James Turrell Quotes
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I don't think my work is about the spiritual life, but it certainly touches on it.
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Light knows when you're looking at it.
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I look at light as a material. It is physical. It is photons. Yes, it exhibits wave behavior, but it is a thing.
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I've always thought of Las Vegas as Los Angeles on its day off. There's not any hierarchy of taste, and that's what L.A. always was to me: It's not really a town of culture - it's a town of entertainment.
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Planets' orbits are elliptical. It's a very pleasing shape.
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My mother did not have a toaster oven and would toast bread in the oven, which I thought was stupid. They didn't do cars and electricity, that kind of stuff.
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Light is a powerful substance. We have a primal connection to it. But, for something so powerful, situations for its felt presence are fragile.
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Art history is littered with work that involves light.
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I was waiting for L.A. to always become something important. I gave up... I left in 1974.
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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.
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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.
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I wanted to deal with light directly rather than with paint.
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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.
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The people in L.A. do orient themselves to light. I used to call it 'Tan Fascist Culture.' Everyone there is tanned, wears dark sunglasses, looks like a movie star even when they're not.
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I hope that when you see my work, you are looking at yourself looking.
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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.
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I'm interested in light. It's a very direct, pragmatic, American, rather naive approach.
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I like to work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space. My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.
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At my first exhibits, people were saying that's just a light on the wall.
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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.
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We're part of creating this world in which we live, but we're unaware of how we do that or even that we do that.
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The Quakers don't believe in music or art; they think it's a vanity.
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We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality.
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The lunar cycle within the solar season: that kind of syncopated rhythm is what life relates to.