FLYING INTO THE LIGHT.(Roden Crater project - light artist James Turrell)(Interview)(Critical Essay)

For sheer aesthetic tenacity, nothing beats the saga of James Turrell and the Roden Crater. Since 1974, Turrell's working life has centered on the effort to turn an extinct volcano on the western edge of the Painted Desert, in northern Arizona, into a naked-eye observatory for celestial events. Turrell is an artist whose medium is light. His work is not about light, or a record of light; it is light--the physical presence of light made manifest in sensory form. At the crater, he has built nine underground chambers and one huge outdoor space (the crater's bowl) "to capture and apprehend light" from the sun and the moon and the stars--and also to demonstrate how we create and form our perceptions of the visible world. After years of struggling just to hold on to the land and keep the project going, Turrell has received substantial funding from two private foundations in the last four years. The first phase of construction is virtually complete as a result, but a great deal remains to be done, and the future of the crater, whose total cost will probably exceed twenty million dollars, is far from assured. As obsessions go, this one could outlive Turrell.

At the wheel of his dark-blue diesel pickup, careering down a dirt road and accelerating around curves to minimize vibration from the washboard surface, the artist manages to look both rugged and distinguished. Turrell, who is fifty-nine, is a big man, big in the shoulders and chest, and, these days, in the middle as well. He wears jeans and cowboy boots, and a made-to-order shirt of pin-striped blue gabardine, with buffalo nickels for buttons. His hair is white, and so is his full beard and flowing mustache. A mountainous serenity envelops him as he sits behind the wheel, steering with one hand and pointing out things with the other as we hurtle past. "There you see some first-time mothers with their calves," he says, waving at two dozen small and smaller dark-brown cows. "The heifers will have theirs a little later." Turrell became a cattle rancher sixteen years ago, so that he could get a bank loan on his land--banks don't lend money to develop craters as art works. His ranch, Walking Cane, now has just under a thousand head of cattle on a hundred and fifty-six square miles of land, about half of which he owns outright. (He leases grazing rights to the rest.) "It's paid off," he says. "Agriculture is actually subsidizing art. I'm not sure if it's harder making a living as a rancher or an artist, but I think people behave better in ranching."

The crater is about half an hour's drive from Turrell's modest ranch house and studio, which makes it an hour from Flagstaff. The landscape changes dramatically as the altitude drops, from Flagstaff's seven thousand feet to five thousand at the crater. Ponderosa pines and aspens give way to pinon and juniper, and now we are barrelling along through arid grasslands on the eastern edge of the San Francisco volcanic plateau. Rounded cinder cones loom on all sides, some much bigger than Roden. "That's Saddle Crater," Turrell says, "the one that looks like a shark took a bite out of it. There's one called Merrill Crater, after a member of the family that made Merrill Lynch, although I think it should be after another member, James Merrill, an amazing poet." A little farther along, he points out a tiny log house, which he built in the early eighties and lived in for nineteen months, studying the crater and the light and "trying to understand what happens throughout the year." When Roden Crater comes into view a few minutes later, it is instantly clear why he chose it: a symmetrical, black-and-red cone that's all by itself in the landscape, with an unobstructed horizon. "There were four parts to its explosive cycle," Turrell explains, "and you're looking at two of them. The black crater was first. The red crater blew out of it later. That was three hundred and eighty-nine thousand years ago. It's kind of a young crater, modest in scale, but very handsome. We're coming to a place here where the two of them look almost like that painting by Man Ray, of lips in the sky. Do you see it?" I see it. Northern Arizona is irresistibly pictorial. The red-rock country around Sedona, sixty miles to the south, inspired not only John Ford but Max Ernst, who lived there for a while in the nineteen-forties. The silhouetted buttes in the backgrounds of Krazy Kat comics were drawn mostly from life by George Herriman, who spent a lot of time in Flagstaff.

Driving slowly now, Turrell navigates the winding dirt road up Roden Crater. It's four-thirty in the afternoon, and the work crew has just knocked off for the day. (Navajos compose a large portion of the construction crew on the crater; their lands lie to the east.) Halfway up, he stops to show me the nearly finished guest lodge. It is built right into the black cinder slope, an elegantly spare concrete bunker with floor-to-ceiling windows facing south across the valley. Turrell designed every facet and detail, including the furniture, which is being made. There is a suavely efficient kitchen, and four bedrooms with private baths. Two other lodges are planned, elsewhere on the crater. All three together will ...