James Turrell show at National Gallery sheds light on artist’s work

For contemporary artist James Turrell light, and our perception of it, is at the heart of his work.

Shanta II (blue) (1970) by James Turrell. From the James Turrell restrospective at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Anyone who takes the trouble to read the first pages of Genesis with care will be rewarded with some surprises. One of these is to discover that before the familiar story of Eve being made from Adam’s rib is an alternative account (Genesis 1:27) in which God makes man and woman together: either the two sexes at the same time or an undifferentiated hermaphrodite who will be split apart into the two sexes at a later stage.

In fact, as scholars have long realised, Genesis comprises two quite different stories — an awkward fact for biblical fundamentalists — both ancient and venerable that the editors of the text had to stitch together as best they could. The first of these essentially is concerned with cosmology and the order of nature, while the second has only a perfunctory interest in the creation of the natural world and is chiefly ­concerned with explaining the origin of sin and suffering.

In the first of these, the cosmological story, there is another apparent anomaly when, as we see illustrated on the Sistine ceiling, God creates light and darkness on the first day (Genesis 1:3) before making the sun, moon and stars on the fourth (Genesis 1:14). Or more exactly he creates light, then proceeds to separate light from darkness, which presumably was the primary condition. What is suggestive about this is the idea that light is a metaphysical substance before, and not merely caused by, the physical bodies that emit it in the visible world.

Such speculations are common to various mystical traditions and, like many such ideas, also have a broad appeal to the imagination, beyond any specific occult or spiritual doctrine, because our response to light is so visceral. Nothing has such an effect on mood, or can so irresistibly inspire a sense of beauty or joy as light, just as nothing symbolises and embodies melancholy and even dread more immediately than darkness.

To say that all artists and architects work with an awareness of light is almost to state the obvious, since light is the condition of visibility itself. But in a more specific sense we can see that architects, for example, consider orientation and the fall of light as well as forms that will create shadows and thus effects of chiaroscuro to articulate the shapes of their design. Sculptors work in a similar way, while painters may be particularly concerned with light as a way of modelling form, of dramatising composition or of enhancing colour.

Among the most intriguing instances of the use of light as a subject in its own right are the black-and-white drawings of Georges Seurat. Characteristically simple and even austere, they present their subjects as dark silhouettes; banal figures seen in the street become in his hands mysterious and slightly disturbing absences. The secret of these drawings is that they are primarily about light. His shadowy figures are slightly uncanny because they are like holes in the field of light, as though the individual somehow represents an interruption in the continuum of being.

James Turrell, whose work is surveyed in a retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, is a contemporary artist who thinks along these lines. Light, and our perception of it, is his subject; and his work has developed from meditations on the perception and misperception of light and colour to an increasing absorption in the cosmos and the lights of the heavens.

The earliest works, from a half-century ago, involve illusions of form and volume. We enter a room to see what appears to be a white cube floating in space; as we approach it becomes apparent it is nothing but white light projected into the corner of a room. In the adjacent room, it is a blue box shape or cuboid that seems to hang in the air. In this case, as we get closer, we see it is constituted by a space cut into a projecting corner constructed within the normal angle of the room; we can reach into the space behind, a seemingly boundless well of blue light.

There is a similar but more elaborate illusion in a later work installed in a much bigger space. Here seating is provided at the back to allow for a longer communing with the work, and indeed for the eyes to adjust to the darkness. There seems at first very little to see, and so we begin to see more in less. On either side of the room lamps project faint pools of light down the walls; we notice the greater intensity of the light directly opposite the lamps, enhanced by the contrast of the relative darkness adjacent, and the way it diminishes with distance from the source.

We are slightly puzzled by what appears a faintly lighter area on the far wall between the two lamps. When we finally get up to inspect it, this turns out to be a deep recess cut into the wall, and lit within to a level that the eye can only just discern as brighter than the ambient illumination of the room.

Some works deal more overtly with colour: we enter one room to find its corner occupied by a vertical band of orange. If we stare at this intently and without blinking, we find that the shadowed walls on either side seem tinged with a complementary hue. Even more striking is to stand directly in front of it, so we see our own shadow, on the field of orange, turn a deep green-blue.

Other rooms offer a wash of the kind of pink light that is supposed to calm violent criminals and psychopaths; or a more complex illusion in which we seem to see the room we are in doubled, and beyond that an ambiguous space with an orange wall opening diagonally into space. But by now we may be beginning to ask ourselves whether there is much more to this than the creation of moody ambiences with a certain element of indeterminacy.

Two of the principal pieces in the exhibition deal with changing light effects, one designed for collective experience and the other for one viewer at a time. The collective one is a large neutral space that groups of 10 or so are allowed to enter at any one time, while others wait outside, remove their shoes and put on paper slippers. Inside, the side walls curve into the floor with no edge, as in a photo studio backdrop, so that the boundary between horizontal and vertical is eliminated, and low ambient lighting in constantly changing hues enhances the illusion.

The back of the room opens like a kind of proscenium into a separate space with its own illumination that sometimes comes into synch with the main room and sometimes makes interesting contrasts; the depth and subtlety of the chromatic washes are often quite beautiful and would be more absorbing without — when I was there at any rate — the insistent chatter of people in whom a very quiet environment provokes the anxious need to occupy the vacancy with noise.

The other piece is what is called a “perceptual chamber”, a sort of mock-scientific instal­lation with a faintly Doctor Who feel to it. From the outside it consists of a sphere made of elements bolted together, surrounded by young men and women in white lab coats and clipboards who make you sign a declaration that you are not an epileptic, prone to cardiac problems or claustrophobic, and that you waive any right to pursue the gallery or the artist in the event of an adverse reaction to the experience.

Then, if you have managed to secure a booking, you lie down on a flat rolling bed, like a patient about to have a CT scan, and are inserted into the sphere, where you are surrounded by low but intensely coloured light. In the spherical space there are no points of visual reference, so the most interesting part of the experience is that you lose all sense of distance between you and what you are seeing. There is nothing to look at or to focus on: the retina is simply saturated in washes of changing colours; there are moments when you wonder if your eyes are open, and it is only by closing them that you ­realise they are. The most unpleasant part — and the part that explains the epileptic warning — is the use of strobe lighting, pulsing different colour mixtures.

This seems to be designed to produce flashes of complementaries in the eye and to that extent it works. But it is also uncomfortable and prevents Turrell’s journey through colour from being the meditative or even transcendent one it might have been. It left me with a vague sense of headache and nausea for the next few hours: one might have accepted that more cheerfully had it been an exceptional aesthetic experience — but, then, good art tends not to have bad side effects.

Turrell’s most serious preoccupation of the past 40 years has been to turn an ancient ­volcanic mountain in Arizona into a remarkable naked eye observatory, and the most interesting part of the exhibition is the short video in which he explains his aims and shows images of the corridors through which the light of the sun or moon shines into interior spaces at particular times of year such as the summer solstice.

The small observatory structure commissioned by the gallery in 2010 and situated outside the gallery in an attractively landscaped garden gives some idea of the character of this project on a much smaller scale. The Roden Crater project itself is represented by numerous prints, photographs, models and so forth, reminding us yet again how non-commoditised art forms such as environmental sculpture and earth art have to be economically supported by the production of what is essentially expensive collectable merchandise.

Roden Crater clearly would be a fascinating place to visit — especially, as Turrell suggests — alone or with very few fellow visitors. But the whole exhibition, and even this monumental project, reminds us of the frequently inefficient cost-benefit ratio in contemporary art: so much technology, so much funding, for a relatively modest aesthetic reward.

Quite unexpectedly, as I left the Turrell show, I glimpsed Monet’s Meules, milieu du jour (Haystacks, midday). No doubt Turrell had sharpened my eye to chromatic nuances and complementary after-effects, but how far more economically and effectively these were captured in this little painting, looking south at midday on a warm day in late summer, with its hazy horizon and hills, its fringe of trees, the sunlit grass and already lengthening shadow filled with more meaningful and more memorable chromatic notes than the arbitrary ones generated by mechanical means.

James Turrell: A Retrospective

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Until June 8.