To see James Turrell’s installation Rayna, I headed from the outdoors down a dark corridor. Inside the room, at first I could see nothing but the faint glow of incandescent bulbs and the silhouettes of two other visitors. Unable to determine the contours of the space, I was uncertain where the “art” was. And as curator Daniel Birnbaum has written in a piece on Turrell, “When your eyes get lost, your body falls.”
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Turrell is an internationally known artist who’s been making light installations since 1966; Rayna is owned by the Art Institute, which exhibited it once in 1982, then put it in storage for more than two decades. Gallery 400 has installed it–as well as ten stunning, supple prints showing Turrell’s characteristic mysterious rectangles of light–in conjunction with the November debut of a Turrell piece commissioned by the University of Illinois, UIC Skyspace. What the Art Institute owns are the artist’s instructions for Rayna and the right to exhibit it, and the only physical element it provides is the thin strip that frames the opening. Installations vary–and two writers who saw the original have complained that this version is inferior. I didn’t see the first installation, but I had a problem only on visits when I waited a few minutes before entering: the piece is best when you come in directly from daylight, because the initial disorientation is mirrored by the dematerialization of the “painting” into a mass of light.
John Neff denies the rational roles of solid objects in his sculpture show at Western Exhibitions by combining and presenting them in a disorienting, almost demented way. Eighteen of the 26 pieces here are called “decorative panels”–suggesting an ironic comment on the bourgeois complacency of interior decorating. Decorative Panel #19: Cracked Skull: Wall Sconce is a grid of white tiles, some cracked, hung in a diamond shape not quite flush against the wall. A sconce holding a candle-shaped lightbulb sticks out from its center, while on the back of it is a big stone (Neff calls it the “brain”) with part of a spine beneath it. The rock-brain is juxtaposed with three gears also attached to the back of the panel–and as animate mixes with inanimate, Neff’s world becomes less and less rational.
Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois
Western Exhibitions
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Fred Camper.
