines, the French polymath Michel Serres will point to the “association of the distinct with the clear, the language of light with the language of borders,” for the edges and borders that define distinct objects appear sharply only in a light that is clear. This enlightenment is perhaps nowhere more obvious than when René Descartes, widely acknowledged as a founding father of modernity, takes the standard of evidence to be the clear and distinct. That is to say, Descartes resolves to accept as true only what appears clearly and distinctly to his gaze. Clarity and distinctness, joined in the fashion Serres described, become the defining characteristics of an evidence that appears beyond the shadow of doubt: when things appear with such an evidence, any suspicion that what appears might be a false or misleading appearance is dispelled. Defining what appears in truth as any and all objects that come to light in such a clear light, Descartes thereby establishes reality (that is, appearing in truth) on the foundation of certainty. What lacks certainty is either not real or not yet established in truth. Descartes thus believes he is closest to reality, dwells most firmly in the truth, when he sees with certainty. Not only does the modern dream of enlightenment dream of a particular kind or function of light, it also dreams that this light is under human control. According to a provocative suggestion made by Hans Blumenberg, this dream accounts for the importance in modernity of the idea of method: “In the idea of ‘method’, which originates with Bacon and Descartes, the ‘light’ is thought of as being at man's disposal. Phenomena no longer stand in the light; rather they are subjected to the lights of an examination.” An examination directed by...