APERTURE 1: PINPOINTS OF LIGHT

Some commentators have linked Turrell's prolific use of light as a medium for art to his biography. He was born in 1943. His father was an aeronautical engineer, and his mother's family were Quakers. As a child, he was told “what to do at a Quaker meeting: ‘Go inside and greet the light.’” He became “fascinated by light's physical presence” and “laboriously pricked holes in the blackout curtains in his bedroom, to simulate the stars and constellations during the daytime.”Footnote ¹¹ At summer camp in Newport Beach, he would wake up before dawn on clear mornings to venture outside by himself and watch the sunrise. Turrell enjoyed the way the light hit the water and land at dawn, the sky and bay growing pink before the sun appeared.Footnote ¹² He studied perceptual psychology at Pomona College with Paul C. Vitz, an experimental psychologist whose work focussed on information processing and human orientation and response.Footnote ¹³

Turrell's art practice developed after college. An early piece, Afrum (White), projected light to create the form of a white box floating partway up a corner of the gallery walls. It tricked the eyes: was the box concave or convex? Was it flat or three-dimensional? Did it have mass? “To form an experience,” the young artist said, “you don't need glass or canvas. Nor do you have to consume space.” Turrell told the newspapers that “afrum” referred to his medium – “simply light,” the Boston Globe reported in 1968.Footnote ¹⁴ While Turrell's work played with materiality – one critic has written that Turrell “dematerializes the medium to create works of art as effervescent as the act of apprehension itself” – it also came to be in conversation with other modern artists, echoing minimalists like Donald Judd and Richard Serra.Footnote ¹⁵ During his career, which has spanned many decades, Turrell became known for white as well as bright colored rectangular light pieces that sometimes intervene in the gallery space to create optical illusions, and, later on, skylights and underground chambers that frame the viewer's field of vision. Much of Turrell's work blurs the line between sculpture and architecture. Use of light as a medium as well as interest in the perception of the viewer have remained constants.

An important and sometimes overlooked aspect of Turrell's early biography is his engagement with politics. Turrell registered as a conscientious objector in the 1960s and was jailed for political activity. Objector status was common for Quakers, who opposed war on religious grounds, but Turrell had stopped going to Quaker meetings in his teens (it was not until the early 2000s that he began going to meetings again as an “‘un-lapsed’ Quaker”).Footnote ¹⁶ Turrell's stance was more political, especially since he did not stop at his own objection: the FBI arrested him in 1966 during a sting at UC Irvine for coaching other young men to resist the draft. Turrell rarely speaks of these actions or consequences, and even then only reluctantly – “sometimes you can be so naïve as to think that your own self-righteousness will carry the day,” he told one interviewer.Footnote ¹⁷ “Everything I was accused of I had done and more,” he told another. “I love those bumper stickers that say ‘Question Authority,’ but you know, authority's going to answer.”Footnote ¹⁸ Though he took some meaningful actions in a charged political atmosphere, Turrell later remembered the story as part of his “spiritual journey, which has had its up and downs, to say the least.” Couching politics in terms of spirituality after the fact has helped to diminish the forcefulness of Turrell's political actions and their importance to historians of art. It has also functioned to build a level of ambiguity into his politics.

Furthering this ambiguity, Turrell also worked as a pilot with an air transport agency contracted by the CIA. For much of 1960 and 1961, just out of high school, he reportedly “flew small planes into Tibet and brought out Buddhist monks who had been involved in the revolt against China's puppet regime.”Footnote ¹⁹ The source base here is limited, for Turrell rarely discusses the experience. “I'd just rather leave those things out,” he responded when art critic Calvin Tomkins questioned him in recent years specifically about the claims.Footnote ²⁰ Again, the artist refuses an easy political narrative and builds political ambiguity into his public image. Yet his actions suggest that an antiwar stance did not preclude him from involvement with the US security establishment.

Instead of focussing on politics, Turrell often tells his own story in terms of spirituality, as above, and also as a set of physical experiences with light. He has stated that in prison he would purposefully be put into solitary, where “they make it extremely dark” as punishment. But he reports,

He had similar experiences in airplanes, after learning to fly at sixteen and working as a crop duster and mail deliverer in the San Joaquin Valley, in addition to his CIA missions.Footnote ²² “I have a whole book of illusions that happen to pilots,” Turrell later said, “especially … in a turn, and where there are changes in terrain that may not be read as changes in terrain, and … may set up an illusionary quality.”Footnote ²³ The descriptions demonstrate Turrell trading political meaning for physical, psychological, and spiritual narrative. Instead of dissent, prison represented a way to experiment with light and space; instead of complicity with the American war machine, CIA missions were one more way to witness sensory illusions. Turrell's rhetorical economy of light and space as he interacted with the American state suggests broader political meaning in his sensory experimentation and artwork.

Turrell found an opportune venue to continue his experiments with light and perception in the Art & Technology program. Maurice Tuchman, the young new curator of LACMA and so-called “bad boy of the arts,” had only Recently moved to Southern California from the Bronx and was struck by the differences.Footnote ²⁴ There was a palpable presence of aerospace and other industrial technology companies in Los Angeles, many of which had flourished during World War II and continued to undergird the military complex into the Cold War, especially through space travel. LA also had the cinema and television industry. “A newcomer to this region,” he wrote in the final project report, “is particularly sensitive to the futuristic character of Los Angeles, especially as it is manifested in advanced technology.”Footnote ²⁵

Many artists also identified with the sense of futurism. The 1960s, a time of prolific artistic exploration, were pivotal in putting LA on the cultural map, as it transitioned from a city with few modern art museums and galleries to a world-class cosmopolitan art center. A key component of the scene's sense of liberation was from art history. “One of the advantages of growing up in California is that you're not under pressure to repeat the past,” Turrell later said.Footnote ²⁶ He was often disappointed by actual European paintings that he had seen on slides growing up: he “would sometimes feel that they were not very luminous.” Turrell's identification with a kind of California exceptionalism seemed to exempt him from historical time. It suggests the feelings that he and other artists had of being situated on the cusp of a visionary future rather than a static, heavy, or homogeneous past. Robert Irwin, another artist who would collaborate with Turrell during A&T, said that Los Angeles was “nowhere, it's nothing, it's superficial, it ... has no architecture, no history,” but this made it “a good place for me to be because the way I was functioning was really ... about what were ... the possibilities.”Footnote ²⁷ The futurism that nullified the past was a modernist proposition shared between artists and the aerospace industry operating in a shared regional space.

Turrell's preoccupation with light emanated from his experiences in the environments of southern California, especially its clear sunrises and shining ocean coast. His experience with light would soon attach to another set of spaces more related to the American military establishment: industrial plastics and metals, aerospace warehouses, and sensory-deprivation chambers that cut off outside light and encouraged inner bursts of luminescence.

APERTURE 2: DARKNESS AS DEPRIVATION

The Art & Technology program promoted the reputation of Los Angeles as a new center of art. Coming on the heels of LACMA opening the doors to its new facilities in 1965 and making use of the energy of a new curator and an experimental artistic culture, the program created residencies. It placed artists in corporations in the aerospace and entertainment industry, in which they were paired with corporate engineers, scientists, and industrial resources. A&T was “an experiment,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “in what happens when ranking art-creative minds run free through the knowledge and facilities of rich, sophisticated industry.”Footnote ²⁸ By late 1967, Tuchman had contacted over 250 companies, thirty-seven of which joined the program in varied ways. They included IBM, Lockheed Aircraft, Universal City Studios, the RAND Corporation, Twentieth Century Fox, General Electric, the Hewlett-Packard Company, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Litton Industries, North American Rockwell, and the Garrett Corporation, which allowed access to corporate personnel and materials and contributed financially.Footnote ²⁹

While Los Angeles has long been known for its entertainment industry, southern California has also been called the “aerospace capital of the world.”Footnote ³⁰ According to historian Peter J. Westwick, scholars cite reasons as diverse as the weather, civic boosterism, local universities, the labor market, military facilities, and culture. The region saw the beginnings of airplane experimentation and manufacture during the early twentieth century, and it transitioned from an already thriving aircraft manufacture industry in the 1920s to a “network of vast plants” by World War II. The rise of jet engines and travel, as well as the space race, boosted the industry at the height of the Cold War, which prompted many airplane manufacturers to also make spacecraft, and which spawned the term “aerospace.”Footnote ³¹ In the century after the International Aviation Meet occurred for the first time in Los Angeles in 1910, the aircraft and aerospace industries, Westwick writes, “transformed Southern California from a collection of quiet agricultural groves into a sprawling high-tech nexus on the Pacific Rim.”Footnote ³² Millions of people moved to southern California during the twentieth century for aerospace jobs, and the regional population doubled between 1920 and 1940, and again from 1940 to 1960.Footnote ³³ The Garrett Corporation, where Turrell would do his A&T residency, followed a trajectory similar to that of the region it called home. Founded in Los Angeles in the 1930s, it expanded production of airplane engines, turbines, circuit controllers, and mechanical switches during World War II and then became a Cold War aerospace contractor for the US government. Garrett was known for “environmental control systems” at high altitude for corporate aircraft and, later, for spacecraft.Footnote ³⁴ Aerospace contractors also formed part of the larger “military–industrial complex” of which Eisenhower had warned. Lockheed Martin, for example, became the largest military contractor in the United States by producing aircraft, munitions, and spy satellites, and even working on the Star Wars missile defense system.Footnote ³⁵ Such multifunctional companies received massive Pentagon contracts for their work.

Even though many of the companies were military subcontractors – what art critic Max Kozloff later deemed a “rogue's gallery of the violence industries,” a characterization explored more below – many press reports saw the collaboration in cheery terms.Footnote ³⁶ Art and corporate innovation could be mutually beneficial, Business Week argued, through a “catalytic effect” on each other's ideas, and the program also offered a marketing function, a “chance to show the public a new facet of modern industry.” As one executive put it, “today's industrial technology is an art form in itself.”Footnote ³⁷

There was no shortage of artists who wanted to participate: over seventy people joined in some capacity. Many were or would become big names. They included John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol. Where LA artists often drew inspiration from the natural world, many of those from New York were edgier. “California minimalism,” Tomkins wrote, “with its bright colors and hand-polished surfaces, was putting a sunnier spin on the somber industrial artifacts of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and their minimalist peers in New York.”Footnote ³⁸ Some commentators noted that the list of artists was in fact more representative of New York.Footnote ³⁹ The A&T program also had connections to a contemporary project on the east coast, Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), which sponsored a similar set of works at the intersection between the worlds of visual art and industrial technology.Footnote ⁴⁰

Despite its star-studded program and financial resources, A&T famously encountered problems even as it started. Chief among them was a clash between the artists and their corporate hosts. Claes Oldenberg refused to sign his contract and exchanged haughty letters with Tuchman about compensation. Jean Dubuffet wrote that he would not submit to payment “corresponding to the cost of my cigarettes.”Footnote ⁴¹ John Chamberlain, known for his twisted metal sculptures created from old automobiles, worked at the RAND Corporation, where he screened an erotic film he had shot in Mexico and earned the ire of the think tank employees in a set of subversive actions.Footnote ⁴² In one instance, Chamberlain distributed a memo to “Everyone at Rand” asking “for ANSWERS. Not questions!” “An artist in residence is a waste of time,” one reply read. “… YOU HAVE A BEAUTIFUL SENSE OF COLOR AND A WARPED, TRASHY IDEA OF WHAT BEAUTY AND TALENT IS,” said another.Footnote ⁴³ Observers at the time framed such conflicts as part of a larger clash between artists and corporate executives – what one critic called “shaggy versus close-cropped.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Yet Turrell would find partners who also wanted to explore questions that he had about perception. This was no surprise coming from the other artist who shared the same residency, Robert Irwin, who was older and more experienced. Born in 1928 in Long Beach, Irwin served in the US Army in Europe at the end of World War II. He then started off as a painter in the 1950s but soon became preoccupied with the delimiting nature of canvas. Irwin moved to painting discs in the 1960s and eventually left behind the medium entirely in favor of sculpture. Turrell has said that he and Irwin approached the same problem from “opposite sides”: Irwin wanted to “dematerialize physical objects into their light qualities,” while Turrell worked to “materialize light into its physical quality.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Turrell's art was also more grounded in scientific questions. After studying psychology at Pomona, Turrell had a working knowledge of perceptual psychology, behavioral science, and human sensory research,Footnote ⁴⁶ which interested Irwin, whose process was more intuitive. “It was as if each had found in the other an ideally complementary source of information,” the A&T report gushed.Footnote ⁴⁷

Beyond the A&T project, Irwin and Turrell were both participating in a new kind of artistic experimentation in Los Angeles that would come to be known as the Light and Space movement. Southern California artists were beginning to blur the boundaries of traditional media in the 1960s. Sculptors in particular used new synthetic materials and industrial processes and explored how art could be integrated into its surroundings through architectural interventions or near-invisible surfaces. Critics used the “Light and Space” denomination to describe the “perceptual environments” of Irwin, Turrell, and Doug Wheeler, as well as the sculptures of artists such as Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, and Helen Pashgian. These artists did not necessarily see themselves as part of a movement. Yet they formed a “community” that experimented with new plastics, resins, and perceptual interventions. Some scholars have seen their work as symptomatic of the unique environment of Los Angeles, with its many industries, new materials, and spaces to explore plastics, light, fog, smoke, and vapors.Footnote ⁴⁸ Almost a third of artists who proposed projects for A&T wanted to create light environments or sculptures.Footnote ⁴⁹ Their proposals testified to the opportunity that corporations, and especially the aerospace industry, presented for artists who wanted to use industrial facilities to experiment at various scales with synthetic materials.

In contrast to the clashes between some artists and their sponsors, Irwin and Turrell found a compatible benefactor in the Garrett Corporation. The artists went on a site visit and met scientist Edward C. Wortz, who later called their initial encounter “love at first sight.”Footnote ⁵⁰ LACMA reported it as “one of the most exciting and spontaneously productive occasions of its kind … during the entire course of A&T.”Footnote ⁵¹ Photographs in the Los Angeles Times and the LACMA report depicted the three men deep in conversation. Wortz directed the Life Sciences Division at Garrett, where he had worked since 1962. The scientist started out studying neurology in the 1950s, after which he moved to a human factors laboratory at Convair Aeronautics in 1957 and, later, Martin-Marietta Corporation, where his research focussed on transforming the Titan II from an ICBM to an environment dedicated to sustaining life in outer space. At Garrett, Wortz oversaw numerous NASA contracts awarded to the corporation as well as AiResearch (a research subsidiary) during the 1960s for the Gemini and Apollo programs. Wortz was a leading expert in aerospace medicine and human factors.Footnote ⁵² Tasked with designing the environments of manned spaceflights, he participated in a field expanding its purview during the 1960s from technical questions to psychological, theoretical, aesthetic, and spatial enquiry.Footnote ⁵³ Wortz was grappling with similar issues to the ones that the artists wanted to explore: psychology, space, perception, and light. They quickly signed on to work together.

The collaboration came at a moment in which NASA was attempting to adjust to public loss of interest in the exploration of outer space. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the rise of the environmental movement and subsequent anti-nuclear weapons crusade – partially inspired by the “Earthrise” photograph of 1968 – “turned against the space programme,” Robert Poole writes, “but they owed much of their early inspiration to its most important product: the image of the Earth.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Other historians point to a broader set of concerns. By the end of the 1960s, Kendrick Oliver argues, “mans’ adventures in the cosmos,” for many Americans, “represented a distraction from more important concerns: the war in Vietnam, the plight of the poor, inflation, the environment, and the state of the nation's cities.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Matthew Tribbe attributes decline in support for the American space program by the early 1970s to growing antirationalism. “By the early 1970s,” he writes, “when NASA should have been celebrating its triumph and proudly counseling other ambitious programs and organizations … it instead found itself facing an increasingly antagonistic cultural environment in which growing numbers of Americans began to contest rather than embrace the values and vision of progress the space program embodied.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Though some posit that the “space age,” which began with the Soviet Union's launch of sputnik in 1957, never ended, others see its definitive end point at the close of the 1960s.Footnote ⁵⁷ Turrell and Irwin thus entered their residency at Garrett during a time when the outer-space program searched for new meaning, even as the Vietnam War, on which Garrett also subcontracted, reached its apex.

At the Garrett Corporation, which worked on both military aircraft components and space travel, the artists grappled with the changed sensibility of physical existence that space travel engendered. Both artists worked with Wortz from November 1968 through the summer of 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon, planting an American flag in lunar soil. Irwin and Turrell have emphasized the bodily nature of Wortz's outer-space research by highlighting his role in studying “physiology for the walks on the moon” and teaching “astronauts to slow down their heart rate” that had increased due to the quick acceleration of early spacecraft.Footnote ⁵⁸ The LACMA report noted that Garrett Life Sciences Department “has done considerable research on the problem of actually walking on the moon,” considering “the astronaut's perceptions of space and perspective when he is near or on the lunar surface” and “what his physical and psychological tolerances are during various phases of his exertions.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The Garrett collaboration took up similar questions by focussing on scientific study of embodied experience and perception. Irwin's initial list of collaboration goals named spacecraft habitability even before he met Wortz. First on his list was “Space craft cabin/support environment,” for which he desired “investigations necessary to determine what perceptual awarenesses [sic] are necessary for basic orientation and stability.”Footnote ⁶⁰ What were sonic, visual, and tactile stimuli like in outer space? Irwin wanted to know about “natural environment noises for attention, sleep,” about orientation and the interior “space of capsule.” Materially, he asked, “how do they protect the men from the sound during liftoff?” He was interested in the human experience of aerospace technologies, which he linked to his preoccupations with light and air. Irwin's goals revealed an immediacy to the concern – it was not abstract or theoretical, but, rather, pragmatic and pressing. “We've been anxious to do experiments,” Turrell told the Los Angeles Times.Footnote ⁶¹

After the artists contracted with Garrett, they pursued their experiments closely in line with their planned research topics. Irwin, Turrell, and Wortz created a three-part schedule, with the first six months, beginning in January 1969, “devoted to development of overall perceptual thesis.” They would pursue this goal through research. The team devised twelve different types of experiment, which ranged from sensory deprivation to selective introduction of light and sound, to attempts at creating color–tone synesthesia; exploration of the tonal relationship to taste, spatial perception, and light; and the role of words. In practice, they focussed mostly on reactions to anechoic space across different time durations by testing the effect on about thirty to forty subjects at UCLA.Footnote ⁶² Turrell, Irwin, and Wortz also regularly participated in the experiments that they designed, especially through extended periods of sensory deprivation in the soundproof chamber. The team likewise worked with Ganzfelds: a “visual field in which there are no objects you can take hold of with your eye.” The illusion derives from its concave hemispheric shape and illumination. They experimented, too, with alpha conditioning – the attempt to create “certain measurable cycles of brain waves which have for some time been known to occur strongly during states of meditation.”Footnote ⁶³

The US military–industrial complex had relied in different ways on sensory deprivation, though it was of waning importance by the late 1960s. Sensory deprivation was important first to psychological and security concerns of the Cold War. Especially in the wake of the Korean War, historian Susan L. Carruthers shows, many people found the prospect of communist mind control “more terrifying than the threat of atomic annihilation.”Footnote ⁶⁴ These fears propelled research, much of it CIA-funded, into “behavioral modification.” Experiments began in the late 1940s and peaked in the mid-1950s, when, historian Rebecca Lemov writes, “key social-science initiatives and certain arms of the CIA consolidated and when a significant charter to extend the research into real-world situations went forward.” Many experiments ended (though not entirely) in the mid-1960s.Footnote ⁶⁵ The early experiments had included sensory deprivation as well as hypnosis, drugs, and, in some cases, extreme psychological duress.Footnote ⁶⁶ Art historians have linked chambers of the type that Wortz, Irwin, and Turrell utilized at UCLA to Korean War concerns about both “brainwashing” and “lapses in attention” under monotonous conditions, such as monitoring radar screens.Footnote ⁶⁷ While the artists likely knew of the scientific connections to “mind control” research, and certainly were aware of the “cultural fantasy” life of brainwashing (which played out mostly in literature and films), the full extent of CIA funding for this type of work was not revealed until the 1970s.Footnote ⁶⁸ Like the CIA, which had ended many of its behavioral experiments by the mid-1960s, NASA had little interest in psychological research by the late 1960s.Footnote ⁶⁹ Despite the waning focus on sensory deprivation and psychological experiments, the very technologies that the artists utilized in their Garrett Corporation residency were nonetheless materially imbricated with Cold War security and research, which tied their artistic fruits to the military–industrial complex in concrete ways.

The experiments and exhibition space that the artists planned aimed to appropriate these technologies for a more art-oriented goal: to make people perceive their own bodies. A sensory-deprivation structure would direct the viewer's attention to the “sounds of his own system, retinal color fields, etc.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Different chambers within the piece would then introduce selective stimuli, including sounds and changes in light quality, color temperature, intensity, and duration.Footnote ⁷¹ The team conceived of perceptual awareness in an extremely literal, physical way. Turrell's notes fixated on “getting them to look at their own eyeball (to look at their looking), and listening to their own ears.” He wanted the artist's statement for the exhibit to make it plain that the intention was “to bring you to an awareness of perception, of perceiving yourself perceiving, pressing the information against the sense – making the sense of reality a sense of the senses.”Footnote ⁷² The dizzyingly reflective nature of the goal signaled a deep dive into that which constituted existence. “We three are becoming intranauts,” Turrell told the Los Angeles Times, “exploring inner space instead of outer space.”Footnote ⁷³

But Wortz, Irwin, and Turrell did so in relation to space technologies, which begs questions. Was their focus, then, internal and subjective? Or external and controllable? Turrell traded in creating tension between the poles rather than picking just one. “Make certain viewer is aware that the experience is formed within, that he forms the experience, gives it substance,” he wrote in his notes on 25 January 1969. Just four days earlier, it was the architect of the experience who controlled it: “We're concerned with manipulating the conscious state,” he wrote. Both facets could come in the same breath: Turrell wrote of “Allowing people to perceive their perceptions – making them aware of their perceptions” – the permission and the enforcement, for Turrell, were one and the same. He even eroticized the connection. “Hit them at the level of expectancy so they become engaged and then manipulate them to our level – a seductive act,” he wrote elsewhere.Footnote ⁷⁴

In the immersive experiments, there was a question of control that was both central and explicit. In an initial list of research topics, Irwin had wondered “how much sense of control was built in [to space capsules] and not entrusted to the astronauts.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In the exhibit space, the artists planned a tightly controlled bodily immersion. The Los Angeles Times reported that the team used an anechoic chamber because they were “looking for pure ‘emptiness’ in order to have a state or space where sights, sounds and smells can be controlled.”Footnote ⁷⁶ “Must structure the forms we want, so they correspond with experience we want them to have,” Turrell wrote in his notes.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the 12 × 12 × 12 sound-dampening space, “The chair the visitor is seated in is constructed of moveable parts which will slowly flatten as it is hydraulically lifted up to the third, upper chamber so that the visitor will end up prone on the floor of the upper chamber.”Footnote ⁷⁸ It was not enough to control sensory input; the experiment required close dictation of positionality. One of Turrell's takeaways was that such an act of structuring was possible: “I have found out … that you can order people's experience,” he commented in 1970. “There's really a lot that you could control in making people confront something,” he concluded.Footnote ⁷⁹

But what was it that needed to be confronted? For as much as the experiments reflected a desire to understand the changing nature of reality, they also intentionally destabilized it. The act of control, paradoxically, pushed people into a space of uncertainty around what was real. The “reorienting stimuli” in the anechoic chamber were to “increase gradually to the point which seems to be between hallucination and reality.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The team put test subjects in the soundproof chamber at UCLA and questioned them about their hallucinations, which were often vivid. The artists alluded to the “doors of perception” and psychedelic drugs in their write-up for LACMA. They created glasses that lit up when brain waves went into alpha rhythms below twelve cycles per second during meditation. In uncertain terrain, the artists and scientists searched for something to hold onto: a set of principles around how exactly to destabilize reality, around making that which was internal and invisible into external and legible signifiers.

The 1960s counterculture deployed similar tools. Light was a fundamental feature of countercultural aesthetics, in ways that asserted a new quality and meaning to reality through ad hoc experimentation. San Francisco beat poets performed in front of static slides, which jazz and, later, rock shows deployed in ever more colorful and dynamic elaborations. To the “standard bubbling mix of coloured oils and inks,” music journalist Edwin Pouncey writes, light artists added “strange slides or Super 8mm film loops of train crashes and autopsy footage that were speeded up or projected backwards to create a surreal effect.” Hundreds of companies proliferated in San Francisco and then spread to New York through Bill Graham's Fillmore East. Andy Warhol even designed a mixed-media show linked to The Velvet Underground and Nico album, which evolved into his Exploding Plastic Inevitable happenings. When he took it to San Francisco's Fillmore, though, its edginess was poorly received by the “psychedelic crowd.” Light culture, then, had a specific valence in California, where its highest form was “the illusion of an acid trip that had reached its peak.”Footnote ⁸¹ It signified counterculture that defined the fabric of its own local reality.

Turrell and Irwin apprehended the psychedelic potential of light, freighted with its countercultural meanings, and they used it toward corporate and scientific institutionalism.Footnote ⁸² “For a while,” the Los Angeles Times reported in mid-1969, the trio's jargon “sounded like the paisley mental muddle of the new astrological and meditative mystics.” However, it soon “became clear that the three are, in fact, involved with the whole current drift, but with a major difference. While the hippie and flower people dwell in a garbled romanticism, these men are striving for clarity, reality.”Footnote ⁸³ Contemporary commentators deemed the experiments legitimate not due to the scientific nature of their enquiry – indeed, Wortz himself, the “corporate guru,” reportedly “was inspired to take a class in Zen Buddhism,” which lent greater credence to him becoming artistic rather than the other way around – but because the team tethered their work to concrete explanation. Light, as a marker of Turrell and Irwin's experimentation, had physicality – heft and weight and force – in their work. They deployed it and studied its effects in a more exacting manner than the architects of Fillmore light shows. But like the larger reality of which it formed a component part, light could also be unreal. Even without LSD, by simply structuring the physical environment, light could become imagined, hallucinated, spiritual, and theoretical.

Perhaps it was fitting, then, that while the team experimented with physicality, they never built the exhibit that they planned. One issue was feasibility. The piece relied on limited numbers of participants, making it functionally difficult in museum settings. But something more drastic occurred in late August: Turrell suddenly left the project. There was some mystery about why. At different moments, Turrell vaguely referred to “ambitions,” “vanity,” self-protection, and the project's focus on technology over spirituality.Footnote ⁸⁴ One art historian has pointed to Turrell's career prospects and need for “artistic autonomy.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The team's dissolution could have also sprung from the intimate relationship between the three collaborators spinning out of control. At the start, the Los Angeles Times wrote that the “key to the trio's theoretical discoveries is their obvious delight in finding that they have a lot in common despite the contrast of the artists’ beards with the scientist's detergent neatness.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Their exercises relied on communication. Each participant came from a different background, which entailed different language and points of reference. Turrell, Irwin, and Wortz took turns spending multiple hours blindfolded in the sound-dampened chamber. Afterwards, they would explain their experience to one another.Footnote ⁸⁷ Wortz, Turrell noted, listened to the artists and involved them “in a new way of thinking, which actually influenced our work from then on profoundly.”Footnote ⁸⁸

A subjective dynamic developed. Wortz was the “catalyst in the relationship,” but felt essentially like a “passive instructor,” while the artists played a more “active role.” In another way, though, the outlier was Irwin, who “withholds information,” whereas, Wortz said, “Jim and I are primarily information sops.” Ultimately, it became “difficult to sort out any one person's contribution,” in Wortz's mind. Irwin, likewise, felt, “I didn't know who really came up with an idea, or who did what.” Each collaborator, then, was both central and the odd man out in his own way. The working process, like the content of their experiments, became its own kind of destabilizing immersive experience that distorted perception. Irwin and Wortz believed that they needed Turrell to function, and the feeling meant that when the young artist left, “we couldn't really proceed in the same line.” Though the project became increasingly “non-goal-oriented,” both Irwin and Wortz maintained that the exhibit would have come to fruition if Turrell had stayed.Footnote ⁸⁹ The dynamic, in their minds, relied on all three collaborators to manifest an artistic rendering of collaboration with the aerospace industry in formal display.

APERTURE 3: SKY SPACES

Lack of product, though, is a poor measure of the lasting ways in which the A&T project created a shared material exchange between artists and scientists. During a time in which NASA searched for new meaning in its work, Wortz became increasingly preoccupied with space travel as experience. He worked on the Habitability Research Program at Tektite II, an underwater research facility, where “aquanauts” stood in for astronauts. Scientists-in-the-sea at the lab in the US Virgin Islands studied food, including frozen steaks and sauces and eating habits; sleep areas in terms of size, shape, and use; recreation; and illumination, decor, housekeeping, and mobility.Footnote ⁹⁰ Wortz continued to solicit Irwin's advice. The artist advised that engineers – whom he called “hot-rodders” – should “massage portions of the machine that no one will ever see, just because it feels right.”Footnote ⁹¹ The premise showed how spacecraft design could take on new significance and incorporate artistic sensibilities around materiality.

In their self-reflective style, Wortz and Irwin also structured environments for those tasked with space capsule design. The artist helped the scientist organize a habitability symposium in Venice, California during May 1970, for which Irwin enlisted artist Larry Bell and architect Frank Gehry to design a space that would create psychological conditions for a “tense and complex encounter session.” It was located in a large room near the sea, with tinted skylights and “rows of low, bleacher-like seats, made of chunks of corrugated cardboard” on a central platform. Participants entered through a small doorway and sat in uncomfortably low seats. The designers made it “impossible to relax physically.” They gradually let in more light each day and refused to insulate the room from street noise, which forced inconsistent levels of concentration on the speakers in order to see and hear. They pushed the tension between “square” and “hip” participants, Wortz wrote, to promote “unpredictable positive situations” and deemed it a success at producing fantastic discussion with “really heady kinds of information.”Footnote ⁹²

The design compelled participants to acknowledge their own embodied nature. Lessons of uneasiness could inspire them to create humane physical experience for astronauts – Irwin and Wortz showed an interest in compassion that rose to the level of other experiments to develop a “technique of producing a loving response in someone.” But the designers found other ramifications in the effect that space travel engineering could have on domestic life. In addition to scientists and engineers, the organizers invited sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, system analysts, and even city planners to consider “habitability” in terms of issues as expansive as urban planning, development, infrastructure, and public health.Footnote ⁹³ In doing so, art historian James Merle Thomas argues, they helped to “transpose the applied scientific research of large federal agencies (such as NASA) onto a wide spectrum of domestic concerns.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The material exchange that A&T residencies had engendered, then, helped to imbricate space design research into American life in ways that far surpassed sculpture and included cities, infrastructure, and other central aspects of physical human life on earth. The wide-reaching implications retained continued social relevance for both aerospace designers and sculptors.

Indeed, it was not just the meaning of NASA's role that was changing by the late 1960s, but also large-scale sculptural practice. Both Robert Irwin and James Turrell set off on experimental phases of their artistic careers after the A&T project, which changed their practice in material ways. Irwin experimented with dematerialization, first through increasingly formless artwork and then by eliminating his art studio entirely.Footnote ⁹⁵ Turrell made his studio into a sculpture in a series of pieces called the Mendota Stoppages, in which he selectively blocked outside sounds and lights.Footnote ⁹⁶ To some, this kind of experimentation seemed irrelevant by the late 1960s, the product of white male claims to universality even as women, Chicanx, and other artists of color created new artistic and activist movements in Los Angeles that testified to their positional experience.Footnote ⁹⁷ A new “social history of art” recognized artistic production as a “critical aspect of cultural production as a whole.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The very concept of art was shifting to be more socially engaged.

Turrell grappled in serious ways with materiality as a result of his aerospace residency. “When we want to go into the universe, we can't look at a rock, like the Japanese. We have to actually go to the moon. We're so literal,” he chided in the A&T report.Footnote ⁹⁹ Space travel, then, was less a capability than a deficit, an outgrowth of the fact that “we can't see the cosmos in a rock.” Turrell found this literalness not just in the external world but also in the internal one. “The thing that happens with technology, or [something like] the Manhattan Project,” he said, was that “people put their energies into a cause where they have to forget themselves.” Turrell challenged the literal with the transcendent: “People are afraid to dissolve themselves into any sort of human cosmic consciousness,” he continued. Yet though we might refuse to jump into that swimming pool, he said, “There are forces which are about to push us in.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Even as the aerospace and defense industries had conscripted artists into their work, and even as Turrell remained ambivalent about the goals of space travel or atomic capability, his exchange with industry had created significant questions for him around materiality and transcendence that informed his subsequent sculptural practice.

Turrell went on to create more structured experiences. In Skyspace I (1974), which was the first of many such “skyspace” pieces, a large square aperture in the ceiling of a room frames the sky.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Turrell also acquired a dormant cinder cone in northern Arizona in 1977 to build a massive piece called Roden Crater, which began with the removal of over 1.3 million cubic yards of earth to create an 854-foot tunnel. He has fashioned it into a “site containing tunnels and apertures that open onto pristine skies, capturing light directly from the sun in daylight hours, and the planets and stars at night.” It will contain twenty-one viewing spaces and tunnels when complete. “My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience,” an artist's website for the piece states.Footnote ¹⁰² The art structures the physical experience of perceiving in a clear signal of the influence of Turrell's enquiry into sensory deprivation. Other more recent pieces, including the Perceptual Cells series, demonstrate a similar continued interest in sensory deprivation and selective sensory input.Footnote ¹⁰³

Turrell's increased preoccupation with physical spaces, as well as his political ambivalence, played out in his involvement with the American display at the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka, Japan. Despite his apparent critiques of US aerospace programs in the A&T report – though art critic Max Kozloff interpreted them as “not a complaint about gadgetry as such, but about the illusion that a kind of soul hunger and quest for faith might be literally satisfied by chemical assistance or electronic innervations”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ – Turrell was among the artists who initially worked with the US Information Agency on the American display.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ After he left the Garret Corporation collaboration, Turrell flew to Osaka in late 1969. But he decided against participating because he “found the spaces unacceptable.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The display garnered significant international exposure, with nearly 11 million people viewing the New Arts section of the “waffle-shaped” US Pavilion from March to September 1970.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Crowds flocked also to a display of Moon rocks, which helped cement the connection between science and aesthetic as determinative of US technological prowess.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Like Turrell, the American press found fault with certain aspects of the US Pavilion (and the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion by Experiments in Art & Technology, the forerunner to the LA program based in New York), but widely lauded its politics. A&T was “attractive to government,” the piece said, as it “seems to embody democratic ideals of co-operation and interaction between various levels of the society,” representing “the President's ‘bring us together’ philosophy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ That Nixon's 1968 political slogan responded to bitter domestic divides over issues including the Vietnam War was surely not lost on contemporary commentators, though critics did not object to counterculture as representative of the United States.

A&T's final show at LACMA in May 1971 brought more scathing critiques that were both aesthetic and political. The Los Angeles show contained only sixteen works, despite the fact that over seventy artists had participated in the program.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Tuchman organized the show with a team that included LACMA curators Gail Scott and Jane Livingston, who wrote large parts of the catalogue.Footnote ¹¹¹ ARTnews deemed the exhibit, if “judged on the basis of these objects,” to be “disastrous.” The dim lighting undermined the few successful pieces in the show.Footnote ¹¹² It sought to structure an immersive environment, but it failed to do so effectively, at least on formal aesthetic terms, through which it seemed flimsy and capricious.Footnote ¹¹³ Art critic Max Kozloff eviscerated it as a “multimillion dollar art boondoggle.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ For the amount of funding that had gone into the project, many saw the paltry show as a failure. Writer Jack Burnham later called the artistic embrace of technology a “panacea that failed.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Critics also highlighted the fact that all artists involved in the project were white men, many of whom were from New York. The A&T project had this in common with the aerospace industry. Both were worlds largely staffed by white men that also traded in a concept of subjecthood that was at once generic and exclusionary.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Protest movements made A&T's involvement with military industry and technology more scandalous by the time the show opened.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Tuchman later said that the exhibition “was undermined by the Vietnam War almost month to month.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ While events of the late 1960s and early 1970s were “inflaming the radicalism of our youth and polarizing the country,” Kozloff wrote, “the American artists did not hesitate to freeload at the trough of that techno-fascism that had inspired them.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

The artists themselves experienced the technological opportunities offered by corporations in more nuanced terms. There were reasons to embrace and reject technology. Turrell has reflected on the late 1960s and early 1970s as a “contradictory time.” “On one hand,” he says, “we were going to the moon, and anything was possible. On the other hand, despite technological advancements and euphoric attitudes, we were conducting a war in Vietnam and my generation was up in protest.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Sculptor Richard Serra, who worked with Kaiser Steel during A&T, called technology “a simultaneous hope and hoax.” He related its negative effects to specific governmental violence: “Technology is what we do to the Black Panthers and the Vietnamese under the guise of advancement in a materialistic theology.”Footnote ¹²¹ While outside commentators saw the artists as unbothered by the violent actions of aerospace subcontractors, from within the project, some grappled with how to digest the horrifying realities of technology while also taking advantage of its aesthetic and material possibilities.

Critics and scholars have also interpreted the A&T show as conceptual art, humor, or even satire.Footnote ¹²² Journalist William Wilson wrote in 1971 that “art watchers believed the real art work under way was the total project,” which was “really a staggering multi-media work of Concept Art,” with Tuchman as “master artist” and the LACMA show catalogue “the only tangible object that captures its scope.”Footnote ¹²³ Its cover apparently mimicked the 1970 edition of the report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.Footnote ¹²⁴ Even Max Kozloff, who interpreted the derision of the artists as frivolous at the time of the project, later wrote, “I now think that such derision was indirectly critical of the whole enterprise … It was the way for them to go.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Perhaps satire implicated American corporations and the art world, or even the government. But it could have served a more nuanced function, too, by creating plausible deniability. It allowed artists and even the project's director to feel that they had created space between themselves and their corporate patrons, even as they benefited artistically and materially from their in-house residencies.

Many contemporary critiques of the Art & Technology program turn on questions of complicity. The shifting corporate structure of the early 1970s converged with a longer trajectory of Cold War militarization to vastly extend the reach of the state and blame for its wrongdoings. Corporations were now mostly conglomerates, publicly traded and changeable holding companies with a “rather peculiar and discontinuous structure,” one critic wrote.Footnote ¹²⁶ The “American military machine,” too, was “a very large corporation.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Subcontractors helped build the military–industrial complex through the 1960s. The nature of government changed, blurring the line between the public and private sectors and making it difficult to distinguish between aid of and resistance to statist endeavors. Complicity too became unbounded. Where did government end? Besides contributing to the aesthetic and spatial design of US aerospace technologies, including NASA's outer-space program, Turrell and Irwin also participated in perceptual experiments that were at once subversive and complicit. They digested the meaning of new technologies and offered mind-expanding avenues to liberation through internal perceptual shifts that were imbricated with psychedelic drug and art culture. Yet their work also dovetailed in material ways with experiments and strategies of the Cold War military–industrial complex.

In its paradox, James Turrell's story offers American studies scholars an opportunity to look beyond the dichotomy of artist as protester or complicit. Neither was Turrell a pawn of the US government, nor did he reject the US military–industrial complex wholesale. His artistic practice lent itself well to corporate partnership, where some part of industrial production went towards military efforts with which he did not fully agree. His choice to focus on engagement with the aerospace industry spoke to his desire to grapple with larger questions about the changed nature of physical existence in a world reshaped by American technologies. Turrell thought about nuclear capabilities, the Vietnam War, and space travel within his own inner universe, as well as in terms of a larger “cosmic consciousness.” His planetary politics were expansive, but they were also idiosyncratic. His early biography, artwork, and scientific experimentation indicate the important and sometimes strange role of singular individuals outside the ambit of official government work. Our histories of the American state and its role in the world are incomplete when limited to those that call themselves foreign-relations actors or those whom scholars can readily name as part of a “school” that coalesces around institutions of privilege that broadcast explicit elocutions of political thought.

The story of Art & Technology suggests, also, the possibilities of adopting a capacious material lens to recover the way in which artists and scientists worked within the same concrete spaces. The role of sculptors at the heart of the military–industrial complex, though sometimes contentious or contradictory, offers unique purchase on Cold War life. It imparts a more nuanced yet broader view of what it meant to be involved in government policy and foreign relations, and where and how we might look for relevant sources to understand the Cold War American state. Sculptors who worked in three-dimensional space with industrial materials afford unique insight into the pervasive effect of policies and their ability to profoundly alter and be altered by physical practices. Turrell has structured ever more immersive and large-scale participatory experience throughout his career. The tension that he upholds between materiality and transcendence speaks to the diffuse role of state policies and their ability to shape our world.

No foreign-policy doctrine relies on the sun, moon, and stars. Yet a planetary politics rendered the military–industrial complex deeply material and, in moments, as immaterial as light or air. Art processed and mitigated technological fallout. It understood geopolitics in a cosmic consciousness. We might imagine the architects of war, of statecraft and aerospace industry and environmental degradation, guided into Turrell's sky space and made to look up. We might ask the same of ourselves. All of us – from artist, to scientist, to policymaker, to scholar – are undeniably embodied. We move within a material world and universe. A celestial doctrine does not govern our foreign relations, but its structuring power intimates both its danger and its utility.