“And then, you start to perceive the sky the way it actually exists and not the way our mind interprets it and you realize the sky is really a big oval on top of you,” Fielder said.
The true experience of Roden Crater is not so much the earth, the structures or the architectural interventions James has created inside, according to Olga Viso, a senior adviser to Tepper who is the liaison between ASU and the Skystone Foundation. She is a renowned independent curator and arts consultant who has known Turrell for years.
“As James likes to say, the work is really about you seeing yourself seeing,” she said.
“He’s creating conditions that allow you to pause, to sense, to isolate specific experiences like understanding the amplification of your own voice or of tracing the path or arc of the sun or moon across the landscape.”
Viso said that one of the planned installations will be a spherical space that, at certain times of the day, will project the adjacent Painted Desert into the crater, bringing this breathtaking exterior landscape inside and into the viewer’s field of perception.
The course that Fielder took was called “Volcanic Arts and Sciences,” taught by Lance Gharavi, a professor in the School of Film, Dance and Theatre, and Ed Garnero, a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration.
“The class was all about finding the intersection between volcanic sciences and art and blending those to create a showcase performance that we will be performing in February,” Fielder said. “It was an interesting experience in combining different areas of art and science.”
That’s the kind of innovative collaboration that Roden Crater will inspire, Tepper said.
“That’s why James is interested in working with ASU — he wants this artwork to not be exclusive but to be generative of ideas and open to people who otherwise might not experience it, and open to people in other fields,” he said.
The academic work has been exciting for Turrell, Viso noted.
“He’s said it’s a fantastic learning experience ...” she said. “Working closely with an academic institution and with students is pushing him into areas of inquiry that he hadn’t anticipated.”
Viso is involved in working out details of what the site might look like, with a visitor and discovery center that educates participants on Turrell’s body of work as well as the volcanic, geologic and human history of the region. She said the hope is that Roden Crater will also boost tourism and provide economic development opportunities in the area, drawing visitors from around the world.
One of the field lab classes under way this semester is called “Indigenous Stories and Sky Science,” which is significant because the crater is located in the ancestral homelands of a variety of indigenous groups, including the Hopi and Navajo peoples. The course is taught by Wanda Dalla Costa, Institute Professor in the Herberger Institute, an architect and a member of the Saddle Lake First Nation in Alberta, Canada.
“James Turrell is one of the masters who’s not an architect but is an influential figure in architecture because it’s all about the perception, which is what we’re aiming to create in the best-case scenario,” she said.
“He’s very interested in seeing where the synergies are between what he’s done with light and perception and land art and the indigenous worldview.”
Dalla Costa teaches through an indigenous lens, which means collaborating with people from the local community. Her course will include talks by a Navajo math professor who teaches about the Navajo science of astronomy and an archeologist who is from the Hopi reservation, among others.
“They will help us navigate and mediate those sensitive cultural-knowledge boundaries, because it’s really important for me to get this right,” she said.
“We’ll ask ourselves, ‘Whose story is this, and how do we make it have value for the community?’”
Like all the field labs, her class will visit Roden Crater, but to give context, she’ll take the class to other locations in the Navajo and Hopi communities as well. The work will culminate in an exhibition.
“A lot of what we’re studying is representation and how we’re doing a service to contemporary representation and how we can make that authentic,” she said. “I think our exhibition will be an exploration and communication on how we’ve had this science here for a long time.”
While completion of Roden Crater is likely several years away, Viso said that this is a good time for the ASU community to be reminded of the power of Turrell’s work by visiting “Air Apparent,” just northeast of Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building 4 on the Tempe campus. The work, part of Turrell’s Skyspace series, was installed in 2012 and is open to the public 24 hours a day.
“Air Apparent” is best enjoyed at sunrise and sunset, when the changing effects of light can be observed over time, Viso said.
“James is trying to show us that the sky, the earth, humanity and everything around us are in a constant state of evolution and transformation.”
Top photo: Alpha (East) Tunnel looking toward the East Portal at Roden Crater. Copyright James Turrell/Photo by Klaus Obermeyer
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