The final chapter of
Arden Reed’s 2017 book
Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell compares and contrasts the work of Turrell and Andy Warhol in order to establish whether they are, respectively, ‘the Angel and Demon of Slow Art.’ It is of interest, therefore, that the exhibition of new works by Turrell at
Pace Gallery overlapped briefly with the
Warhol retrospective at Tate Modern, as this, too, enabled the opportunity to compare and contrast the work of both.
Slow art is structured to slow the viewer in order that greater attention is paid to the artwork generating a contemplative state. Reed argues therefore that ‘slow art is not a thing but an experience, an ongoing conversation between artwork and spectator.’ For Reed, the work of Turrell encapsulates slow art par excellence, while, for many, the perception of Warhol’s art and practice is the antithesis; being focused on ephemeral consumables – the instant and immediate. Reed, though, is aware of the way in which such stereotypes of Warhol’s art, as fast art, sell his actual practice short. Therefore, the overlapping of the Turrell and Warhol exhibitions in London at this time provide an opportunity to revisit the contrasts between the two, as made by Reed.
Turrell’s recent
Constellation works, three of which are currently at Pace Gallery, are culminations of his lifelong pursuit of an art of light, space, and time. Presented in site-specific chambers, the works feature elliptical and circular shapes with a frosted glass surface animated by an array of technically advanced LED lights, which are mounted to a wall and generated by computer programming. With a run time of several hours, the programmes run on a loop that is imperceptible to the viewer generating light changes that are subtle and hypnotic, one colour morphing into the next.
The
Constellation works generate what the artist has called ‘spaces within space.’ His luminous portals are instruments for altering our perception prompting a transcendental experience; gazing into them, as
Oliver Shultz, Curatorial Director, Pace Gallery, notes, ‘results in the slow dissolution of the boundaries of the surrounding room, enveloping the viewer in the radiance of pure colour.’ That experience is not immediate, but is realised as the viewer settles in to the experience within a computer programmed loop running for hours, not minutes.
Turrell is, therefore, an artist of duration for whom ‘experiencing is the object’ and whose installations enable us to ‘perceive ourselves perceiving.’ He creates theatres of perception in which light shows are performed. Reed writes that this is like ‘watching a play in which little happens – one by
Samuel Beckett, say – we sit (or stand, or lie down) and look at a stage where Turrell makes “light shows” – makes light show.’
In this way, he ritualizes looking by asking us to submit to the art and enter the experience. He says, ‘I don’t think I ask too much. I ask you to wait.’ Again, ‘I’m a slow guy. I like slow planes … In a way that’s true with art, too. Things that require more time give back more. I think it’s okay to take time. It seems more direct actually.’
Sleep, made over several nights in summer and autumn 1963 with a 16mm camera and shown at the start of the Tate’s retrospective, is a clear demonstration of Warhol as an artist of duration; as with Turrell, a slow artist. The film shows 22 close-ups of the poet
John Giorno, who was briefly Warhol’s lover, as he sleeps in the nude. Warhol shot around 50 reels of film for Sleep, each one lasting only three minutes. He edited them to fashion a movie without movement. The final version repeats many scenes and lasts over five hours. It is projected in slow motion, giving a dream-like feel. Giorno said that Warhol made the movie Sleep ‘into an abstract painting: the body of a man as a field of light and shadow.’
Reed notes that the pacing and length of a work like Sleep ‘call to mind meditative practices.’ He quotes
Jonas Mekas reflecting on Warhol’s use of cinema:
‘Film is transported to a plane that is outside the suspense, outside the plot, outside the climaxes … We study, watch, contemplate, listen – not so much for the ‘big actions’ but for the small words, intonations, colors of voices, colors of words … We begin to realize that we have never, really, seen haircutting, or eating,’ because ‘we watch a Warhol movie with no hurry. The first thing he does is to stop us from running.’
Mekas brings us to a second element of Warhol’s practice as a slow artist, which is to enable us to stop and see the fast, ephemeral or mundane aspects of our existence as though for the first time. Warhol said that ‘Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second – comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles – all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.’ Artists notice things that others don’t and bring those things to our attention. So, while Pop art images could be recognized in a split second, they were not intended to be viewed in a split second. Instead, they enable us to realize that we have never really seen comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles etc. because we had only previously recognized them in a split second without paying them the attention that is their due.
Eugene McCarraher noted, in
The Enchantments of Mammon, that Warhol said, ‘“Pop Art is a way of liking things,” a celebration of those “great modern things” that comprise the humble matter of everyday life – a realm where, in Orthodox tradition, the divine always manifests itself sacramentally.’ This aspect of Warhol’s art was immediately apparent to
Sister Corita Kent on a visit in 1962 to the Ferus Gallery in LA to see Warhol’s breakthrough exhibition of Campbell’s Soup Cans. ‘Coming home,’ she said, ‘you saw everything like Andy Warhol.’ As a result, Kent found inspiration in signs and advertising for vibrant screen-printed banners and posters that provided an opportunity to show the sacred in the most mundane.
The Tate Retrospective explores the extent to which themes of faith recur throughout Warhol’s life, including concluding the exhibition with his vast 10-metre wide canvas Sixty Last Suppers created in 1986, a few months before the artist died in his sleep while recovering from gall bladder surgery. This poignant meditation on faith, death, immortality and the afterlife, depicts six rows of ten silkscreened images, each a black-and-white reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic mural The Last Supper depicting Christ’s last meal with his disciples before the crucifixion. A copy of the image had hung in the Warhola family kitchen as Warhol was growing up. Warhol noted, ‘It’s a good picture … It’s something you see all the time. You don’t think about it.’ To make people see it and think about it, Warhol reproduced it 60 times. Thereby, he also evoked the re-enactment of the Last Supper that takes place during every Mass.
Like Warhol wanting us to stop and really see, Turrell is also concerned to take away the distance between ‘quotidian and spiritual,’ ‘beholder and beheld,’ in order to ‘bring the cosmos down’ in order that we call our everyday existence ‘a spiritual plane.’ His Quaker experience of ‘going to greet the light’ is, as
Adam Gopnik has argued, to see that ‘the mystic’s white light and ecstasies are not dim apprehensions of another realm but experiences as real and as open to investigation as sleeping, eating and breathing.’
James Turrell, Pace Gallery, until 27 March 2020
Andy Warhol, Tate Modern, until 6 September 2020
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Velvet Underground & Nico -
Sunday Morning.
