James Turrell’s Roden Crater

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Site plan of Roden Crater

Although I only learned about the Roden Crater a few weeks ago, this large earthwork has been installation and land artist James Turrell‘s major project since 1974.  His works typically include creating spaces and sensory experiences through an almost tactile manipulation of artificial and natural light. The Roden Crater, an extinct volcano near Flagstaff, Arizona, is being subtly reshaped and fitted with underground tunnels and rooms, some carved with “skyscapes” (openings that frame and seem to shape the sky). This ambitious project is still under construction, and few people have seen it outside models, drawings, and photographs. Turrell has stated that he wants to link visitors with the celestial movements of planets, stars, and distant galaxies, saying: “In this stage set of geologic time, I wanted to make spaces that engage with celestial events in light so that the spaces performed a ‘music of the spheres’ in light.” A lot could be said about this project, but I’m particularly struck by the way the site as a whole resembles an eye.

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Roden Crater

The artist has also said: “Roden Crater has knowledge in it and it does something with that knowledge. Environmental events occur; a space lights up. Something happens in there, for a moment, or for a time. It is an eye, something that is in itself perceiving.” With the latter comment in mind, I think it is fascinating to consider how light and knowledge are connected to the eye and the gaze. The crater is in part a naked-eye observatory, on a scale that puts it in dialogue with the heavens even as it reverses the traditional gaze of the all-seeing eye of the Judeo-Christian God who looks down on earth. In art history, this notion has been represented by a tradition of God as a disembodied Eye. From the medieval period onward the eye of God was invoked to represent all-seeing divinity and the Holy Trinity. A form of this symbol where the eye is enclosed in a triangle, often called the Eye of Providence, proliferated and was repurposed during the Enlightenment for secular, man-made knowledge. The power of the much-used symbol stems from the privileging of vision and its association with knowledge. Regardless of whether an eye was literally present, the implicit gaze of religious art in both Western and Eastern Orthodox traditions has been a divine, watching one.

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Crater’s Eye Plaza

Considering the power structures implicit in the gaze (at the Roden Crater, a man-made and God-like eye on earth staring up to the heavens) is fascinating not just historically but in today’s surveillance-prevalent society. Ancient monuments such as the Incan and Egyptian pyramids, which Turrell cites as an influence, were scaled for a privileged aerial viewpoint that once belonged only to God. Historically this privileged view became accessible to man through maps, which were once valuable luxury items. Now the aerial view is available to society en masse courtesy of Google Maps and Google Views, reinforcing Foucault’s notion of the surveillance society. While Turrell might seem to be creating a monument along ancient lines, contemporary societies’ changed relation to the aerial view complicates this understanding.

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East Portalt

While the site itself features tunnels, rooms, viewing stations, and the crater’s eye plaza already, as well as a small guest house nearby, Turrell is still working on the project. He is 71 years old, and it is unclear whether the project will be finished in his own lifetime. Once it is open, visitors will be restricted to small numbers at a time, but I for one would certainly love a chance to walk through and experience this strange modern megalith.

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Crater’s Eye

 

Ancient Greeks as Colorists

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Colored replica, Vinzenz Brinkmann & Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, 2003

The Ancient Greeks painted their sculptures and temples, preferring a decorated surface to the pristine marble.  “If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect / The way you would wipe color off a statue”  is a quote by Helen of Troy in lines written by Euripides in 412 B.C., as cited in this Smithsonian article on new color replicas of Ancient Greek statues. It highlights how colors were seen as beautifying agents. One of these new replicas, pictured, is of Artemis, the Goddess of Hunt (the so-called Peplos Kore) from the Athenian Acropolis. Somehow the paint brings the stature very much into life, rendering it more naturalistic and less stiff. Traces of red, blue, yellow, and green pigments have survived in the hair, eyes, belt, and garment of the original figure. Recent examinations in extreme side light have revealed further painted decoration. Thus a new and spectacular interpretation has been made possible through the examination of the pigments. 

 

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The color reconstruction of the original Greek marble statue, executed ca. 520 B.C., allows one to imagine how different the Acropolis itself would look if painted. The white pillars, cornices, and roof–not to mention all the sculptural reliefs–would have stood out all the more to the viewer’s eyes below. Today, this bright and bold mix of colors might seem garish to modern taste. Since the Renaissance, the tradition of bare marble was respected in statuary because it was a presumably classical tradition. Although evidence exited to the contrary, of the first art historians Winkleman wrote influentially about whiteness as being the most beautiful. There were people who took exception based on historical evidence, but they were largely overruled until recent scholarship. Although incontrovertibly accepted today that much of the surfaces of temples and statuary would have been decorated, it still requires a mental adjustment to imagine colorful Classical structures.

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However, even with accurate reconstruction based on analysis of pigment traces, I wonder if the Ancient Greeks saw the colors the same way as we do today. Radiolab did a wonderful podcast on colors, and the last section focused on Homer, the author of the Illiad and the Odyssey who presumably lived 200 or 300 years prior to the Peplos Kore and other Acropolis buildings. Those two epic poems display strange conceptions of colors, such as a wine-dark sea and wine-colored oxen, and violet sheep and iron. The poems never refer to trees or leaves as green, but call honey and faces pale with fear green. It suggests to some scholars, who did further analysis, that ancient Greeks saw fewer colors. That is, they literally distinguished fewer colors of the rainbow even though their eyes received the same information that ours do today. Complementary linguistic evidence suggests that worldwide people first only saw black and white, followed by red, and then yellow and green. Blue was always last.  Homer lived in a time where he presumably only saw black, white, red, some green and yellows, but no blue. The blue that later appeared on the painted marbles of the Acropolis is called Egyptian blue today, because the expensive pigment was imported from Egypt. But what would it have looked like to Homer?

 

Would the colorfully painted Acropolis and other painted Greek marble perhaps been seen as less colorful by the original viewers despite the careful research to duplicate the original colors? Perhaps the painted decoration would have seemed much more muted, or otherwise different, than recreations seem to us. It’s impossible to know, but the idea that the ancient Greeks might have seen color differently certainly ought to affect how we consider art objects from the past.