James Turrell

 JAMES TURRELL

Sustaining Light, 2007

Wood, computerized neon setting, glass piece

Aperture: 62 1/4 x 46 1/2 inches (158.1 x 118.1 cm)

Everyone's been talking about the James Turrell exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, getting all giddy with excitement in their explaining of it. I can now understand why.  It's incredible. Today, the last day,  through nothing short of a gloriously unexpected miracle (given how many times i've tried to book a slot) i managed  to get one of the coveted spots in Bindu Shards (2010), the immersive light installation experience. You enter the lunar-esque space pod (below) like it was an MRI scanner - flat on your back and slid in by the 'laboratory assistants' who ask if you'd like the hard of soft experience. i went for the invigoratingly hard as oppose to the blissed out soft experience, which they informed me meant being surrounded by coloured strobe lighting effects. The experience, which lasted about 10 minutes, and which you do all alone, is a bit like being inside a piece of op art - a Bridget Riley, say - or like wandering round a technicolour, throbbing M.C.Escher print crossed with Antony Gormley's Blind Light. Patterns of colour converge and diverge around you. it's wholly enveloping, like being at the epicentre of a kaleidoscope. the colours which flash seem not so much to be around you as within you - inside your eyes. it's not really like seeing. it's like being. being transformed into light that has shape and pattern and a perspective that pulsates rather than being visible upon a surface. It is one of the most extraordinary experiences i've ever had.

 James Turrell, Gagosian Gallery