In James Turrell’s City of Arhirit (1976), participants walk through a series of four empty chambers. (Figure 1) The first is illuminated by blue colored light, the next violet, the third red, and the fourth green. Although composed only of smooth white walls and tinted lighting, each area appears suffused with a palpable atmosphere. The chromatic illumination seems to atomize and float like a mist in the space surrounding the participant. This effect is produced by what is called a ganzfeld. In a ganzfeld (first encountered by pilots flying through white-out snowstorm conditions), an unmarked even distribution of light covers one’s entire optical field. In City of Arhirit, Turrell creates a ganzfeld by both illuminating the space with a uniform intensity of light and gently curving the walls and ceiling to remove any hard lines or shadows. This lack of visual cues causes a total loss of depth perception. As a result, one cannot determine how near or far one stands from their surroundings. Due to this confusion between shallow and deep space, one begins to perceive a nebulous and endless fullness of light.¹ In this environment one becomes acutely aware that they are inhabiting a plenum, a filled space rather than an empty void. The volume contained within the installation becomes almost tangible. I suggest that in City of Arhirit, Turrell manipulates the properties of light precisely to allow participants to sense their surroundings anew, to apprehend their emplacement within an all-encompassing environment.

Current scholarship on Turrell’s light installations has not fully investigated the way these works foreground the sensory experience of environment, instead focusing on Turrell’s thematization of the mechanics of individual visual perception.² In City of Arhirit, participants walk along a set pathway, proceeding from blue to violet to red to green tinted rooms. As participants’ eyes adjust to each monochrome space, each succeeding color appears more vibrant and intense. Turrell explained in an interview: “you had the after-image of the green, so you entered with a pink after-image which made the already slightly red space intensely red.”³ While it is the unique curved architecture and even light saturation that creates the ganzfeld effect, it is the transition between different colored rooms that draws participants’ attention to the subjective nature of this epiphenomenon. Throughout this promenade participants are continually alerted to the process of their own visual perception. It is this personal experience of light and color to which most Turrell scholarship attends, often repeating Turrell’s own assertion that his interest lies in “allowing people to perceive their perceptions — making them aware of their perceptions.”⁴ I instead propose that Turrell’s immersive installations disclose an ontology of environment.

I look closely at Turrell’s City of Arhirit and his early studio installation Mendota Stoppages (1969–1974) to determine how abstract light effects draw participants’ attention to their surroundings. I analyze the interaction between the space inside the installation and the space outside the installation to argue that greater attention to ones’ atmospheric surroundings inside the installation leads to greater attention to ones’ atmospheric surroundings outside of the installation. Moreover, building on both contemporary Anthropocene aesthetics and the historical discourse on air quality in 1970s Los Angeles, I posit that this greater awareness may have led participants to a greater recognition of environmental degradation and pollution.

Adopting the traditional art historical reading of Turrell’s work, which uses a combination of formal analysis and phenomenology to parse the relationship between the individual participant, the work of art, and the surrounding space, I attempt to move beyond formal or perceptual conclusions to uncover a heretofore unacknowledged social-political character to Turrell’s early installations. It is through newly developed theorizations of the relationship between perception, environment, and environmental degradation that this content begins to come to light. Starting with an approach based in Anthropocene aesthetics, I also uncover historical evidence which suggests that an environmentalist connotation to Turrell’s work was already evident to critics in 1969. I propose that this ecological reading of Turrell’s work has been overshadowed by formal and phenomenological interpretations in the intervening years.⁵ It is through new thinking about perception and environment, spurred by our current climate crisis, that I am able to look back at the 1970s — another moment when environmental crisis held the national stage — to draw connections between Turrell’s perceptual experimentation and environmental degradation.

In “Visualizing the Anthropocene,'' Nicholas Mirzoeff presents the faulty state of sensory perception within the era of the Anthropocene: “The body can no longer make sense of what is presented to it. We cannot articulate what we perceive, namely, that the climate is wrong — too hot, too dry, too wet, or all of the above.”⁶ Implied is the notion that if one could somehow correct their senses, if one could recognize the climatic aberrations wreaking havoc just beyond their realm of perception, one might begin to develop an effective approach to climate change. He argues that the “aesthetics of the Anthropocene emerged as an unintended supplement to imperial aesthetics — it comes to seem natural, right, then beautiful — and thereby anaesthetized the perception of modern industrial pollution.”⁷ To make this pollution visible would require a shift or a jolt in our sensory perceptions. In his article, Mirzoeff effects this jolt through novel readings of canonical western painting’s such as Claude Monet’s Impression Sunrise (1872), revealing depictions of industrial pollution that viewers have consistently overlooked. Rather than uncovering the representations of pollution in Turrell’s works, I argue that instead City of Arhirit and the Mendota Stoppages provide a perceptual shift similar to that evoked by Mirzeoff’s readings. These works establish a relationship between the participants and their immediate surroundings through the language of perception. They use this perceptual play to reorient participants’ sense of the world both inside and outside of the installation. Turrell’s light installations change what participants pay attention to, what is visible to them: namely environmental degradation.

More than environment generally, I argue that Turrell’s works evoke air pollution specifically. This is partially due to the formal similarities between light and air, such as their ubiquity and invisibility. In her influential article “Air as Medium,” Eva Horn posed the following questions:

How can we conceive of an object of knowledge in which we are always already entangled and immersed and by which we are formed, touched, and penetrated? An object that engulfs us and sticks to us? Not just because we move in it, breathe it in, dwell in it, but also because we damage it with a huge number of the practices we daily engage in.⁸

Turrell’s artworks provide something of an answer to these questions. He uses light to help viewers perceive an atmosphere in which they are always already entangled and immersed. Light, like air, defines our contours, presses our edges, and enters our bodies. It is the necessary substrate for our experience of the world. The medium of light in Turrell’s work is analogous to Horn’s idea of the medium of air. Yet this relationship is more than formally analogous. Historical interviews and criticism of Turrell’s work from the 1970s explicitly link the experience of light in these installations with the experience of air and air pollution in the city of Los Angeles.

In 1969 James Turrell began converting his studio into an immersive art installation known as the Mendota Stoppages. Throughout the 1960s, Turrell used individual projectors to form his wall-based light sculptures and thus required total darkness. To achieve this darkness, Turrell covered the windows of the two front rooms of his studio in plywood, drywall, and paint. Then, in 1969, he began tearing down these walls, stripping this paint, and opening the windows, although not all at once. Turrell removed measured squares of paint and constructed custom shades for four windows and one doorway in his studio space. One window was separated into four quadrants that could be individually opened or blocked off, another window was divided into three sections, two more could be opened and closed while the doorway between the spaces could be opened partially, or fully closed.

Turrell devised a program of opening and closing apertures to work in concert with the ambient light streaming in from the commercial Santa Monica intersection on which his studio was located. Just two blocks from the beach, the busy corner of Hill Street and Main Street featured the glow of several streetlamps, the shifting red, green, and yellow glimmer of a traffic light, the gleam from the plate glass frontage of “Sunlight Thrift” retailer and the glinting lights of many passing cars. Turrell shaped and positioned restricted openings in the architecture of his studio to mold the light from these exterior traffic signals, passing cars, and lamp posts into a series of immersive visual effects projected against the walls, ceilings, and floors of his studio. These shafts of light, veils of color, and flickering shadows moved and changed over time as, for instance, a car sped through the busy traffic crossing, a signal changed from red to green, or a shop closed for the evening. Turrell designed ten different configurations to be viewed from ten different designated positions throughout the space.

In the summers of 1969 and 1970, Turrell opened his studio installation to the public, hosting two-to-four-hour long presentations, usually once a week. They began around nine or ten at night and constituted a social visit as well as an art experience. Visitors included prominent artists, gallerists, critics, curators, and collectors from both U.S. coasts and around the world. Participants would cycle through the ten different viewing stations with varying configurations of open and closed doors and windows, stopping at each for ten to fifteen minutes to experience the lighting effects.

More than any photograph, a watercolor created by Turrell may help elucidate the immersive atmosphere of the light animating the Mendota Stoppages. (Figure 2) While a camera may be able to record a trace of light, its motion and duration, it does not process light the way the human mind does, and therefore cannot reproduce what the participant sees. In Turrell’s installations the effects evoked by the light are created only in the interaction between the illumination present in the installation space and the perceptual apparatus of the participants. Therefore, it is in watercolor, rather than the medium of photography, that Turrell lays bare the unique perceptual process of apprehending light within the Mendota Stoppages. In the center of the image on the top and bottom edges, splotchy maroons seem to reference the patterns one sees through closed eyelids or the floaters that populate one’s retinas in total darkness. The variegated washes of navy and the undulating lines evoke an ambiguously deep, encircling darkness, rather than a flat optical black. The white rectangles that curve along the horizon just above the center of this painting signify the apertures in the architectural envelope while the blank, un-inked page represents the open window. One rectangle is not bright white, but red, indicating the shine of a stoplight or brake light entering the space. Inside this perforated architectural barrier, space expands indefinitely out toward the viewer. There are no straight lines or corners, just undulating curves flowing around and emanating from the rectangular light sources. Without traditional graphic markers of depth or scale, the volume depicted in the watercolor is nevertheless full. The shifting, rippling curves imply space without a fixed dimension. Depth is instead represented idiosyncratically through repeated lines conjuring simultaneously a topographical map and chart of oceanographic currents. The ambiguous depth of the picture plane evokes the ganzfeld effect of Turrell’s light installations. In this image, Turrell uses the language of abstraction, tone, line, and form to make the experience of atmosphere of his installation visible to non-participants.

In 1969, critic Doug Davis described his experience of the work for a review in Newsweek. “The facing wall,” he wrote,

is filled with triple auto images. A car passes outside, to begin with, and its shadow, extended like some surrealist droodle, glides softly across the wall, followed by more images, gliding one after the other, and thanks to the mirrored complexity of the intersection at Main and Hill, each image is different, tinged with color from a different neon sign or traffic light outside.⁹

Davis effectively conjures an image of a technicolor shadow play orchestrated by Santa Monica itself. The radiant urban infrastructure conducting its own visual symphony within the darkened artist studio. Yet, what is a droodle? Although somewhat similar to a doodle, a droodle is in fact an abstract visual riddle, usually solved via a humorous caption. Popularized by the humorist Roger Price in 1953, these puzzles appeared in the comics sections of American newspapers throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In an example, a small central circle is surrounded by four slightly off-kilter rectangles. (Figure 3) The game asks viewers to reorient their perceptions, to creatively propose a situation that might be represented by these shapes. In the example I have given, according to the published caption, we have four elephants examining an orange. While Doug Davis names the sources of the light effects he describes, by invoking the droodle he reveals that the light phenomena themselves are more abstract, distorted, removed from their direct referent. Despite this abstraction, the comparison to the droodle reveals a desire to decipher these shapes of light. They are at once subjective sensory experiences and real elements of the built environment, connecting environmental-perceptual revelation both inside and outside the work of art.

Turrell scholar Craig Adcock describes the Mendota Stoppages as “Turrell’s first efforts to establish direct relationships between inside and outside spaces.”¹⁰ He argues that the perceptual and environmental in this installation are deeply intertwined. Turrell’s use of increasingly dim and subtle abstractions served to hone participants’ perception, to allow them to notice the spaces around them which they would otherwise often ignore. Adcock claims that Turrell “abstracted the light in the urban environment around his studio just enough to draw viewers’ attention to it.”¹¹ Adcock makes this point even more explicit when he writes that by

opening the building up to outside light sources — streetlamps, traffic signals, passing vehicles —Turrell involved his viewers in looking at aspects of the urban environment that they normally ignored while simultaneously persuading them to pay attention to the working of their own perceptual systems.¹²

While Adcock’s interpretation underscores the call for a general environmental awareness in Turrell’s work, critic Doug Davis, in his October 1969 review of the Mendota Stoppages for Newsweek, clarifies the specifically environmentalist implications of this awareness. Intriguingly and presciently listed under the title “Environment as Medium” in the issue’s table of contents,¹³ Davis’s review argued that

Turrell has broadened the very definition of media by making the electric environment around his storefront perform. In so doing, he tunes his audiences into their environment, making them aware, just as the latest report on air pollution does, of the space around them.¹⁴

The Mendota Stoppages make the surrounding environment newly available to the senses. In Davis’s words, Turrell tunes participants into their environment. In the same breath, Davis mentions that contemporary reports on air pollution promote the same kind of awareness. Both James Turrell’s artworks and reports on air pollution alert participants to the previously invisible condition of their surroundings. Turrell makes the experience of existing in an environment palpable, through both reference to personal perception and the urban surround. For Davis, as perhaps for other participants, this unique concatenation of abstract sensory stimulation and urban surroundings brought previously imperceptible environmental conditions into view in a manner akin to, but undoubtedly more experiential than, reading a report on smog in the newspaper.

Finally, in a 1969 interview with curator Alan Solomon, Turrell himself made the connection between the increased environmental awareness fostered by his installations and the crisis of smog gripping Los Angeles. Turrell explained his motivations for working with perception as follows:

It isn’t too much different for me than say…you’re looking at something like smog… if people were sensitive to fresh air, to what their particular perceptual capabilities were, they wouldn’t stand for a lot of things that they stand for. … We’ve almost created an environment that we can’t live in anymore, as far as the spaces we live in that we use, that we inhabit, and that we work in, the air that we breathe, and the noise that we live with.¹⁵

Smog, for Turrell, was in part a perceptual problem. He argued that if people could only become more aware of their senses, more attentive to their surroundings, they would find pollution intolerable. Turrell claims that we have created an environment in which we can no longer live; yet we have become used to, and desensitized to, this unlivability. It seems as if Turrell, in 1969, hoped to use his experiments with perception to re-sensitize his participants, so that they would notice the air, water, and noise pollution that surrounded them.

Given this situated reading of the Mendota Stoppages, let us return to City of Ahritit and its original installation in Turrell’s solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1976. This piece also used exterior lighting sources to create its perceptual effects. Each chamber was fitted with a large rectangular window through which sunlight flowed to illuminate each chamber. The catalog for the exhibition indicates that Turrell fitted each window with a translucent piece of fabric to even out the intensity of the light, and different color of tissue paper screens — blue, violet, red, and green — to tint the light entering each room. The catalog goes on to note that the “intensity of the colored light depends on the time of day, the time of year, the passing clouds, in short, on weather.”¹⁶ In this installation as well, Turrell’s abstract perceptual effects were directly tied to the actual environment in which they were situated. Noticing subtle shifts in color and illumination is at one and the same time noticing subtle shifts in the larger environment, even explicitly named weather. Later sources even report that “in the first chamber, the light was pale green because it reflected off a lawn; in the second, it was pale red because it reflected off a brick wall.”¹⁷ If this is in fact the case, it serves as another example of the close connection between perceiving light inside Turrell’s installation and perceiving ones’ environment outside the installation.

If, today, theorists such as Mirezoff and Horn recognize perception as a key tool in understanding our experience of the Anthropocene, James Turrell also recognized the valence of perception in his own experience of Los Angeles Smog. The works discussed here are closely tied to their historical context, to the Smog crisis in 1970s Los Angeles. Yet they are also surprisingly contemporary. Their elucidation of environment and atmosphere remains revelatory. Perhaps this is because the experience of being within an environment takes place in the present tense for each of the participants in these experiential works. If in their original installations in the 1970s these pieces led to an increased awareness of air pollution, today in their many contemporary iterations and re-installations, they may lead not only to an increased awareness of current global climate catastrophes, but also the long history and development of these crises throughout the twentieth century.