MEETING
JAMES TURRELL, 1980–86/2016
The funny thing is, he had to do something pretty brutal to make something this calm. This is Meeting. James Turrell. To make it, they cut an opening through about four and a half feet of reinforced concrete roof so you could sit inside this room and look straight up at the sky. And that helps. Because if you just call this a room with a hole in the ceiling, you miss it. There's no image up there. No projection. No trick. It's just the sky. Actual weather. Clouds moving over Queens whether you showed up or not. But the frame is so exact the sky stops acting like background. It starts to look placed. Almost like a flat field. Like color somebody set into the ceiling. That's the weird part. Something you know is endless suddenly looks edited. Turrell said his work is more about your seeing than his seeing. That's exactly what happens here. He's not changing the sky. He's changing the conditions under which you notice it. And once that happens, the whole thing gets strange fast. Blue deepens. Gray flattens. Cloud cover changes the emotional temperature in ten seconds. The room stays still, but the thing you came to look at won't hold still. That's why the title is so good. Meeting. Not watching. Not observing. Meeting. Because most of the time the sky is just there. Useful, maybe. Annoying, maybe. But background. Here, it stops being background. And once that happens, you realize how rare it is to look at something this familiar long enough for it to become strange again.