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Sunday, May 26, 2002

By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic

Monumental, among the greatest works of American art, massive ego trip, spiritual retreat, environmental desecration, theater, astronomical site comparable to Stonehenge and on the scale of the pyramids: These are some of the ways the Roden Crater project has been described.

It's not even completed, but that hasn't stopped James Turrell's awe-inspiring artwork -- begun in the late 1970s in northern Arizona at the edge of the Painted Desert -- from inciting controversy and discussion.

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And the intervening decades haven't stopped the artist from continuing to pursue his vision.

The story of the crater goes hand and hand with Turrell's love of flying. As his experience of soaring in small planes through voluminous fields of light fed his interest in issues of perception, it was also while piloting an airplane that he located the extinct volcanic cone that would become the site of his lifetime work.

Supported by a $25,000 grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, he flew a biplane over the western United States during six months in 1974, selecting Roden from the thousands of craters he saw.

Birthed 300,000 years ago in flame and violent expulsions of molten basalt, the black and orange cinder cone rises in a graceful 550-foot-high curve over the surrounding range landscape. The nearest city, Flagstaff, Ariz., is 40 miles away, and there is no easy ground access to the crater.

While maintaining the natural appearance of the crater's exterior, Turrell, working with construction crews, has done some major restructuring within, including the excavation of more than 1.2 million cubic yards of earth.

It's his intent to turn this natural feature into a multichambered locus for viewing the light of the sun, moon, stars and other planets, presented in ways that might prompt a sublime experience and a questioning of the nature of light itself.

The chambers are underground to protect them from ambient light, Turrell explains. Several distinct spaces are planned so that light from various sources may be isolated, enabling visitors to "look at specific parts of the sky and exclude others."

His plans for the crater have been growing and changing over the years in response to his experiences and to changing cultural conditions. He's learned from smaller-scale pieces he's done around the world, he says, and those works and the crater project have informed each other.

"In a way, I've done these little chamber music pieces -- as I have done here [at the Mattress Factory] -- that are in great support of this bigger assembly of the chamber music into sort of the symphony," Turrell explains.

The analogy to music is one that surfaces frequently when he is talking about his art.

"In this stage set of geologic time, I wanted to build these spaces that engage celestial events, kind of making music with a series of light," he told the BBC two years ago.

So far, those include the Sun and Moon Space, a basalt-paneled room that will contain a white marble monolith upon which the sun's image will be projected yearly on the solstice and the moon's light will be projected every 16.8 years.

An 854-foot-long tunnel connects this space with the East Portal, an elliptical room with an elliptical opening to the sky, and a second tunnel continues to Crater's Eye, a circular room beneath the crater's bowl with a circular opening to the sky. Within the great bowl itself, visitors are invited to lie on platforms to experience the celestial vaulting effect Turrell has observed when flying.

Future plans include an amphitheater and a small guest lodge to accommodate overnight visitors once it opens to the public.

The project has made for a lot of change in Turrell's life. One was a shift in the late 1970s from urban California artist to proprietor of the 155-square-mile cattle ranch that surrounds the crater. As it turns out, without his own herd of cattle grazing the land, others could have used the land for grazing, perhaps disturbing the crater's pristine environment in the process.

And, while interest in the crater has always been high, funding hasn't necessarily followed. In 1982, Turrell founded Skystone Foundation in Flagstaff to promote and develop the project. In recent years, he's received major funding from the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, N.M., and the Dia Center for the Arts in New York -- an early supporter that purchased the crater in 1977 and eventually turned it over to Skystone -- has returned to fund an excellent Web site (www.rodencrater.org). The oft-quoted estimated cost of the finished project is between $15 million and $20 million, raised from foundation and private funds.

"In many cases, if we knew what it would take, we might have thought twice about it, so it's often wonderful that we don't have hindsight," he said last month, musing about the economic struggles he's overcome to date.

Recently, commitment from funders has stabilized and the project is making headway, re-igniting interest in its progress. A several-page color spread on Roden Crater appeared in last month's issue of "architecture" magazine. And last spring, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman visited the crater, writing, "... after more than two decades, it is finally possible to see what he has been talking about all this time. And the results turn out to look even more beautiful than he said they would be."

While completion of the first phase seems probable in the near future, second-guessing a date would be disingenuous and perhaps against the Zen component of the overall production.

As for Turrell's outlook on it all, the Mattress Factory's Michael Olijnyk says there's a T-shirt he hands out to visitors that reads: "Roden Crater, Sooner or Later."