A Conversation between Diane Burko (DB) and James Turrell (JT) Philadelphia, 9 April 2008.

DB: I still have your flight map on my studio wall — from our flying in your Helio Courier into the Grand Canyon over Lake Powell in 1977. So transformative for me: hovering over the glistening artificial lakes below with the walls so close. That’s when I first began to photograph my own images from the air. Thank you!

JT: And you are still at it I see. But not using them for the paintings — making them as objects themselves here. These images are taken from either above or underneath. Actually, of course, that’s in terms of where we’re going, compositionally, the situation where there’s no up nor down, no left nor right, is where we’re headed. Whether it’s into space or it’s into cyberspace, we don’t have that sense of gravity any more, and that’s really, I think, the important thing. That’s kind of a de-compositional idea for many, because of horizon lines, but it’s more of an organized composition in other aspects, which I find more exciting here with these images.

DB: I like looking up and looking down.

JT: It works with the modern space that we are headed towards.

DB: When I first started painting the landscape, it was much more traditional — foreground, background. Now, this is what compels me. Jim, where are you in space when you think about space?

JT: I do like to view down in terms of looking at the earth. That’s in terms of earthly kinds of things. Other than that I like to look up. Just looking upwards at all sorts of things is very important.

DB: Looking up, looking down. As artists, do we direct how others look?

JT: Yes. But I don’t think our looking is any different than the viewers.

DB: But you place the viewer where you want them don’t you?

JT: Everyone does that. And that sort of says, Well okay, you’re making all these for yourself… There are times when you are the best viewer. You make subtle differences that no one will even know about — or won’t follow if they did know about them. On the other hand, there are places where you are going through your struggles… Whatever it took to get that image has changed some of your views. So that you are not always as fresh a viewer as another might be. There is an idealized viewer. Sometimes we can be that ourselves. Often we are not.

DB: Space and water can both present such possibilities. You’ve used water in your work?

JT: There are quite a few you have to enter by going underneath, underwater to go inside. You actually have to be baptized or go to the mikvah before you go into the space.

DB: Your sky spaces. Do you imagine them as you are creating them — with water or with rain? Or does it matter to you?

JT: I feel we are bottom-dwellers on the ocean of error. They call people who are on the ground that all the time: bottom-dwellers, ground-pounders. Basically, the people on the ground know the ground by the maze. When people first learn to fly, they get up, can see one hundred miles, but they cannot find the airport. Suddenly, it’s a whole new organization of everything. And Diane, all you have to do is, you know you have your studio, where you have all your problems and projects and everything laid out. And you are thinking about it and you fly over and it’s about that big openness — all these tremendous problems that you have are not out there.

DB: When I was lying on the ground looking up at this rain, it did transport me into another world.

JT: Water is magical. It has such interesting properties in its changes of state. For instance, to get it to change state, you have to over-warm it to get it to go to water. You can’t just have it be thirty-two. ’Cause it won’t change state… Also super-cool water. If you fly, you know that you can have water that is well below zero that is actually water. There is just so little pressure that it doesn’t become a solid. It does when it touches your plane. Which is then kind of disastrous. It can actually go over the entire structure of the plane — not just the leading edge.

DB: That sounds dangerous.

JT: Some of these things are really interesting. There can be fogs of super-cool water. Many of the lenticular clouds you see — the very thin clouds that are formed by a föhn or by the mistral, as they call it. Föhn to be German. Mistral would be French. They are composed of super-cool water that is actually not ice.

DB: I was once in a mistral in Aix. I travelled in Iceland discovering shades of ice. What wonderful stuff to react to.

JT: And those things above — everything in there is a standing wave. The air comes up and it precipitates as water as it rises and it then goes back into the solution at the end of the cloud. So this cloud is not solid — there is water moving through it all the time. You think of a cloud just staying there but in fact, it’s not stationary.

DB: A constantly changing phenomenon.

JT: Yes, water is a very interesting solution. It’s a very magical thing.