James Turrell

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Through Sept. 25

James Turrell makes “air-conditioning for the eye,” said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. This summer, three American cities—Los Angeles, Houston, and New York—are hosting museum exhibitions of his work, and each show promises a rewarding respite from the “clamorous, hysterically clever” art spectacles that so frequently win attention. Turrell, 70, has devoted his career to a rather simple project—using light and our perception of it to create dreamy, perception-altering installations. The culmination of that effort won’t arrive unless and until Turrell completes work in Arizona on turning an extinct volcano into a many-chambered celestial observatory. (He’s been at it for 40-plus years so far.) But his “seductive” current show at New York’s Guggenheim represents a solid stand-in.

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Stepping into a Turrell installation “requires a degree of surrender,” said Wil S. Hylton in The New York Times. You often trust what your eyes see, and to have that confidence stripped away “can be rapturous—or distressing.” The comprehensive retrospective currently showing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art includes the opportunity for an individual viewer to lie down and be slid inside a giant sphere where brightly colored light bathes the eyes for 10 minutes. His “Ganzfeld” rooms achieve a similar disorienting effect: Entering one feels “like falling into a neon cloud. The air is thick with luminous color that seems to quiver all around you, and it can be difficult to discern which way is up, or out.” The Guggenheim show, in presenting just five of Turrell’s pieces, has created “a spare, unhurried tour of his art” that should do his reputation good, said Roberta Smith, also in the Times. The centerpiece, which fills the museum’s iconic rotunda, “will probably be the bliss-out environmental art hit of the summer.”

To me, Aten Reign feels “more escapist than transcendent,” said Blake Gopnik in Architectural Record. Five large elliptical rings are connected by fabric that creates a towering cone inside the rotunda, and as LEDs embedded in the rings gradually shift colors, visitors gazing up into the cone lose all sense of depth. But the apparently immense cost of the project becomes a distraction. As the show’s “superb” earlier works prove, Turrell’s light tricks once were the embodiments of “a modesty so radical that it reads as almost anti-materialist.” Still, Aten Reign might offer the more transformative experience, said Jillian Steinhauer in Hyperallergic.com. As I lay beneath the cone to get the full effect, the uppermost oval “began to shimmer and shift,” fading to invisibility before appearing again. “I thought it might reach down and swallow me.”