Seeing Heaven From a Hole : James Turrell is working to turn an extinct volcano into an art piece that functions as a very special observatory : James Turrell

“I like sites that have no function and are only inhabited by consciousness,” says James Turrell, the California artist who has spent more than a decade at work on a massive environmental artwork that may stand as the ultimate cathedral of consciousness upon completion in 1994.

Transforming Rodan Crater, the cinder cone of an extinct volcano at the edge of Arizona’s Painted Desert, so that it functions as a natural observatory and all-purpose “focusing device,” Turrell is creating an artwork of unprecedented scale and subtlety. And though his name rarely appears in the popular press, this driven visionary and his beloved volcano are legendary within the art world.

“My work is about making people aware that light isn’t something that reveals, so much as it itself is the revelation,” says Turrell, a 46-year-old artist who first made a name for himself in the late ‘60s with installations employing light to explore perceptual phenomena. Enhancing one’s awareness of space and time is the essential function of the crater Turrell purchased in 1977 for $64,000, and even with the bulk of the construction yet to be done, visitors can have that experience now simply by laying down in its bowl and gazing up at the sky. When it’s completed, however, Rodan Crater will offer several exotic variations on this theme.

Those who make the pilgrimage to the crater, which is 50 miles northeast of Flagstaff, Ariz., will park their cars three miles from the 500,000-year-old volcano, then follow a curved footpath leading to the mountain that houses the crater itself. When the project is completed, no more than four people will inhabit the site at a given time, and visitors will be encouraged to stay for no less than 24 hours in order to witness at least one cycle of celestial events.

Visitors will travel through a 1,035-foot tunnel leading from the outside base of the crater to its bowl, which has been shaped to accentuate celestial vaulting (a phenomenon that makes the sky appear to form a domed ceiling overhead). They will visit several carved-out chambers built into the banked walls of the volcano that will be attuned to specific astronomical occurrences.

The “Eastern Space,” for instance, will be geared toward sunrises, while the “Southern Space” will be shot with sun in the afternoons. Other enclosures will function like pinhole cameras, causing images of planetary alignments to appear on the walls, or will focus on specific atmospheric conditions. Once every 18.6 years, the moon will be in perfect alignment with the opening of the tunnel.

With visitors encouraged to spend at least 24 hours at the site, Rodan Crater must feature living quarters, and the project also includes plans for an airplane hangar, a planetarium, a museum to house other works by Turrell and a visitors’ center with a library.

The price tag for this dauntingly ambitious art center is a surprisingly modest $3.2 million. Thus far, Turrell has raised all the funds himself, with $204,000 coming in the form of a MacArthur Grant in 1984, which ran out last year. The Skystone Foundation, an organization he formed in 1983 to administrate the crater, received $75,000. Money from the DIA Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim grant have also been devoured by the crater.

Turrell and a crew largely composed of volunteers have spent the past 10 years on research, surveying, fund-raising and sculpting the crater bowl.

“Even though I’d like to lose myself in actually just working on the piece, I constantly have to be thinking about generating more funds. We’re gearing up for the big push now,” says the artist, bouncing down the long stretch of unpaved road leading to the crater.

Apparently not the least bit fazed by the enormity of the undertaking, he adds: “I’ve never once regreted taking this project on, nor have I ever felt discouraged because I paced myself for the long haul.”

A graceful, soft-spoken man with a surprisingly wacky sense of humor and the seductive voice of a deejay, Turrell is simultaneously a highly original and sensitive thinker and a little boy enchanted with his arsenal of gigantic toys.

Much of the equipment used on the crater was bought at sales of used military goods, and Turrell lovingly restores every piece to perfection. Supporting himself on and off for years by restoring vintage planes, Turrell has also worked as an air cartographer and pilot, and his approach to art making has been largely shaped by endless hours spent poking around the heavens in airplanes.

“I’ve always been interested in using light as a way to mark perception,” he recalls. “I can remember being acutely aware of light as a kid and lying on my bed staring at the plays of light on the ceiling. As a child I was also impressed by the writings of St. Exupery. He was a pilot and his books opened up a whole world to me.”

Born in Pasadena, Turrell is the son of an aeronautical engineer. After graduating from Pomona College in 1965 with a degree in perceptual psychology, he studied art at UC Irvine, then graduated with a master’s degree in art from Claremont in 1973.

Coming of age amid the spiritual idealism of the ‘60s, Turrell has centered his work on the themes of light, perception and self-knowledge. Credited as being one of the pioneers of California light and space art, he had his first one-man show in Los Angeles in 1967 at the age of 24, then didn’t have another major show here for 18 years. (One of Turrell’s light pieces from 1970, “Stuck,” is currently on view at the Ace Gallery.)

Though Rodan Crater seems a rather far-flung idea, it makes perfect sense in light of Turrell’s history, and is an ambitious outgrowth of everything he has done.

“I’m interested in painting, but I’m not interested in being a painter because the way I see it, there are enough antiques,” says Turrell.

“I’d rather set up an experience than tell you a story because a direct experience is always more powerful than a secondhand recounting of one. We’re just crustaceans who live in shells called cars and buildings, and I’m interested in the idea of shells that open meaningfully onto the spaces outside rather than just having a window cut for a view.

“I suppose my work does have certain affinities with Eastern philosophy,” adds Turrell, who likens Rodan Crater to a Japanese garden in that he intends that it merge into nature rather than appear man-made. “But I am an American artist, and this piece is about spaces and colors that don’t exist anywhere but in the West.

“It’s really beautiful out here,” says Turrell, gazing appreciately at the late afternoon landscape. “I was flying across here at just this time of day when I first saw the crater, and it really stood out to me as the one.”

As if on cue, Rodan Crater comes into view. Turrell spent every day for seven months (and the money from a Guggenheim grant on aviation fuel) flying from Canada to Mexico and from the western slopes of the Rockies to the Pacific Coast in search of the proper site for his piece, and it’s easy to see why he settled on Rodan Crater.

One of 273 craters in the San Francisco Volcanic Field (extinct since the late Pleistocene Era), Rodan Crater stands out as a remarkably sensual and compelling geologic formation. With the Painted Desert’s muted symphony of yellow and pink forming a backdrop on the remote horizon, Rodan Crater appears at this distance to be a soft, perfectly formed mound colored in deep shades of burgundy, brown and black.

“When I first saw this from the sky I was struck by its position off by itself, its form, and the fact that it’s much more colorful than the surrounding craters,” Turrell explains. “It was love at first sight I guess.”

With 20 more minutes of driving and two locked gates behind us, we arrive at the crater and begin to trudge up its side. As is Turrell’s intention, there’s no evidence that this is an artwork in progress; after he reshaped the crater, its natural vegetation was carefully restored.

“We have a staff of six, but most of the work is done with contractors,” he explains. “We do the plumbing ourselves, but all the earth moving is done with contractors except for the restorative work, which we do. Some of the work is done by students from two local universities and the surveying is mostly done by our crew and student volunteers.”

Having to hire heavy construction crews, Turrell encounters a fair amount of skepticism as to the feasibility of his undertaking, but he takes the naysayers in stride.

“I was looking for a space with a perfectly symmetrical rim that would shape the sky, and though this crater came close to doing that, it didn’t do it completely,” he recalls. “So, I contracted a crew to finish shaping the rim and we wound up having to move over 200,000 cubic yards of earth before the effect I was after began to happen. When I first hired this heavy equipment crew--and believe me, these guys are not exactly operagoers--I told them they might think they were moving earth but in fact they were shaping the sky. They said, ‘Yeah, sure, just tell us where you want the dirt moved.’ A few days go by and at that point I’m into $18,000 worth of earthwork and nothing was happening.

“I began to wonder what I was doing out here and self-doubt was really beginning to creep in--then finally, it began to happen. . . . You could see the difference in the shape of the sky. It was a pretty terrific moment when these guys got down off their Cats and first looked up and saw it.”

Cresting the rim of the crater, we walk to the center of the bowl, lay down and look up--and yes, it does work. Gazing up from this symmetrical bowl joining earth and sky, one’s depth perception is altered, and the sky takes on the appearance of a perfectly curved dome; you experience a strong sense of being “in” something, even though you’re surrounded by open, empty space. Turrell probably has had this experience more than a thousand times, yet he seems utterly enchanted.

“Our cities put out so much light at night for protection that we’ve overlit the atmosphere to the point that we can’t see the stars or the universe,” he muses as he stares into the sky. “Even though light pollution isn’t high on the list of ecology problems, I think it has an enormous impact because it warps our perception of the universe we feel ourselves a part of.”

Later that evening over dinner, Turrell and a pilot friend of his, Rod Hill, swap stories about particularly crazy pilots they have known and talk a bit about a project they’re working on. Turrell is currently collaborating with Hill in an attempt to take a glider higher than it has ever been taken before--a complex undertaking requiring endless preparation. Clearly, there’s more to life than Rodan Crater for Turrell, who maintains an active exhibition schedule in the United States and Europe (the Europeans are wild about Turrell and his crater). Rodan Crater has been the consuming passion of Turrell’s life thus far, but he envisions a day when he will part ways with his magic mountain.

“Eventually we want to place it with an institution, but a lot of places don’t want a white elephant they’ll have to put money into,” Turrell says of his long-range plans for the piece. “How many people it will accommodate has been a bone of contention in our attempts to get funding, and that may be a problem when we attempt to place it. Personally, I’d like it to be a fairly one-on-one experience, and though I want it to be available to anyone who’s interested, I also want to preserve the experience--because this isn’t about looking at a sculptural work, it’s something that requires a bit of time.

“I’m also not interested in hanging around and hosting it for the rest of my life. My job is done at the opening and it might be a relief to walk away from it at that point.”

Asked to summarize what Rodan Crater means for him, he slowly replies: “I’m not interested in optical phenomena or the technical aspects of the piece. The work I do isn’t about that--my work is about looking at the world. I don’t presume to tell you how to look at the world, but artists do offer tips and give you a vantage on the world. Rodan Crater is a vantage.”