A couple weeks ago, I visited the MoMA PS1 museum in Queens, NY. I went with a friend who was writing about an artist’s exhibition there and knew nothing about the museum beforehand. We entered the museum and went up to the second floor, where my friend examined the exhibition. After about an hour or so, we decided to go up to the third floor. It looked nearly empty. We even wondered if we were allowed to be there. However, we noticed a door with a sign that said “James Turrell. Meeting. 1980-86/2016.” We opened the door and entered a “cube” of sorts. It was completely silent, almost eerily silent. It was a relatively small space; probably enough to fit 20 people max. Each wall had a large wooden bench to sit on. The walls above it were plain and painted white. The ceiling had a large square cut-out displaying an unobstructed view of the sky. There were about 4 other people in the installation with us, none of them speaking a word. There was almost a mutual understanding that this space was to be contemplated in silence. I was immediately reminded of Vincenzo Natali’s Cube, in which 6 strangers meet in a cube and try to escape. So, when I entered Turrell’s “Meeting” room, it almost felt as if I was in the film. However, I lacked the desire to escape. In fact, it almost felt like I was set in the last scene in the film in which Kazan escapes the cube and walks into the light. But before that, there’s a sort of contemplation that happens with David Hewlett’s character, Worth. He stares into the light, frozen in place, with a look of fear and awe. I finished the film, wondering why Worth wouldn’t have taken the chance to escape the cube when he could.
I took the picture linked above of a lady sitting across from me who reminded me of this final moment. She was already in the installation when we walked in and she was writing something in a notebook. Every once in a while she would look up at the skylight with a similar contemplation. Sometimes she would glance at the ceiling for upwards of 5 minutes straight. The light is the most important aspect here. It serves as a symbol and a theme in both Turrell’s installation and in Natali’s Cube. Turrell said in an interview that he wanted people to value light. He stated that people don’t value light itself, they value the objects highlighted by light.
You don’t realize the power that light has until you are forced to look at it and observe the way it changes a space. The ending of Cube was initially very underwhelming for me. The reveal of the bright light held no significance to me. In fact, I initially felt that it was quite contrived. However, after experiencing James Turrell’s Meeting, I realized that it wasn’t what was beyond the light that was important, it was the light itself. You don’t realize how significant light is until you are confronted by it. And because I noticed the contemplation in both the attendees of the installation and in Worth at the end of the movie, I now have a better understanding of what it means to notice something we seem to take advantage of every day: light.
Here are a couple more photos I took in the installation:
Nathan Hughes Blog 