Meeting

James Turrell, 1980–86/2016 · MoMA PS1

To make somewhere this quiet, James Turrell needed a jackhammer. He'd been invited to make a work here, in this old public school in Queens. And he wanted an opening in the roof. Alanna Heiss ran the place. She told him the concrete was probably six to nine inches thick. The building had been designed to carry extra floors above it. Turns out it was four and a half feet. So he had a compressor craned onto the roof and jackhammered his way through. Now you get to sit underneath it. So, look up. That's the actual sky. Whatever's happening over Queens, whether you showed up or not. Around sunset, hidden lights wash the walls in changing colors. When the white walls glow warm orange, the blue up there gets stronger. Change the light in the room, and the same patch of sky looks different. From down here, the edge looks almost impossibly thin. The sky can go flat. Like a panel fitted into the ceiling. All that distance, close enough to touch. This is called Meeting. Turrell grew up Quaker, going to meetings where people sat together in silence. His grandmother told him they were going inside to "greet the light". He also remembers sitting in those meetings, thinking about a car. A '57 Ford. The one that retracted a metal roof back into the trunk. And imagining the meetinghouse could do that. The roof coming off.

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