The California Light and Space movement included artists like Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell who explored light, space, and perception. They used light, glass, and other translucent materials to create immersive installations that blurred the boundaries between object and environment. By manipulating light and optics, they aimed to produce perceptual effects that confounded vision and approached sensory alteration.

1. California Light + Space Movement
Art 109A: Art since 1945
Westchester Community College
Fall 2012
Dr. Melissa Hall

2. West Coast
Minimalism
On the West Coast, a number of
artists explored ideas that
paralleled New York Minimalism
The Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, 1962
Artnet

3. “By the mid-1960s California artists had
West Coast
embraced Minimalism and given it a
Minimalism
uniquely West Coast spin in the Los
Angeles Fetish Finish and Light and
Space movements. Artists such as
Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Craig
Kauffman, and DeWain Valentine were
incorporating into their work the latest
technologies of the Southern California
based engineering and aerospace
industries to develop sensuous, light-
filled objects”
http://www.ocma.net/index.html?
page=past&show=exhibit&e_id=401
The Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, 1962
Artnet

4. West Coast
Minimalism
John McCracken created
Minimalist works that
incorporated pop
references in their titles and
slick lacquer finish
John McCracken
Image source: http://venice-in-venice.com/mccracken-john.html

5. West Coast
Minimalism
Designed to lean directly against
the wall, his “planks” exist in an
uncertain place between painting
and sculpture
John McCracken, Think Pink, 1967
Image source:
http://artobserved.com/2011/02/go-see-turin-john-mccracken-at-castello-di-rivoli-through-
june-19th-2011/

6. West Coast
Minimalism
“McCracken began producing his vibrant
lacquered monochrome "planks" in 1966.
While the polished resin surface recalls
the aesthetic of 1960s southern
California surfboard and Kustom Kar
cultures, the title was drawn from
advertising slogans in fashion
magazines. The plank's interaction with
both the floor and wall is meant to call
attention to the space occupied by both
viewer and object. ‘I see the plank as
existing between two worlds’ McCracken
says, ‘the floor representing the physical
world of standing objects, trees, cars,
buildings, human bodies, and everything,
and the wall representing the world of
the imagination, illusionistic painting
space, human mental space, and all
that.’”
Museum of Modern Art
John McCracken, Think Pink, 1967
Image source:
http://artobserved.com/2011/02/go-see-turin-john-mccracken-at-castello-di-rivoli-through-
june-19th-2011/

7. West Coast
Minimalism
Larry Bell began working with the
minimalist form of the cube, using
glass to explore the complexities of
perception
Larry Bell with cube at Jacobson Howard Gallery, New York City,
2005. Photo by Jennifer Lynch
http://artandliving.net/2008/05/13/art-spotlight-interview-with-ed-
moses-and-larry-bell/

8. “With their enclosed rectilinear shapes, the
cubes bear a resemblance to Minimalist
sculptures that were being made
contemporaneously in New York. But like
other Light-and-Space artists active in Los
Angeles in the 1960s, Bell was interested
less in literal, material objects than in the
nature of our perception. At the same time
that they carve out and define a given
volume of space, works like 20" Untitled
1969 (Tom Messer Cube) become a
continuum of their surrounding space, partly
reflecting whatever happens to be in the
environment while also permitting the
viewer to see through them from every
angle. By setting some of his cubes on clear
Plexiglas pedestals, Bell further collapses
their physical presence and produces a
sense of weightlessness. The gray-tinged
cube of this work seems more substantial
than its invisible base and appears to hover
in the air.”
Guggenheim Museum
Larry Bell, 20" Untitled 1969 (Tom Messner Cube), 1969
Guggenheim

9. Larry Bell, Untitled, 1969
http://www.quotestemple.com/Quotes/larry-bell-quote-hes-not-going-to-win-but-my-vote-is-a-vote-for-having-more

10. California Light
and Space
Movement
The California light and space
movement included artists such as
Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and James
Turrell
Robert Irwin in the Robert CaplanArtist-in-Residence Studio MCASD Jacobs Building, on July 11,
2007. Photograph by Stephanie Diani
http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/robert-irwin-2/

11. California Light
and Space
Movement
They used light and scrims to
create extraordinary perceptual
experiences that border on mind-
altering encounters
Doug Wheeler, Light Encasement, 1968

12. Doug Wheeler, 68 VEN MCASD 11, 1968/2011. Exhibition view Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface.

13. “This untitled work is a
convex, spray-painted disk
held a foot or so out from
the wall by a central post. Its
subtle, tactile surface
modulates delicately from
center to edge, and it is
softly lit from four angles,
creating a cloverleaf pattern
of shadow. The white center
of the disk can seem to lie
level with the white wall, so
that the eye spends time
trying to understand what it
sees—what is nearer and
what is farther, what is solid
and what is immaterial light,
or even light's absence. For
Irwin, the result is ‘this
indeterminate physicality
with different levels of
weight and density, each on
a different physical plane. It
[is] very beautiful and quite
confusing, everything
starting and reversing.’”
Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1968
Museum of Modern Art
Synthetic polymer paint on aluminum and electric light, Disc 60 3/8" (153.2 cm) in diameter
Museum of Modern Art

14. “The idea, in part,
extends the Abstract
Expressionist notion of
an infinite, all–
encompassing, allover
field, but with the
qualification that for Irwin,
‘To be an artist is not a
matter of making
paintings or objects at all.
What we are really
dealing with is our state
of consciousness and the
shape of our
perceptions.’”
Museum of Modern Art
Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1968
Synthetic polymer paint on aluminum and electric light, Disc 60 3/8" (153.2 cm) in diameter
Museum of Modern Art

15. “To be an artist is not a
matter of making
paintings or objects at all.
What we are really
dealing with is our state
of consciousness and the
shape of our perception.”
Robert Irwin
Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1968
SFMOMA

16. “My art has never been
about ideas . . . . My
interest in art has never
been about abstraction; it
has always been about
experience . . . . My
pieces were never meant
to be dealt with
intellectually as ideas, but
to be considered
experientially.”
Robert Irwin
Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1968
SFMOMA

17. “What I would like to do is
to make you aware that
you see and that, by not
being able to prejudice
the situation, you
suddenly become party
to an entirely different
structure of the state of
the real. It’s you that
does it, not me. So it
can’t really manifest itself
as an idea, or an object,
or an event because any
of these things becomes
distracting and at least in
part about itself.”
Robert Irwin
Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1968
SFMOMA

18. “If light is the medium
and space is the medium,
then, in a sense, the
universe is the medium. I
know the impracticality of
it right now but when I
say that the medium is
the universe, that maybe
the world is an art form,
then the gardening of our
universe or our
consciousness would be
the level of our art
participation . . . . That’s
the reason for my
participation in some
other activities.”
Robert Irwin
Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1968
SFMOMA

19. James Turrell
James Turrell’s work is
based on his studies of
psychology and perception
James Turrell at Roden Crater
http://www.rodencrater.com/james.html

20. “Turrell’s work involves explorations
in light and space that speak to
viewers without words, impacting the
eye, body, and mind with the force of
a spiritual awakening. ‘I want to
create an atmosphere that can be
consciously plumbed with seeing,’
says the artist, “like the wordless
thought that comes from looking in a
fire.’”
James Turrell Art:21 (PBS)
James Turrell, Alta (White), 1967

21. “James Turrell has been building rooms to
which he has given the name 'Skyspace'
since 1974. A chamber of certain
dimensions is constructed; containing only
seating, lighting and an aperture in the
ceiling, in which visitors can sit and gaze at
the sky.”
James Turrell Deer Shelter (Art Fund
Comsion)
James Turrell, Live Oak Friends Meeting
House, 2001
Houston, Texas

22. “The reason I started the Skyspace series
was to get a situation where the sky was
actually brought down in close contact --
there’s long been an art where light is the
subject, I want it also to be the material.
How these things are brought close to you
so they become part of your territory is
something very important to me.”
James Turrell
James Turrell, Deer Shelter, 2006
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, U.K.

23. “Whether harnessing the light at sunset or
transforming the glow of a television set into a
fluctuating portal, Turrell’s art places viewers in a
realm of pure experience”
James Turrell Art:21 (PBS)
James Turrell, Tall Glass, 2007
Pace Wildenstein

24. Manipulating light as a sculptor
would mold clay, James Turrell
creates works that amplify
perception. Unlike pictorial art that
replicates visual experience
through mimetic illusion, Turrell’s
light works—one cannot call these
shimmering events ”objects“ or
”images“—give form to
perception. Each installation
activates a heightened sensory
awareness that promotes
discovery: what seems to be a
lustrous, suspended cube is
actually the conjunction of two flat
panels of projected light; a
rectangle of radiant color hovering
in front of a wall is really a deep,
illuminated depression in the
space; a velvety black square on
the ceiling is, in reality, a portal to
the night sky. With such effects,
Turrell hopes to coax the viewer
into a state of self-reflexivity in
which one can see oneself
seeing.”
James Turrell, Night Passage, 1987 Guggenheim Museum
Rectangular cut in partition wall, fluorescent and tungsten lamps, and fixtures
Guggenheim Museum

25. “Throughout history, the artist has been a
shaper of matter, whether the pigment of an
image or the solid substance of sculpture. A
Frontal Passage, like other works by Turrell,
breaks from those ancient traditions in that it
has no mass. Instead, Turrell shapes light.”
James Turrell, Frontal Passage, 1994 Museum of Modern Art
MOMA

26. “To view A Frontal Passage, the visitor passes
through a darkened entryway into a chamber, also
dark—but divided diagonally by a radiant yet
crisply defined wall of red light. Instead of diffusing
freely from one side of this wall to the other, the
light ends abruptly in space, as if it had density.
The power of the work lies in this paradox, in
which nothingness gains physical presence.”
Museum of Modern Art
James Turrell, Frontal Passage, 1994
MOMA

27. ”My work is more about your seeing than it
is about my seeing”
James Turrell
James Turrell, Frontal Passage, 1994
MOMA

28. California Light
and Space
Movement
Turrell’s most recent project is
Roden Crater -- an extinct volcano
that the artist is transforming into a
celestial observatory
James Turrell, Roden Crater, near Flagstaff, Arizona

29. James Turrell, Roden Crater, near Flagstaff, Arizona

30. James Turrell, Roden Crater, near Flagstaff, Arizona

31. James Turrell, Roden Crater, near Flagstaff, Arizona

32. James Turrell, Roden Crater, near Flagstaff, Arizona