Zitat des Tages von James Turrell:
It's really terrific to see Pittsburgh recognize the Mattress Factory.
Usually we are illuminating things instead of looking at the light itself. But I like this quality of the light being the revelation.
I sell blue sky and coloured air.
I used to think that only people who were crazy were attracted to the desert, but once you've lived there, you become that way anyway.
This idea that light plays an important part in our life is important to me.
If you think about art, if you look at Rembrandt and Vermeer and Caravaggio, if you look at Turner and Constable and all the Impressionists and the Hudson River School, there's a tradition of light in art, especially painting.
Light itself is a revelation.
I feel that buildings often have a workaday aspect that you see during the daylight hours, and a more resplendent side that emerges after dark.
I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.
I would describe Los Angeles as actually not having taste. In New York, there's taste. But you have to remember that taste is censorship. It's a form of restriction.
You can't stop demographics. And show me a fence that ever worked. It didn't work at Hadrian's Wall. The Great Wall of China didn't work. The Berlin Wall.
I know that science is very interested in answers, and I'm just happy with a good question.
It is only when light is reduced that the pupil opens and feeling goes out of the eyes like touch.
I don't want you looking at the light fixture; I want you looking at where light goes. But more than that, I'm interested in the effect of light upon you and your perceptions.
I like to use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception. I want you to sense yourself sensing - to see yourself seeing.
At Roden Crater, I was interested in taking the cultural artifice of art out into the natural surround. I wanted the work to be enfolded in nature in such a way that light from the sun, moon and stars empowered the spaces. I wanted to bring culture to the natural surround as if one was designing a garden.
The works of previous artists have come from their own experiences or insights but haven't given the experience itself. They had set themselves up as a sort of interpreter to the layman... Our interest is in a form where you realize that the media are just perception.
Art history is littered with work that involves light.
I live in the sky as a pilot, so it has great meaning to me.
New York has changed amazingly; it's gentrified everywhere, and it's a much gentler place.
This wonderful elixir of light is the thing that actually connects the immaterial with the material - that connects the cosmic to the plain everyday existence that we try to live in.
I am interested in the physicality of light itself.
We use the vocabulary of light to describe a spiritual experience.
Planets' orbits are elliptical. It's a very pleasing shape.
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.
Drake went through my exhibition. I did meet him in Los Angeles, and he was in the spaces that I did do there, and has some images from that.
When you sit down and see someone play at a piano, you don't think, 'Wow - what a fantastic machine.'
There are different stages when you fly. The first stage is the dollhouse effect, seeing everything on Earth like it's a model. Suddenly, all of your concerns seem very small.
I've always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream.
I don't worry about whether anyone knows anything about art.
It's possible to gather light that's older than our solar system.
There are very few religious experiences that aren't explained using the vocabulary of light.
In Arizona, we're at 7,000 feet, so we're above half of the world's atmosphere. It's crisp but hard, a side-raking light that can be revealing but doesn't have the softness that maritime air has.
The cardones cactus is very similar to saguaro cactus in Arizona. These cacti only grow in very specific, particular places.
Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.
I always thought that people who live in the desert are a little crazy. It could be that the desert attracts that kind of person, or that after living there, you become that. It doesn't make much difference. But now I've done my 40 years in the desert.