Universiteit Gent

Academiejaar 2011-2012

Master in de Kunstwetenschappen

Space and the Visible

Visual and spatial de-/ and per-ception in the works of Dan Graham and James Turrell

Masterproef voorgelegd aan de Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte,

Vakgroep Kunst- Muziek- en Theaterwetenschappen

Voor het verkrijgen van de graad van Master door

Milena Behnke (00918433)
Promotor: prof. dr. Steven Jacobs
Contents

1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 3
2 Spatial per-/de-ception ........................................................................................................ 8
2.1 James Turrell’s light spaces .......................................................................................... 12
2.1.1 Dark Spaces ......................................................................................................... 15
2.1.2 Ganzfeld Pieces ................................................................................................... 17
2.2 Dan Graham’s (in-) visible structures .......................................................................... 20
2.2.1 Which way to go? Mirror-mazes .......................................................................... 22
2.2.2 “Mirror, mirror...“ is the wall. ............................................................................... 28
3 Trying to make sense of the senses ....................................................................................... 31
3.1 (Spatial) Experience .................................................................................................... 35
3.1.1 Optic-haptic......................................................................................................... 39
3.2 Visible – Invisible........................................................................................................ 45
3.2.1 “Making seeing visible” ........................................................................................ 50
4 Space and the individual body ............................................................................................ 55
4.1 Positioning the spectator ............................................................................................. 59
4.2 Inside – Outside .......................................................................................................... 64
4.2.1 On entering and leaving ....................................................................................... 72
4.3 Private vs. public space ............................................................................................... 76
5 Conclusion......................................................................................................................... 79
6 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 82
7 Appendix ........................................................................................................................... 89
8 Figures ............................................................................................................................... 90

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1 Introduction

Space is a seemingly ordinary everyday concept. However, it proves, after close consideration, to
be a notion holding manifold meanings. The term space can generally be associated with different
meanings on various semantic levels. Among the definitions are e.g. the understanding of space
as “a continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied,” or, of course, space
describing “the dimensions of height, depth, and width within which all things exist and move.”1
However, the long and short of it is: “Space is existential, yet relative. It is specific to different
cultures and closely related to the habitat of its members.”2 Likewise, the poles of light and
darkness seem to reveal only two possible outcomes, which are visibility and its unevitable
counterpart, invisibility. Blumenberg muses about this relationship: “Light and darkness can
represent the absolute metaphysical counterforces that exclude each other and yet bring the
world-constellation into existence.”3 However, what if these opposites prove to be more
reconcilable as one tends to think? What if space is not simply the environment one moves in
about, and seemingly visible realities turn out to be a set of mirages?

To sharpen the situation: What if the human body is deprived of one of its five senses, or just the
opposite; if it is overstimulated? This situation is tested on the supposedly quietest place on earth,
the “Anechoic Test Chamber” at Orfield Laboratories (Minneapolis, USA). Apparently, the
complete silence one can experience there feels oppressing after a short period of time, until it
becomes unbearable and one has to leave the room.4 Also, being in that chamber one ought to sit
down, as the absence of sound seizes the body’s inborn sense of balance, as a result one’s natural
perception of the surrounding space is distorted. In this paper, the concepts of “space and the
visible,” and what is more, their distortion will be expored by the example of the works of the
American artists James Turrell and Dan Graham. It will be assumed that the artists, who both

1 Cf. s.v. "space" in: Oxford Online Dictionary, URL:

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/space?q=space (05/08/2012).
2 Adolf Krischanitz, "Introduction: James Turrell, the material side of nothing," in James Turrell: Perceptual Cells, ed. Jiri

Svestka, Alison Sarah Jacques, and Brigitte WontorraKunstverein fuሷr die Rheinlande und Westfalen (Ostfildern-Ruit:
Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1992), 7.
3 Hans Blumenberg, "Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,"

in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 31.
4 cf. Ted Thornhill, "The world's quietest place is a chamber at Orfield Laboratories," (2012),

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2124581/The-worlds-quietest-place-chamber-Orfield-
Laboratories.html.

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started working around the late 1960s, create distinct manifestations of visual and spatial
perception with their artworks.

Turrell and Graham have made it their main object to work with vision and/in space. Graham, on
the one hand is usually classified as a Conceptual artist, Turrell on the other is generally associated
with the Light and Space Movement. In fact, this assignment into certain artistic groups seems
somehow arbitrary; e.g. the statement “as immaterial as Conceptual art, Light and Space art
focuses less on ideas than on sensory perceptions”5 does not necessarily apply to Graham’s
mindset.

Two-way mirror pavilions as well as installations including mirrors and video (delayed-) playback
constitute a large part of Graham’s œuvre. James Turrell works exclusively with light but even
more so, as he stresses, with perception. In fact, it is precisely the subjectmatter of perception that
links the two artists and their works; “Mine always involved the question of the audience, its
perception of itself and performance in the act of perceiving,”6 Graham expresses about his art.
In contrast with Graham’s spaces, which open up in their own mirrored reflection, Turrell creates
visual spaces, among which interiors saturated with light or even the very opposite; darkness. What
unifies the artists is not only the fact that they both engage in land art; Turrell with his life-project
the Roden Crater (situated in Arizona, USA) and Graham with his various pavilions placed in
gardens, urban areas or public green spaces but they both employ a specific way of creating
exeptional spaces with their artworks. The way in which the artists deal with the viewers’
perception, thereby actively engaging the beholders in the artwork and alienating them at the
same time, is what makes it worthwile to analyze Graham’s and Turrell’s œuvres.

In this thesis, several of their artworks will be examined carefully according to how Turrell and
Graham deal with rendering a sense of space and visibility. The different works of these two
artists reveal interesting aspects on how we perceive space and how easily our senses and minds
can be deceived. Graham’s and Turrell’s works are distorting - they heighten the awareness of
one’s perception of the world. They may change one’s understanding of the bodily senses, just as
the test chamber in Orfield certainly would. Dan Graham succeeds in unsettling the viewer’s self-
perception with his video/film-installations, sometimes even in a playful manner. To some
degree these installations might be called situational extensions of his two-way mirror pavilions, the
5 Robert Atkins, "Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years - Light and Space art,"
http://www.moca.org/pc/viewArtTerm.php?id=21. (MOCA is the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.)
6 Dan Graham and Ludger Gerdes, "Dan Graham Interviewed by Ludger Gerdes (1991)," in Two-Way Mirror Power,

ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 66-67.

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latter of which will form the basis of this analysis of Graham’s works. James Turrell’s way of
bestowing light with certain unique qualities that cause the viewer to experience it as something
out of the ordinary, as divine even, is what most likely makes his artworks so unforgettable. The
same goes for his dark chambers, the Dark Spaces. The brilliancy of light and color in some of
his artworks makes the light appear heavy or thick. In fact, often the light appears to be source-
less, which is what astonishes the viewer the most. “Usually we see light as informing us about
something else than itself,”7 Turrell says. What is it that becomes visible in Turrell’s installations
then? He suggests it is pure light and that beholders can see themselves seeing. This statement will be
put into question. James Turrell creates with his Ganzfeld Pieces, Dark Spaces, or Perceptual
Cells spaces that are almost as extreme in their effects on the visitor as the Anechoic Test
Chamber. It will be these three series on which the interpretational focus will lie.

This paper’s goal is not to provide an overview of the artists œuvres but it will nevertheless
describe some of the artists works in detail followed by various in-depth analyses demonstrating
how and if certain aspects relating to the main topic of the study; i.e. space and the visible, are
rendered in Graham’s/Turrell’s art. The structure of this paper is threefold. In the first section,
i.e. chapter 2 “Spatial per-/de-deption,” the focus lies on the fact that often a rather spatial
deception takes place than a regular spatial perception in the discussed art works. “Perception
involves the sense organs (including the body) and the mind, but is also situated in and mediated
by a geographical and cultural environment,”8 Paul Rodaway writes. This fact will be thoroughly
taken into consideration and further elaborated on. Second, Turrell’s works will be examined
more closely, followed up by Graham’s art pieces. This part forms a basis for the analyses in the
subsequent chapters by introducing and explaining the nature of the two artists’ work. In the
second section, i.e. chapter 3 “Trying to make sense of the senses,” the bodily senses will be
addressed. This includes a closer examination of the individual’s general spatial perception and
important sensing systems, namely the somatic senses of the body, as well as contrasting
juxtapositions such as “optic-haptic” or “visible-invisible.” The last section, chapter 4, will deal
with “Space and the individual body.” In this last part, the (special) position the spectator
acquires in Graham’s and Turrell’s artworks will be accounted for as well as essential
characteristics of the artists’ artworks such as the notion of “inside-outside” (including “entering
and leaving” and “private vs. public space”) which will constitute the last subchapter. In order to
illustrate certain installations better, lengthy descriptions will be provided in the supplementary

7 JT in: Eva Schürmann, Erscheinen und Wahrnehmen - Eine vergleichende Studie zur Kunst von James Turrell und der Philosophie
Merleau-Pontys (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000). 83.
8 Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place (London: Routledge, 1994). 13.

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appendix. The conclusion will reveal that notions of space and visibility, which seem ordinary and
easy to grasp at first, turn out to be quite multi-layered and form an interesting basis for this
paper.

Literary sources on the art of Dan Graham can be criticized on several accounts. Admittedly,
Graham himself has provided valuable descriptions and interpretations on his artworks.
Consequently, his texts are featured to a great extent in most overviews or catalogues with
reference to his artworks.9 At first glance, Marie-Paule MacDonald appears to be providing a
satisfying candid interpretation of his work; unfortunately it is in large part based on Graham’s
own statements as well.10 Indeed, his commentaries are brief and apposite observations.
Nevertheless, it would be of academic benefit to learn more about the validity of the current
interpretative texts and respectively add to the existing corpus of research. With regard to
informational sources about James Turrell, Craig Adcock (1990) has especially provided
substantial material on Turrell’s œuvre up to the 90s. A more recent catalogue accompanying an
exhibtion in Wolfsburg in 2009, edited by Markus Brüderlin, focuses primarily on a large
Ganzfeld Piece as well as on various objects and studies relating to the Roden Crater but in turn
insufficiently on other essential works of Turrell. Strikingly, several texts show the same recurring
pattern of being written from a very personal viewpoint describing the respective authors’
experiences with Turrell’s works, or how they travelled to Turrell’s major project, the Roden
Crater at Flagstaff.11 To some extent this kind of approach raises as many questions as it answers
but can luckily be balanced by other more scientific-founded essays.12 Graham’s and Turrell’s
own statements on their art in the form of written texts or interviews are valuable. However,
these sources of information can exhibit several weaknesses, as they obviously tend to represent
the artists personal reflections. This is why various other significant authors will be consulted
also. In doing so, particular attention will be paid to the overarching concepts underlying the
works of James Turrell and Dan Graham belonging to fields of sociology, geography, philosophy
or perceptual psychology Therefore, the theoretical framework is based on the just mentionend
9 Cf. e.g. Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).; Martin
Köttering and Roland Nachtigäller, eds., Dan Graham. Two-Way Mirror Pavilions / Einwegspiegel- Pavillons 1989-1996
(Nordhorn: Städtische Galerie Nordhorn, 1996).; or Marianne Brouwer, "Dan Graham : Works 1965-2000,"
(Düsseldorf Richter Verlag, 2001).
10 Marie-Paule MacDonald, "Matéralisations. Production de masse, espace public et convention architecturale dans

l'œuvre de Dan Graham," in Dan Graham, ed. Alain Charre, Marie-Paule MacDonald, and Marc Perelman (Paris:
Éditions Dis Voir, 1995).
11 For example: Annelie Lütgens (The Wolfsburg Project, 2009, pp. 108-121), or Peter Weber in "Sky People: A

travelogue" (The Wolfsburg Project, 2009, pp. 18-51), Michael Rotondi in "Trip to the painted desert" (The Other
horizon, 2001, pp. 190-192), or Daniel Birnbaum in "Eyes and Notes on the Sun" (The Other horizon, 2001, pp.
226-231).
12 Patrick Beveridge, "Color Perception and the Art of James Turrell," Leonardo 33, no. 4 (2000).; or Nina Zschocke,

Der irritierte Blick: Kunstrezeption und Aufmerksamkeit (Paderborn / München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006).

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manifold acadamic fields.. Authors and their works relating to these fields are inter alia Walter
Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project (begun in 1927), Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenological theories (1948 ff.), Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space (1974) or James J.
Gibson’s Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1968).

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2 Spatial per-/de-ception

Ça ne vous fait pas cet effet-là, à vous: quand je ne me vois pas, j’ai beau me tâter, je me
demande si j’existe pour de vrai.13
(Estelle in: Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis-Clos)

Mirrors and light are the materials Dan Graham and James Turrell employ in order to heighten
the viewer’s perception. The change of spatial perception into a spatial deception is a recurrant theme
in the œuvres of Turrell and Graham. One of the effects of this change of experience is that the
beholder’s spatial awareness in everyday life is enhanced. A common mistake made is “to equate
perception with subjective experience.”14 Perception, however, cannot be brought down to a
segregated sensory experience but is a multi-layered process whose components are not easily
singled out. Apart from the individual’s willpower, the body constantly perceives the encompassing
world. The way space is understood as an entity around and within an individual will be focused on
in this chapter.

No mirrors but constant dazzling light; this is how Jean-Paul Sartre furnishes his chamber of Hell
in Huis-Clos, a one-act play in which premiered in 1944. At first instance this description sounds
quite like one of James Turrell’s Ganzfeld Pieces, also known as total visual fields. In Turrell’s
works a notion of solitude and architectural limitlessness prevails; either the actual spatial limits
of his installation are blurred, as is the case in the Ganzfeld Pieces or Dark Spaces, or he plants
strangely solid, three-dimensional objects in a dark chamber, which turn out to be pure light
constructions. The latter are referred to as Projection Pieces, one of which an example is Catso,
Blue (1967) (Fig. 1 and 1a ).

In the storyline of Huis-Clos, three individuals find themselves abandoned together in a room
after they have died. The torments of the afterlife, however, do not consist of unbearable heat
and excruciating pain, but of the permanent judgements of the Others. There is no darkness in
Sartre’s Hell, the convicts have to endure an ever shining light, not even a blink of the eye is
granted to them. Thus, Sartre does not associate light with something healing or pure, as is

13 "Don’t you feel the same way (?), when I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist."
- Character 'Estelle' in: Jean-Paul Sartre, "Huis-Clos: Pièce en un acte," in Théatre: Les Mouches, Huis-Clos, Morts sans
Sépulture, La Putain respecteuse (Paris: Édition Gallimard, 1947), 148-49.
14 Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place: 13.

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commonly believed.15 Martin Jay explains Sartre’s view on the notions of the Self and the Other
as follows: The “fundamental property of the subject is [...] threatened when the self identifies
with the Other's look. Here the Cartesian self-reflecting cogito is replaced by a self that is
constituted by the gaze of the Other: l'Autre me voit, donc je suis.”16 Sartre’s idea of the individual
who depends on the Other’s evaluation in order to constitute a sense of Self calls into mind
Charles Horton Cooley’s concept of the Looking-glass self. Cooley developed this concept in his
book Human Nature and the Social Order ([1902] 1922).17 His study proposes that one forms an
“imagination of how one’s self – that is any idea he appropriates – appears in a particular mind,
and the kind of self-feeling one has is determined by the attitude toward this attributed to that
other mind.” He concludes: “A social self of this sort might be called the reflected or looking-glass self.”18
In fact, looking glass is another expression for mirror glass, which today is no longer in frequent
use, though probably best known from Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the looking-glass (1872).19
Sartre’s play and Cooley’s social psychological term of the looking-glass self illustrates appositely the
subjects not only touched upon by James Turrell’s art but the more so by Dan Graham’s art. This
will be elaborated on later, especially in chapter 4. Graham confronts individuals with their own
image in his pavilions and installation pieces, as well as with images of (Sartre’s) Others, as he
involves the spectator in absorbing instances of looking and being-looked-at.20 Indeed, Graham
describes the purpose of the installation Public Space/Two Audiences (1976) (Fig. 2 and 2a) to be a
constant interaction of visitors viewing, gazing, observing themselves or others, watching the
others as they are watching themselves and so forth.21

Sartre’s Estelle cannot bear the fact that in Hell she will not be able to see herself in a mirror
again, she feels as if she will dissolve if she does not have the confirmation of her Self that the
mirror-image usually provides her with. In spite of withholding the visitors’ images from them,
Graham confronts them intensely with their laterally reversed Selves in his pavilions. Turrell’s
installations usually are divided into the two elements of viewing space and sensing space, the latter of

15Members of he religious "Quaker" group for example, a community wherein Turrell grew up, attend meetings
where "you go to enter yourself, to greet the light," Turrell asserts. In: Almine Rech, "The Eye of the Beholder," in
Rencontres 9: James Turrell, ed. Almine Rech (Paris: Almine Rech Éditions / Éditions Images Modernes, 2005), 72. And
of course, not to forget, the bible verse "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. In: Genesis 1:3.
16 "... as François George nicely puts it," it continues. In: Martin Jay, "Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Search for a

New Ontology of Sight," in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), 156. (Original emphasis).
17 Charles Horton Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Scribner's, 1922).
18 All quotations of this paragraph derive from: ibid., 183-84. (Emphasis added).
19 Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel, Through the looking-glass and what Alice found there. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1872).
20 Graham mainly uses "two-way mirror glass" for his installations. This particular mirror glass will be explained in

Chapter 2.2.2 ("Mirror mirror... is the wall").

21 Cf. Appendix (I) for the various possibilities of observing and being observed which open up in the installation of

Public Space/Two Audiences.

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which is not accessible. Having entered the room in which a ganzfeld is installed, one is in the
viewing space where the installation and the different parts of the room can be overlooked.
Proceeding further to the far end, one needs to stop in front of the wall (although the actual
dimensions of the wall are invisible, due to the homogeneously distributed dense light.) In fact,
the visual deception of e.g. Turrell’s Ganzfeld Pieces goes so far that the viewer standing right in
front of this wall might have the feeling of looking into a far distance (Fig. 3 and 3a), as the total
visual color field conceals the actual architectural limitations of the space.22

In the course of the exhibtion period of the installation of City of Arhirit (1976), Turrell’s first
large-sized ganzfeld, apparently “people [were] leaning back onto non-existent film surfaces,”
which is why the piece was even called “dangerously deceptive.”23 Due to the complete darkness
in Turrell’s Dark Pieces, the viewer has no chance to conceive the architectural situation of the
art spaces.24 The viewers have to grope their way along the wall in order to enter the space.
Therefore, one can say that Turrell deprives his visitors of clear architectural boundaries. The
Dark Pieces and Ganzfeld Pieces will be further discussed in the following subchapters.

An element crucial to the works of the two artists is the act of looking or seeing, i.e. the gaze.
However, elucidations on the concept of the gaze, a topic which is very popular in psychoanalytic
approaches, will be restricted. Nevertheless, Martin Burckhardt suggests that via the reflected
gaze, i.e. through viewing, the viewer engages in a play of questions and answers with the space.25 In
James Turrell’s light spaces, the visitors’ conversation with the art piece is projected into the inside the
inner mind of the viewers. Graham, however, consciously intertwines the architectural design of
his pavilions with the spectators in order to let the viewer converse with the artwork (and
therefore with the viewers’ - reflected - self again), and the other viewers, back and forth.

With light and mirrors Turrell and Graham create, to some extent, windows through which the
beholder can gaze, sometimes even step, in order to experience new forms of reality by means of
visual and spatial perception, as well as the deception thereof. Juhani Pallasmaa argues in his
book The Eyes of the Skin (2005) in favor for a less ocular and more sensual understanding of

22 "[...] direkt vor der Wand stehend [...] in eine weite Ferne blicken," in: Zschocke, Der irritierte Blick: Kunstrezeption
und Aufmerksamkeit: 163.
23 Beveridge, "Color Perception and the Art of James Turrell," 307.
24 Zschocke, Der irritierte Blick: Kunstrezeption und Aufmerksamkeit: 164.
25 "Im zurückgeworfenen Blick gerät der Betrachter, schauenderweise, in ein Frage- und Antwortspiel mit dem

Raum. Oder eigentlich mit sich selbst," in: Martin Burckhardt, Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: eine Geschichte der
Wahrnehmung (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1994). 117. (Emphasis in translation added).

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architecture in society. This mindset is significant here, as it will form a basis for discussion in the
subsequent chapters. Pallasmaa urges:

In our time, light has turned into a mere quantitative matter and the window has lost its
significance a a mediator between two worlds, between enclosed and open, interiority and
exteriority, private and public, shadow and light. Having lost its ontological meaning, the
window has turned into a mere absence of the wall.26

The subjects addressed by Pallasmaa are (1) “interiority and exteriority,” in the following dealt
with as “inside and outside,” (2) “private and public,” (3) “shadow and light” in the sense of
“invisible – visible” and (4) the notion of “a mediator between two worlds” in the sense of “on
entering and leaving”- precisely these themes which will provide a forum for discussion further
on in this paper. In fact, both Graham and Turrell succeed in creating windows with which they
can, to a certain degree, deceive the viewer. Graham’s two-way mirror pavilions and –installations
obviously employ mainly semi-transparent glass – and thereby sometimes appear like windows
through which the spectators either can watch themselves or others. The entrance of Turrell’s
Ganzfeld Pieces at times is not even recognized as an enterable room but is rather mistaken for a
painting. However, the beholder can enter (or exit, Fig. 3b) the picture through this window-door
which emanates colored light. In the course of the upcoming analysis, Turrell’s artpieces will turn
out to have more effects than merely deceiving the beholder on a visual level. More of these
effects will be addressed particularly in the whole of chapter 3.

Paul Rodaway argues that “vision is an important part of everyday experience of the
environment.” However, he also urges: “As a contribution to understanding our place in the
world, [...] vision is very much a taken-for-granted sense, and its true nature and limits are almost
hidden by its visibility.”27 With the help of Sartre’s notion of the gaze of the Other and Cooley’s
concept of the Looking-glass self, this chapter has proposed fundamental ideas supporting the
upcoming introductions of Graham’s and Turrell’s œuvres with regard to spatial and visual
perception as well as deception.

26 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2005). 47.
27 Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place: 115.

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2.1 James Turrell’s light spaces

“I essentially create these spaces that apprehend light for a perception. They seemingly
hold light and you feel its physicality.“28

James Turell’s light environments are essentially all-encompassing. There is no object on display;
instead the beholder’s very own vision and perception are the subjects of contemplation. The
term Light and Space Movement refers to a number of American West Coast artists, in the late 1960s
including Turrell, whose shared interest was working with light and space. Moreover, they focused
on creating art that was not dependent on a material object. “With their light installations,” the
Light & Space Movement wanted “to fathom the boundaries between inside and outside, the
material and the immaterial, between light as a medium and light as an object, as well as to
expand our sensual and intellectual understanding of sight.”29 Among these light and space artists
are generally counted Robert Irwin, Maria Nordman, Douglas Wheeler and James Turrell. On the
informative website of the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles it is stated:

Works of Light and Space art have frequently - and aptly - inspired either scientific or
metaphysical interpretations. Irwin and James Turrell, for instance, investigated the
phenomenon of sensory deprivation [...] as part of the art-and-technology program
initiated by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1967.30

Together with the psycho-physiologist Edward Wortz and the artist Robert Irwin, Turrell
participated in experiments in the Garrett Aerospace Corporation laboratories concerned with
the deprivation of acoustic, visual and spatial information of ganzfelds in anechoic chambers (like
the one in Orfield) (Fig. 4).31 Although Craig Adcocks points out: “Turrell himself feels that there
really was not a Light and Space movement because there was no real cohesion among the
participants and very little critical writing surrounding the work,”32 unequivocal congruities in the

28 Turrell in: A/L Staff, "Adventures in Perception: James Turrell," Architectural Lighting Magazine,

http://www.archlighting.com/industry-news.asp?sectionID=1341&articleID=452238.
29 As quoted from Jan Butterfield’s “"The Art of Light + Space" (New York) 1993. In: Annelie Lütgens, "The Pars

pro Toto and the Big Picture – Tall Glass Piece and Skyspace," in James Turrell, the Wolfsburg Project, ed. Markus
Brüderling (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009), 111-12.
30 Atkins, "Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years - Light and Space art".
31 Julie Freudiger, "Vom 'materiellen Lichtbild' zum 'immateriellen Bildlicht'?," kunsttexte.de 4(2010): 5.
32 Craig Adcock notes: "focusing on perception irrespective of any object, Turrell was certainly an innovator. His

approach helped to inspire a loosely defined direction in Southern Californian art that has been called the ‘Light and
Space Movement’, although the term might be something of an overstatement." In: Craig Adcock, James Turrell: the
art of light and space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 54. Turrell’s quote derives from a conversation
Adcock had had with Turrell in 1986.

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light artists’ imagery are to be found. Douglas Wheeler’s Infinity Environments (Fig. 5), for instance,
highly resemble Turrell’s Ganzfeld Pieces. Wheeler, who grew up in Arizona and is a pilot
himself (like Turrell), shares Turrell’s passion for the beautiful skies in that area for exploring
them airborne. They both create “environments [that] intensify sensory awareness.”33

One of Turrell’s earliest projects in which he experimented with (outside) light and darkness was
the Mendota Stoppages (Fig. 6 and 6a).34 The name of the series derives from the former Mendota
Hotel (Ocean Park, California), which had been Turrell’s atelier at the time (between 1969 and
1974). It should be noted that almost all of Turrell’s subsequent series are more or less influenced
by the tests Turrell conducted there. In the Mendota series, Turrell systematically sealed off the
rooms in order to experiment with very low quantities of light and examine how the space
“responded” to these light conditions.35 “The Mendota Stoppages was significant because it was the
first site-specific sensing space – a space that responds to a space outside with a logic or
consciousness formed by its look into that space,”36 Turrell remarks.

During this period, the series of the Projection Pieces (1966-69), such as Cross-Corner
Projections like Catso, Blue (Fig. 1 and 1a) and Single-Wall Projections like Phantom (Fig. 7)
emerged. “Like the Cross-Corner Projections, the Single Wall Projections give light a palpable
sense of location,”37 Adcock notes. He further asserts: “The Single-Wall Projections create
perceptual spaces that are congruent with the psychological spaces of the imagination – visual
realms that are somehow larger than the physical spaces acutally holding the light.”38 Likewise
during his time at the Mendota, Turrell created some of his first entirely dark chambers and
ganzfeld environments. Also, the first Shallow Space Constructions (1968-present) like Ronin or
Raemar (Fig. 8) derive from this period.39 The series of Wedgeworks (1969-present) (Fig. 9 and
9a) basically result from the Shallow Space Constructions.40 After the Mendota, Turrell turned
towards the so-called Skyspaces (1975-present), one of which is installed at a Quaker meeting

33 Randy Kennedy, "Into the Heart of Lightness," (2012), http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/arts/design/doug-

wheeler-builds-infinity-environment-at-david-zwirner.html?pagewanted=all.
34 The overview is based on Adcock 1990, Schürmann 2000, Noever 2001, and Brüderlin 2009.
35 "The piece had both a day and night effect," Turrell explains. "The spaces generated were made by the light events

taking place in the space outside the studio, how the light from these events was allowed to enter through various
opening and closing apertures, and how the walls, floor and ceiling were positioned to accept the light from these
events." In: Peter Noever, ed. James Turrell: The other horizon (Ostfildern-Ruit Hatje Cantz, 2001), 88.
36 Ibid., 90.
37 Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 16.
38 Ibid., 35.
39 "In a typical Shallow Space Construction, a secondary wall is positioned in front of an existing wall at the far end

of a room," Craig Adcock explains. In: ibid., 29.

40 "By moving the constructed partition wall further into the room and shortening it, the 'Wedgework' series began."

Cf. Turrell in: Noever, James Turrell: The other horizon, 77.

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house, the Live Oak Meeting (House for the Society of Friends in Houston, Texas) (1995-96) (Fig.
10, 10a and 10b). The Skyspaces are contemplative places wherein one can watch the clouds
passing by.through a hole in the ceiling

Another series which has its origins in the Mendota Stoppages is the Space Division Constructions
(1976-present) (Fig. 11).41 Here, the notion of sensing space and viewing space is introduced. At the far
end of the room a large colored rectangle appears to be projected onto the wall. In fact, behind
the rectangle, which is only the opening for the sensing space, lays a lit room (Fig. 11a). The
viewer, however, cannot enter the sensing space but stays in front of the opening. From this
position the light (-illusion) can be contemplated.42 In the 1980s, Turrell started his work on the
Dark Spaces; this series and the Ganzfeld Pieces will be discussed in detail in the following
subchapters, including chapter 3.1 “Optic-Haptic.” At the beginning of the 1990s, Turrell started
working on the Perceptual Cells, which are small enterable cabins wherein ganzfelds are
generated. This series will be of further interest in chapter 4.1 “Positioning the spectator.”

41 Schürmann, Erscheinen und Wahrnehmen - Eine vergleichende Studie zur Kunst von James Turrell und der Philosophie Merleau-

Pontys: 100.
42 "From a distance, the junction between the two spaces is seen only as a surface and resembles a rectangle painted

on the wall.", Turrell describes. "From a space that is directly lit, [you are] looking into a space filled with ambient
light." In: Noever, James Turrell: The other horizon, 104.

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2.1.1 Dark Spaces

“The work on the Dark Spaces began at the Mendota in 1969-70,”43 Turrell recounts. More
specifically, “in the two last and most nocturnal rooms, N° 9 and N° 10.”44 The actual first series
of Dark Spaces starts with Pleiades (1983) (Fig. 12). Pleiades offers the viewer a pitch dark room
with almost no light stimulation despite some extremely dim red and blue projections.45 In his
Dark Spaces Turrell replaces the homogeneous field of light from the ganzfelds with the sheer
absence or lack of light.46 In order to understand the structure of the Dark Spaces, it is worth
quoting Craig Adcock’s description at length:

In Pleiades, viewers proceed along a narrow corridor that acts as a light trap by feeling
their way along a hand rail, turn and enter a small, almost totally dark space. From a
position behind a waist-high partition, they sit or stand, looking ahead into what seems to
be complete darkness. In the beginning, viewers cannot see their hands in front of their
faces. Gradually, a dim area of light seems to become present within the visual array.
Areas of luminance seem to move through the space, but these are often phosphenes
generated by the random nerve firing inside the retinas. Through time, Pleiades turns on: at
first, a small globular area with a slightly reddish cast seems to hang out in space. Then,
the color shifts and becomes more blue while the red moves toward the edges of the
globular shape.47

George Didi-Huberman describes the Dark Spaces poetically as “spaces without visible limits [...]
where the shadow [...] envelops us completely. One must stay inside theses works,” so that
eventually, “strange borderline experiences emerge within the viewer [...] [until] certain intense visual
events – like flashes” occur.48 In a way, the eyes carry the outside with them into the dark room.
Only after some time do they adjust and are filled with the (darkness of) the inside, i.e. the visual
circumstances of the Dark Space.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had already been fascinated by retinal afterimages. This phenomenon
describes the appearance of images in front of the eyes (on the retina) when being in a dark place

43 Turrell in: ibid., 127. (Original emphasis).

44 Rech, "The Eye of the Beholder," 84.
45 Turrell in: Noever, James Turrell: The other horizon, 127., "the title refers to the difficulty that is encountered in

counting the seven sisters of the constellation 'Pleiades' when looked at directly."
46 Zschocke, Der irritierte Blick: Kunstrezeption und Aufmerksamkeit: 164.
47 Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 108.
48 Georges Didi-Hubermann, "The Fable of the Place," in James Turrell: The other horizon, ed. Peter Noever

(Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001), 49. (Original emphasis).

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after having looked into a bright spot.49 After entering a Dark Space, the sight of the viewer is
still penetrated by these afterimages of the outside space, which Adcock also called “nerve
firings.” Only after a period of adjustment they disappear.50 The afterimages are of importance
for Turrell but not as much of interest as the darkness the visitor experiences afterwards. The
viewer is explictly advised to stay longer in the room than the afterimages on the retina last.
According to Zschocke, the deprival of light, resulting in a blinding effect, also seizes any point of
reference for spatial orientation.51 As a matter of fact, this effect is obtained in a total visual field
as will be discussed in the following subchapter.

49 Crary calls the retinal afterimage "perhaps the most important optical phenomenon discussed by Goethe in his
chapter on ‘Physiological Colors’ in his Color Theory," (1810) in: Jonathan Crary, "Techniques of the Observer,"
October 45(1988): 9.
50 Zschocke, Der irritierte Blick: Kunstrezeption und Aufmerksamkeit: 164.
51 Ibid., 164.

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2.1.2 Ganzfeld Pieces

Patrick Beveridge reports: “Viewers experiencing the Dark Pieces and Ganzfeld Pieces
found themselves at times unable to discern whether they were experiencing an eye-based
phenomenon, such as a retinal induced color field, or a vision-based phenomenon, such
as a homogeneous field of colored light at a distance from our eyes.”52

In a ganzfeld, the retina is homogeneously stimulated, so that a total visual field is created. The
formlessness of any (neural) stimuli does not allow for any inference to architectural space or
shape whatsoever.53 Characteristically, a certain light-fog, which seems to be woven from air
particles, is experienced by the viewer. This illusionary surface coating or suffusion of a ganzfeld
washes away all contours. Consequently, any architectural point of reference disappears.54
Zschocke further explains that visitors walking through a Ganzfeld Piece frequently experience
dizziness; “the experience of a ganzfeld creates a feeling of disorientation, the lack of spatial
structure or any kinds of objects denies the viewers to orientate themselves,” she points out.55
Schlachter (2010) provides a significant piece of research on ganzfelds in psychology and art
exemplified by Turrell’s ganzfeld works.

The installation of City of Arhirit (Fig.13 and 13a), first realized in the Stedelijk Museum
Amsterdam in 1976 and later in 1980 at the Whitney Museum in New York, consisted of several
walk-through ganzfeld-rooms.56 Adcock describes the installation as follows:

In the City of Arhirit, light seemed to hover inside four wedge-shaped chambers, or
cabinets, that opened off a hallway. Each chamber held a different colored mist of light
because the illumination entered the spaces through baffled windows after being reflected
off different colored surfaces outside. In addition, the light was affected by such things as
time of day, season and weather. The chambers were ‘sensing spaces’, as Turrell calls
them, because they responded to what was going on around them.57

52 Beveridge, "Color Perception and the Art of James Turrell," 305.

53 Def.: "'ganzfeld' – from the German for ‘complete, or homogeneous, field,' a ganzfeld is a visual field produced by
a set-up in which the entire retina is stimulated by homogeneous light. It has no contours or forms and is totally
differentiated." In: ibid., 307.
54 Cf. Zschocke, Der irritierte Blick: Kunstrezeption und Aufmerksamkeit: 174.
55 "Eine Ganzfelderfahrung erzeugt Orientierungslosigkeit bis hin zum Schwindel. Das Fehlen von räumlicher

Struktur oder Objektsehen macht jede Orientierung unmöglich,“ in: ibid., 162. (Author's translation).
56 Ibid., 155.
57 Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 137. (Original emphasis).

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From this description an affiliation to the Mendota Stoppages becomes clear again with “spaces
responding to what was going on around them.“

Turrell recounts the physical disorientation which seized many visitors: “In the Stedelijk
installation, people got down on their hands and knees and crawled through it because they
experienced intense disequilibrium.”58 The physical and spatial deception on the part of the
visitors was basically too intense to bear, as “several viewers actually fell into the space.” 59 Turrell
had to draw the conclusion: “From then on I began to do pieces that you didn’t enter, but that
you looked into.”60 In order to prevent the viewers from stumbling around his ganzfelds, he thus
started to re-design his art spaces including the differentiation of sensing space and viewing space.
Thereby the effect these installations could potentially have on the visitors is admittedly
weakened. As a response to the varying and partially hostile reactions he received after people
injured themselves in the City of Arhirit, Turrell commented in a newspaper: “The intention is to
change one’s thinking about seeing. I’m not responsible for how someone else takes care of his
or her sense of bodily awareness.”61

A similar disorder of the bodily system has been reported about another recent major ganzfeld project
by Turrell.62 In 2009, the Ganzfeld Piece Bridget’s Bardo (Fig. 14) was launched at the
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Germany). With a height of eleven meter and scaling 700 square
meter of surface area it is the hitherto biggest ganzfeld project ever realised (Fig. 14a). This piece
will be analysed thoroughly in chapter 4.2.1, regarding the notions of “entering and leaving.”

Schlachter identifies the reason for the disorienting effect of ganzfelds which spectators
consistently describe. The homogeneous light conditions of the total visual field result in an
“indefinite perception,” due to a certain “irrelevance” of the viewer’s body movement (as the
latter will not influence or change the visual perception) and as such there is no spatial or
temporal reference given in a ganzfeld. Effectively, this fact leads to a “feeling of infinity.” The
concept of inifinity is inconceivable for the human mind, Schlachter presumes, as human
perception is based on “sequential experiences” and hence overwhelmed if time and space cannot
be arranged in order. As a consequence, the beholder experiences disorientation.63

58 Turrell in: Noever, James Turrell: The other horizon, 124.

59 Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 140.
60 Turrell in: Noever, James Turrell: The other horizon, 124.
61 Turrell quoted by Grace Glueck, "Whitney Sued Over Show," The New York Times, 4 May 1983, p. 24. Quoted

here from: Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 140.
62 Julia Voss, "James Turrell in Wolfsburg: Expedition ins Licht " Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2009.
63 Maria Schlachter, "Licht ohne Schatten: Ganzfelder in Psychologie und Kunst" (Universität Wien, 2010), 94-95.

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Relating to the “notion of infinity,” Mechthild Fend elaborates on Riegl’s interest in the work of
the Austrian philosopher Carl Siegel. Accordingly, in Siegel’s book Entwicklung der Raumvorstellung
des menschlichen Bewußtseins (1899), he implies that modern society (relative to his time; i.e. around
1900) was finally able to comprehend the conception of infinity/infinite space, i.e. the
“conceivability of an all-encompassing infinite space.”64 Fend further explicates the infinite space
Siegel suggests as being conceived of as independent (or disconnected) from body dimensions as
well from a physiological sense of space. This infinite space, in fact, becomes conceivable due to
the fact that the individual knows the sensation of having transcended a regular, usually confined,
space.65 As a matter of fact, Siegel’s understanding of infinite, total space is appropriately
illustrated by Turrell’s Ganzfeld Pieces. Elaborating on Bridget’s Bardo, Brüderlin equally calls
upon the notion of infinity being evoked via the ganzfeld’s sensing space (in this case Bridget’s
Bardo, obviously).66 A concept of infinity can also be found in Graham’s works, which will be
analyzed hereafter.

64 "[...] die Vorstellung eines 'allseits unbegrenzten [...] Raumes,'" Fend quotes Siegel from: Siegel, Carl; "Entwicklung

der Raumvorstellung des menschlichen Bewußtseins," Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Feuticke, 1899, p.50. In: Mechthild
Fend, "Körpersehen: Über das Haptische bei Alois Riegl," in Kunstmaschinen: Spielräume des Sehens zwischen Wissenschaft
und Ästhetik, ed. Andreas Mayer and Alexander Métraux (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005), 192.
(Author's translation).
65 "Das ist ein vom Körpermaß wie von der physiologischen Raumempfindung abgekoppelter, gedachter Raum, der

durch Überschreitung des zuvor erfahrenen begrenzten Raum vorstellbar wird [...]." In: ibid., 192. (Author's
translation).
66 "[Der 'sensing space'] ist nicht betretbar, und der ist auch nicht in seinen Dimensionen erfassbar, d.h. da

verschwimmen die Raumgrenzen und man hat ein Gefühl der Unendlichkeit." In: Markus Brüderlin, "James Turrell:
The Wolfsburg Project," ed. Dirk Finger (Germany: http://vimeo.com/10602522, 2009).

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2.2 Dan Graham’s (in-) visible structures

Graham “has used magazine advertisements, surveillance video and two-way mirror – the
means of control and alienation in the corporate city – to redeem personal space and
identity.”67

Graham’s Magazine Works, like Schema (March 1966) (Fig. 15), show an early fascination for
certain kinds of structures. In his schemata he analyzed formal features of printed texts and
evaluated them according to his own presets. In another version, Scheme (1965) (Fig. 16 and 16a),
he explored numerical structures: “My Scheme (1965) is for use either as a page [...] or to be
extended indefinitely in book form [...]. In the book the angle of the triangle diminishes gradually
to infinity with the progression to cause a cessation at some point in the book’s interior,”
Graham writes.68 One may read this allusion to infinite structures as a precursor of the
limitlessness of images that can be evoked in some of Graham’s mirror pavilions/installation in
his successive work.69 In his subsequent works Graham literally does not create one space but a
multitude of spaces (via different kinds of mirror-structures), up to possibly an infinite number of
spaces even. All in all, a distinct fascination for visible (i.e. arrangeable and sortable) and invisible
structures (i.e. numerical up to infinity) becomes apparent. In this sense, the effect of the
doubling image of two parallel opposing mirrors is the illusion of infinite rooms spreading out
after one another, which calls into mind the controversial concept of infinite regress familiar from
mathematics or matters of reasoning. Already Aristotle had addressed the problematic subject of
infinite reasoning within the framework of the philosophy of logic in his Posterior Analytics. This
effect is to be observed in pieces like Two Adjacent Pavilions (1978-82), which will be further
discussed later on.

Graham’s eye for serialization and conformity in architectural arrangements manifests itself in his
photography of the landscape of American suburbs, which he published in the magazine article

67 Brian Hatton, "Dan Graham, Present Continuous," in Dan Graham, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni
Tàpies, 1998), 206.
68 Graham in: Dan Graham, "My works for Magazine Pages. 'A History of Conceptual Art', 1965-1969," in Dan

Graham, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998), 66. The term "infinity" implies in this
particular case "a number that is larger than all other numbers." Cf. s.v. "infinity" in: Cambridge Online Dictionary
(URL: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/infinity?q=infinity (24/07/2012).
69 Brian Hatton agrees; "the magazine page is a forerunner of the parks and quasi-public interiors in which he has set

his recent pavilions." In: Hatton, "Dan Graham, Present Continuous," 207.

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Homes for America (Fig. 15).70 The pictures demonstrate the uniformity and monotonousness the
ever occurring architectural elements of the suburbian houses radiate (Fig. 18, 18a and 18b).
Strikingly, Graham often offers just a fraction, a part of the seemingly boundless spreading row
of houses (Fig. 19). He transferred this particular point of view into his mirror-pavilions, but added
the component of moving people (i.e. the audience); an audience that revives his uniform pictures
and interacts with the structures in the pictures in an unpredictable way.71 This new status of
Graham’s images in turn results in an infinite number of ever different pictures. As the mirror
always reflects the respective spectators and their actions, the possible outcomes grow
innumerably. “The exhaustive self-reflexivity of each variant fuses content and context, subject
and object,”72 Alexander Alberro claims about Schema (March 1966). This interpretation holds just
as true for Graham’s mirror pavilions as for his video/mirror-installations (e.g. Public Space/Two
Audiences, 1976), which, among others, will be subject to further discussion in the following
chapters. In fact, Brian Hatton highlights: “in using mirror and soundproof glass instead of video,
Graham’s gallery installation Public Space/Two Audiences anticipated his two-way mirror pavilions
of the 80s.”73

70 Graham writes: "The one magazine piece which was most like a conventional article was Homes for America, printed
in Arts Magazine, December 1966 – January 1967. It is an article designed around photos of suburban tract housing
estates taken over a period of two years. It is important that the photographs are not seen alone, but as part of the
over-all magazine article lay-out. They are illustrations of the text, or inversely [...]." In: Graham, "My works for
Magazine Pages. 'A History of Conceptual Art', 1965-1969," 65-66.
71 "I think that the similarity [between the text pieces from the 60s and the glass pavilions, A/N] begins with one of

the first pieces I did, Homes for America (1966-67), which is basically about the relation of art to an urbanological or
suburban scheme, " Graham admitted in an interview with Mark Thomson ([1991] 1996) In: Dan Graham and Mark
Thomson, "Dan Graham Interviewed by Mark Thomson," in Dan Graham. Two-Way Mirror Pavilions / Einwegspiegel-
Pavillons 1989-1996, ed. Martin Köttering and Roland Nachtigäller (Nordhorn: Städtische Galerie Nordhorn, 1996),
206.
72 Alexander Alberro, "Structure as Content: Dan Graham's 'Schema (March 1966)' and the Emergence of

Conceptual Art," in Dan Graham, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998), 21.
73 Hatton, "Dan Graham, Present Continuous," 212.

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2.2.1 Which way to go? Mirror-mazes

Er bewegte sich durch ein Labyrinth von Spiegeln, zu vielen davon, und aus jedem blickte
sein Bild.
(Daniel Kehlmann, Der fernste Ort)

Recalling into mind the notion of the Other being subjected to Graham’s play of mirrors, it is
worthwhile considering Lefebvre’s examination relating the Ego and the mirror:

The mirror is a surface at once pure and impure, almost material yet virtually unreal; it
presents the Ego with its own material presence, calling up its counterpart, its absence
from – and at the same time its inherence in – this ‘other’ space. Inasmuch as its
symmetry is projected therein, the Ego is liable to ‘recognize’ itself in the ‘other’, but it
does not in fact coincide with it: ‘other’ merely represents ‘Ego’ as an inverted image in
which the left appears right, as a reflection which yet generates an extreme difference, as a
repetition which transforms the Ego’s body into an obsessing will-o’-the-wisp.74

The mirror as such and its usage in contemporary art is often read as referring back to the
Lacanian stade du miroir.75 Although this particular reading will not be adopted in this analysis,
Graham recapitulates in this sense that “mirrors are metaphors for the Western concept of the
‘self.’”76 According to Lacan, the infant’s confrontation with the own mirror-image origin for the
very first instance of self-awareness77, it necessarily brings forth an allusion to narcism of which
the most prominent example in art history can be found in Caravaggio’s painting of Narcissus
(1594-1596, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome). Likewise, Lefebvre reads the moment of
self-mirroring as the essence of self-realization. Although he generally tends to devaluate the
psychoanalystic approach, one means to discern an affinity with the latter in Lefebvre’s viewpoint
concerning the Ego.78

74 Henri Lefebvre, The production of space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 184-85. (Original
emphasis).
75 According to Jacques Lacan, the moment the individual gains consciousness of its ‘self’ is the recognition of the

own image in the mirror.

76 Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power: 55.
77 "Pschoanalyst Jacques Lacan invoked the metaphor of the mirror as a model for the visual scenario of identity

formation," Friedberg writes in: Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). 17.
78 Cf. Lefebvre, The production of space: 185 and Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film

(New York: Verso, 2002). 255. Lefebvre in turn also refers to Narcissus; he understands narcissistic characteristics to
be a negative outcome of the lesson an indivual should learn from the mirrored Self:Should the ‘Ego’ fail to reassert
hegemony over itself by defying its own image, it must become Narcissus – or Alice. It will then be in danger of
never rediscovering itself, space qua figment will have swallowed it up, and the glacial surface of the mirror will hold

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Artists’ usage and fascination for mirrors is pervasive in art history; e.g. “for [some] Russian
symbolists [...] mirrors provided an ambiguous intersection between two worlds of reality and
illusion, sanity and madness.”79 Exactly this obscure nature of the mirror, its power to evoke an
illusion of another reality or space will be taken into consideration with Dan Grahams pavilion
pieces. Unfortunately the scope of this paper does not allow for a more detailed analysis of the
use and significance of the mirror in art history.

Nevertheless, a short excursus will be made with reference to Martin Burckhardt’s analysis of Jan
van Eyck’s famous painting of the Arnolfini Wedding (1434, National Gallery, London, Fig. 20).80
Burckhardt provides a useful piece of research on the analysis of the Arnolfini wedding, adding
to the existing research. The convex mirror (Fig. 20a), which is depicted at the center of the
painting, has been subject to many different interpretations and speculations. Adding to those,
Burckhardt offers some inspiring insights into the mirror’s ability of creating various levels of
spatiality. Also, Burckhardt emphasizes the mirror’s crucial role in enclosing the room, i.e. the
space, in which the Arnolfini couple poses. By mirroring not only the viewer but also what is
behind, the viewer’s very backside becomes part of the image. The mirror puts the viewer in the
picture so that an all-enclosing space is created. Burckhardt calls this the “painter’s artifice to
overcome the picture’s border.”81 Herewith the viewer is activated and plays a crucial part in the
picture’s absorbtion - the viewer eventually comes to impersonate a repoussoir-figurine.

Likewise, the insights Burckhardt offers regarding the convex mirror are relevant for the analysis
of Graham’s use of mirror-structures. The mirror takes on the painting’s place; consequently, the
mirror’s reflective surface assumes the role of the canvas. Lefebvre accordingly draws a
comparison between the mirror and a painting:

In some ways a kind of ‘picture’, the mirror too has a frame which specifies it, a frame
that can be either empty or filled. In that space which is produced first by natural and
later by social life the mirror introduces a truly dual spatiality: a space which is imaginary
with respect to origin and separation, but also concrete and practical with respect to
coexistence and differentiation.82

it forever captive in its emptiness, in an absence devoid of all conceivable presence or bodily warmth. In: Lefebvre,
The production of space: 185. (Original emphasis).
79 Andrey Bely quoted in: Mark Pendergast, Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection (New York:

Basic Books, 2003). 212.

80 Burckhardt, Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung: 104 ff.
81 Cf. Ibid., 114.
82 Lefebvre, The production of space: 186.

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The beholders, standing in front of the mirror, seeing their own reflection, represent their own
repoussoirs. As the viewer cannot be part of the actual reflected space, i.e. cannot enter the mirror-
reflection, each and every perception [Erfahrung] is the perception of the Self. The mirror
generates a dialogue between the space and the (viewer’s) gaze.83

A visual deception involving a play of convex and concave mirror-structures is also generated in
Graham’s land project Two-way Mirror Triangle with One Curved Side (1996) (Fig. 21).84 It is “sited on
a fjord in northern Norway” and thus mirrors the surrounding lake and mountains.85 Graham
describes the piece as follows:

This work which is enterable by spectators through a side sliding door has its sides in
two-way mirror. [...] The concave, outside, curved side provides a panoramic view of the
seascape it faces while it anamorphically distorts spectators observing just outside. The
interior provides a convexly distorted view of the mountain landscape in the distance and
the overall form and spectators gazing on both sides.86

In advancing towards the piece, the movement stimulates a visual deception due to the fact that a
definite view of the reflected landscape is always negated by the splitted mirror-structure. The
piece resembles the Arnolfini-mirror in rendering a similar compressed perspective of the
surrounding space. The pavilion depends entirely on this surrounding space and light conditions,
although it always presents just another view of the same. According to Burckhardt, the mirror
allows a different view of the same room to be created. Moreover, a different construction principle
of the space becomes visible.87 The Two-way Mirror Triangle with One Curved Side will be subject to
further discussion in chapter 3.2 “Visible-Invisible.”

For centuries, monarchs such as Louis XVI surrounded themselves with mirrors en masse in their
royal residences. The Galerie des Glaces - Hall of Mirrors - in Versailles (completed in 1684) not
only offered the narcissistic Roi-Soleil literally the perfect reflection for his glory - i.e. himself and

83 "Denn dadurch daß [der Betrachter, A/N] nicht einen Teil des Raums [ausmacht] [...] daß jegliche Erfahrung stets

die Erfahrung des eigenen Selbst ist, ja, daß der den Raum sondierende Blick sich in einer Art Zwiegespräch mit sich
selbst befindet." In: Burckhardt, Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung: 117. (Author's
translation).
84 The piece was "realized for ‘Artscape Nordland’, an exhibition of works installed on the Lofoten Islands off the

coast of Northern Norway", cf. in: Brouwer, "Dan Graham : Works 1965-2000," 287.
85 Gloria Moure, ed. Dan Graham (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998), 172.
86 Ibid., 172.
87 "...ein anderes Konstruktionsprinzip des Raumes sichtbar wird." In: Burckhardt, Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit:

eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung: 115. (Original emphasis.)

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his castle - but even more so he worshipped the mirror’s ability to magnify space (in combination
with other mirrors) and to even deceive the viewer’s orientation (by e.g. mirror mazes). “The
mirrors magnified the light in the gallery as they reflected sunlight,” they “formed ‘false
windows’” and “produced a mise enabyme of representation, reflecting the glass windows framing
the pictorial space of the landscape outside,”88 Anne Friedberg points out.

“Mirror mazes were popular Victorian entertainments, disorienting visitors in an early incarnation
of the funhouse,”89 Mark Pendergast (2003) notes in his all-encompassing work on the human
relationship with mirrors. Graham, in fact, does not create classic Victorian garden mazes but
rather an optical illusion of maze-like structures by means of the mirrors and within the mirrors’
reflections. Graham’s Two-Way Mirror Hedge Labyrinth alludes with its name already to a maze. At
this point, the actual technical difference between a labyrinth and a maze should be clarified:

Confusingly, the English words ‘maze’and ‘labyrinth’ are often used interchangeably even
though the two constructions are not entirely the same. A labyrinth implies a single path
and ritual aspects, while a ‘maze’ is a puzzle, with junctions and choices. Since they have
just one course to follow, labyrinths are ‘unicursal’, whereas mazes are ‘multicursal’
because they contain many different sections or pathways.90

Two-Way Mirror Hedge Labyrinth, a parkscape project variously realized between 1989 and 1993,
may imply in its name the technical affinity to the category of a labyrinth. At first glance the piece
seems to provide evidence for this assumption (Fig. 22 and 22a). Graham, however,
interchangeably makes use of hedge- and (two-way mirror) glass-elements. As a result, a
“multicursal” puzzle-structure is established in spite of the straightforward “unicursal” function
the piece seems to imply by all appearances. Additionally, Graham does not seem to attach great
importance to the technical distinction of labyrinth and maze:

The work combines the traditional landscape or more modern ‘suburban’ landscape
garden hedge boundary with both transparent and two-way mirror glass. The resulting
hybrid creates a continuously shifting optical surface emblematic of the modern urban
corporate office building facade and the baroque garden maze.91

The visual deception which is generated by this garden installation does not only result from a
presupposed purpose of the piece to evoke a maze-structure. The viewers themselves are also

88 Friedberg, The Virtual Window: 109. (Original emphasis).

89 Pendergast, Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection 211.
90 Adrian Fisher, Mazes and Labyrinths (Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications, 2004). 4.
91 Graham in: Moure, Dan Graham, 186. (Emphasis added).

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deceived into seeing shapes or reflections of themselves or others which in fact turn out to be
cunning effects created by the combination of the aforenamed elements.

The effects of the changing sunlight illumination produces mirror ‘ghosts’ or spectators
on either side of the two-way mirror glass/conventional glass or hedge. The viewers see
images of themselves gazing and other spectators gazing themselves or at them,92

Graham affirms. Occurrences where ghost-like figures come to the fore of the viewer call into
mind the 19th century stage performances known as Phantasmagoria or Pepper’s Ghost. (Fig. 23). The
audience must have been in some sort of shock, seeing an almost transparent likeness of an actor
appearing out of nowhere on stage, performing, and dissolving just as quickly again. In order to
elucidate the affinity between Graham’s mirror ghosts and Pepper’s Ghost, it is worth citing a
description of the latter at length:

In order to produce a ‘ghost’ within a drama performed by live actors, an angled sheet of
glass was situated between the audience and the stage action. When the strong focused
light of a magic lantern was thrown onto someone lying in a black void beneath the stage,
their reflection would suddenly appear amid the actors. Of course the phenomenon itself
would have been familiar to anyone who had ever stood in a well-lit room overlooking a
darkened garden but the unfamiliar circumstances of the application and the unseen glass
turned the familiar into a magical illusion.93

Similar ghostly effects are to be observed as well in, for example, the Fun House for Münster (Fig.
24), a pavilion which will be further analyzed in chapter 4.3 “Positioning the spectator.” Merleau-
Ponty supports the idea of ghostly figures being evoked by the reflected mirror-images:

The mirror’s ghost lies outside my body and by the same token my own body’s
‘invisibility’ can invest in other bodies I see. Hence my body can assume segments derived
from the body of another, just as my substance passes into them; man is mirror for man.
The mirror itself is the instrument of a universal magic that changes things into a
spectacle, spectacles into things, myself into another, and another into myself. 94

In this section, the mirror has been introduced as an object evoking fascination throughout many
cultural spheres. Burckhardt’s analysis of the convex mirror central to Jan van Eycks’ Arnolfini

92 Graham in: ibid., 186.

93 Richard Crangle, Mervyn Heard, and Ine van Dooren, eds., Realms of Light: Uses and Perceptions of the magic lantern from
the 17th century to the 21st century (London: The Magic Lantern Society, 2005), 20.
94 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Northwestern University

Press, 1964), 168.

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Wedding has provided a basis for further analysis of Graham’s Norwegian pavilion. It has been
demonstrated that Graham’s implementation of two-way mirror glass into his artistic practice has
facilitated a wide range of interactions between beholders and art object. These interactions
proved to be visually as well as spatially deceptive, particular attention has therefore been paid to
the notion of mirror mazes. Furthermore, it has been found that the viewers themselves gradually
turn into the object of contemplation. This notion will be further discussed in the following
subchapter.

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2.2.2 “Mirror, mirror...“ is the wall.

The German architect Arthur Korn acknowledged in 1929 the versatile qualities of glass as an
architectural component by saying: glass “can enclose and open up spaces in more than one
direction.”95 Concerning the terminology two-way mirror glass, Graham points out that the English
term “one-way” at some point had been changed into “two-way.”96 This change appears to be a
result of the the oscillating qualities of its surface, which is a striking quality of this kind of mirror
glass. It can hold both the characteristics from translucent glass and reflective mirror-glass.
Interestingly, this sort of glass is also referred to as spy glass in German, as it is often used for
example as a dividing element between the interrogation room and a police detective’s office at
police stations. At this point it is worth citing Graham’s commentary on his medium of choice:

The first use of one-way mirror [sic] was actually for surveillance – the way it was used in
psychological laboratories was that the students could see through the invisible side and
observe the doctors or psychologists with their parents on the other side, and the people
on the other side would oly see a mirror view of themselves. In the contemporary one-
way mirror office building you have something very similar: on the outside the building
reflective of the sky and the environment becomes equated to the natural environment
[...].97

The analysis so far has shown that Graham’s predominant use of mirror-structures has taken on
various shapes within his œuvre. His mindset regarding the role of the spectator, which will be
further discussed in chapter 4.1, has in fact changed accordingly. In early Performance Pieces, like
TV Camera/Monitor Performance (1970), Graham had explicitly included his own person in the art
performance which complied with the classic theatrical distinction between performer and
audience. This was still the case with Performer/Audience/Mirror (1977), where Graham (or, of
course, any other performer) faces an audience, his back turned to a mirror wall. In various stages
the performer describes his observations of the audience’s behavior, his own body’s reflection in

95 Arthur Korn, "Glass in Modern Architecture (1929)," in Form and Function: A Source Book for the History of Architecture
and Design 1890-1939, ed. Tim Benton, Charlotte Benton, and Dennis Sharp (London: Granada, 1975), 170.
96 Köttering and Nachtigäller point this interesting shift of terminology out in their introductory words in the

Nordhorn Catalogue. Martin Köttering and Roland Nachtigäller, "Transparente Reflexionen - ein Vorwort " in Dan
Graham. Two-Way Mirror Pavilions / Einwegspiegel- Pavillons 1989-1996, ed. Martin Köttering and Roland Nachtigäller
(Nordhorn: Städtische Galerie Nordhorn, 1996), 10.
97 Graham and Thomson, "Dan Graham Interviewed by Mark Thomson," 207-08.

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the mirror, the mirrored view of the audience and so forth.98 About his use of mirror-structures
Graham maintains:

The use of the one-way [sic] mirror in the pavilions evolved from my original use of glass
and mirrors in temporary interior subdivisions of spaces. That work involved the notion
of more than one audience, the audience’s relationship to itself and another audience and
the spectator in relation to him or herself and his or her own viewing process.99

In the meantime, Graham had moved the relationship of audience – performer in his artworks
towards an audience – audience situation, wherein the audience themselves were to occupy the
traditional performer’s position. Early video-works like Two Consciousness Projection(s) (1972) show a
fascination for the mirroring effects of direct video-recording and -playback. This manner of
confronting the beholder with a direct structure like immediate video-playback or the beholder’s
own mirror-image is a continuous characteristic of Graham’s artworks. Graham remarks: “In
Public Space/Two Audiences the work looks back; the spectators, inversely, see their projection of
‘self’ (conventionally missing) returned specularly by the material (by means of the structural)
aspects of the work,”100 Public Space/Two Audiences, first installed at the Biennale in Venice 1976,
was one of the first instances, where two groups of people were left on their own (i.e. without a
performer, but with the group being, unconsciously, performers themselves). Concerning this
particular installation, Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts concerning the relationship of seeing and to-be-
seen appear applicable:

For the first time also, my movements no longer proceed unto the things to be seen, to
be touched, or unto my own body occupied in seeing and touching them, but they
address themselves to the body in general and for itself (whether it be my own or that of
another), because for the first time, through the other body, I see that, in its coupling with
the flesh of the world, the body contributes more than it receives, adding to the world
that I see the treasure necessary for what the other body sees.101

Merleau-Ponty adresses in this statement that seeing and touching are crucial elements in how an
individual’s perceives his or her body, as well as how the body is perceived in relation to the
Other, or maybe even in a group. Graham summarizes: “In effect, this [Public Space/Two
Audiences] was the framework for all the one-way [sic] mirror outdoor pavilions that came

98 Cf. Graham in: Moure, Dan Graham, 98-100.

99 Graham in: Graham and Thomson, "Dan Graham Interviewed by Mark Thomson," 205.
100 Graham in: Moure, Dan Graham, 120.
101 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The visible and the invisible: followed by working notes, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 143-44.

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later.”102 Gradually, in the course of Graham’s further artistic development, the mirror (or two-
way mirror) takes up the room of the white cube’s wall. In fact, in retrospect Graham regretted
having had the non-mirror wall in Public Space/Two Audiences being plain white instead of an
“open window.”103 Graham distinguishes four groups within his series of mirror pavilions; (1) the
emblematic pavilions (like the Star of David or the Heart Pavilion), (2) the garden pavilions (like the Two-
way Mirror Pergola Bridge or the Two-way Mirror Hedge Labyrinth), (3) pavilions with a distinct
architectural connotation and a last group (4), which includes the Children’s Pavilion (a collaboration
with Jeff Wall). Throughout this analysis the groups will be taken into consideration. Concerning
the last group, the Fun House for Münster will be discussed due to its seemingly socially engaging
and playful character. Instead of an architectural pavilion, the landscape project Two-Way Mirror
Triangle with One Curved Side has already been and will be further discussed. Additionally, attention
will be given to the two room-installations Public Space/Two Audiences and Present Continuous
Past(s).104

This subchapter has provided a relevant definition of Graham’s favored material, the two-way
mirror glass. Additionally, the development from Graham’s early performance pieces to his
video- and mirror-installations has been traced. With this progression, Graham has emancipated the
beholders of his artobjects and extended the number of effects the installations can produce.

102 Graham in: Graham and Thomson, "Dan Graham Interviewed by Mark Thomson," 207.
103 "I realized that the flaw if that particular piece [Public Space/Two Audiences] was that it was very much the old
white cube art gallery architecture ides, and I wondered what would happen if you had an open window on the side."
In: ibid., 207.
104 This classification is based on: Köttering and Nachtigäller, "Transparente Reflexionen - ein Vorwort " 10. The

editors are referring to a letter they received from Graham (21/03/1996).

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3 Trying to make sense of the senses

The Berlin-based dark restaurant Nocti Vagus advertises its premises with: “Invisible Pleasures -
You’ll be enthusiastic!”105 The German version, though, says: “Seeing nothing means seeing
different.”106 The phrase appears to be catchy, but to be more precise it should rather state:
“Seeing nothing means sensing more!” It may seem like just another fashionable and quite
amusing idea of a clever entrepeneur to offer such an extraordinary dinner arrangement, but it
also addresses the timeless topic of how one is to make sense of the senses.

The human body functions almost automatically; each and every part joins forces with the others
in order to constitute a smoothly working whole. Only if one part suddenly malfunctions one
becomes aware of the fact that every single component of the body’s system is essential. Usually
such a situation in which one of our traditional five senses fails occurs due to illness or accidents,
causing loss of hearing, eye-sight, sense of smell or taste or tactile anaesthesia even. At Nocti
Vagus, drastic arrangements are made in order to heighten one’s understanding of the senses,
above all by blocking the major sense, which is sight.107

The “central role of vision in modernist thought” has been questioned increasingly as well as the
formerly prevalent “Cartesian eye of control and detachment.”108 The fact that “vision is lionised
among the senses and treated as wholly autonomous”109 will be taken into consideration as well
as suggestions for a non-visual approach will be given. In his article Techniques of the Observer
(1988), Jonathan Crary gives an encompassing overview of the rise of ocularcentrism in the
nineteenth century.110 Thus, to begin this section, a digression to a tale from the New Testament
appears to be illustrative. After Jesus Christ had risen from the dead he went to see his disciples.
When Thomas the Apostle heard from his friends that their Lord had appeared before them, he
would not believe it: “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into
the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25). He

105 http://www.noctivagus.com/english1.htm
106 "Nichts sehen heißt anders sehen," in: http://www.noctivagus.com/idee_2.htm
107 "Schmecken, Tasten, Riechen und Hören - Diese alltäglichen Erfahrungen werden Sie nach einem Besuch im

Dunkelrestaurant in einem anderen Licht sehen," Nocti Vagus write, therewith cunningly working in the pun of
"seeing the senses in another light." In: http://www.noctivagus.com/idee_1.htm
108 Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses: 27 and 29.
109 Chris Jenks, "The centrality of the eye in Western culture: An Introduction," in Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks

(London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 1.

110 For further discussion if the term "ocularcentrism" also see: ibid., 16.

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literally could not believe his eyes but had to feel the wound in order to trust in Christ’s
resurrection. One of the best known depictions of this story is the vivid painting of the Doubting
Thomas by Caravaggio (Fig. 25). Thomas and his companions are wrinkling their foreheads in
disbelief and amazement as Thomas sticks his finger into Jesus Christ’s wound. Jesus is leading
Thomas’ hand benevolently up to the level of his lower ribcage (Fig. 25a), so that one can almost
feel the flesh of Jesus’ open wound. This story and its naturalistic depiction by Caravaggio
illustrates adequately the affinity of the senses and how much human beings rely on them – as
well as the fact that sometimes one simply cannot believe one’s eyes.

Although Turrell’s pieces seem to primarily address ocular sight, this assumption can readily be
refuted by the fact that Turrell’s installations have been reported to affect the visitors physically.
Also, Graham’s maze-like mirror structures have shown that one cannot solely rely on eyesight in
order to perceive the correct architectural circumstances. Mark Paterson criticizes in several of his
studies the dominance of explorations on the visual in Western Society. Juhani Pallasmaa joins in
saying: “In Western Culture, sight has historically been regarded as the noblest of the senses, and
thinking itself thought of in terms of seeing.”111 The five bodily senses regarded as the major ones
are hearing, taste, smell, sight, and touch. Ususally, they are further distinguished into intimate and
distant senses (Fig.24). It may be questionable to what extent this harsh classification should be
adopted. Not only has society equipped the human species with helping devices, such as spectacles
and hearing aids, but also with electronic gadgets that most science fiction authors could never
have imagined. It must not be forgotten that perception in itself simply is a highly intimate and
personal matter, which requires active engagement with the environment; as Rodaway puts it:
“Perception is an experience of the whole body and an activity in a dynamic world.”112

Approaches on how and in which context the human senses should be analyzed change with
respect to various academic disciplines. A main field of discourse is, without a doubt,
phenomenology as it has been introduced to 20th century philosophy by Edmund Husserl in 1913, as
well as by his critical contemporary Martin Heidegger in 1927.113 The ideas of the latter were in
turn significant for the forthcoming of existential phenomenology as pursued by e.g. Jean-Paul
Sartre (1938) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945).114 This field of studies shows its

111 Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses: 42.
112 Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place: 20.
113 Edmund Husserl, "Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Allgemeine

Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (1913)," in Gesammelte Schrifen: Edmund Husserl, ed. Elisabeth Ströker
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1992); Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984).
114 Jean-Paul Sartre, La nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris:

Gallimard, 1945).

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interdisciplinary relevance in analyses like Eva Schürmann‘s Erscheinen und Wahrnehmen - Eine
vergleichende Studie zur Kunst von James Turrell und der Philosophie Merleau-Pontys (2000).115

The perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson considered the senses as perceptual systems, rather
than exploring them individually.116 The systems comply in principle with the generally known five
senses, only Gibson highlights that “these five perceptual systems overlap one another; they are
not mutually exclusive.”117 Gibson’s approach of studying the senses as a cooperating whole;
hence the “multisensory nature of our perception,”118 has more and more been a concern to
various recent authors (Paterson 2005, 2009, 2012; Juhani Pallasmaa 2005; Giuliana Bruno 2002;
Laura U. Marks 2000; or Paul Rodaway 1994). Paterson criticizes the prevailing “emphasis on
visuality and visual metaphors in western culture.“119 Marks in turn stresses that
phenomenologists generally tend to solely refer to the “senses’ basically biological function in
serving needs for shelter, nourishment, safety, and sociability.” This leads, according to Marks, to
a wrong “Eurocentric” assumption that “because the proximal senses of touch, taste and smell
are not accorded much importance in Western cultures, they are outside culture in general.”120
Paul Rodaway (1994) calls for an increased academic focus on the subjectmatter of “sensuous
geographies,” a field of study, which, as he says, “might be located in the sub-field of perception
studies.”121 The manner in which the world and space in general are perceived is of particular
interest in geographical perception, as well as it is for the paper at hand.

In her discussion of “psychogeography” Bruno pays attention to what she refers to as the “touch
of space.”122 “The interaction of touch with the sensing of space is part of an historical
development that engages the impulse to map psychocorporeal space and its intimate
mechanics,”123 Bruno asserts. What catches one’s attention here is Bruno’s exceptional wording;
what does psychocorporeal space signify? The term corporeal is used in order to express oneself

115 Schürmann, Erscheinen und Wahrnehmen - Eine vergleichende Studie zur Kunst von James Turrell und der Philosophie Merleau-
Pontys. Translates: "Appearing and perceiving – a comparative study of the art of James Turrell and Merleau-Ponty’s
philosophy" (Author's translation).
116 Cf. James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, ed. Leonard Carmichael (London: George Allen &

Unwind Ltd, 1968). 1.

117 Importantly, "they often focus on the same information – that is, the same information can be picked up by a

combination of perceptual systems working together as well as by one perceptual system working alone." In: ibid., 4.
118 Mark Paterson, "Haptics," Wordpress Blog, http://geotheory.wordpress.com/space/.
119 Mark Paterson, "Haptic geographies: ethnography, haptic knowlegdes and sensuous dispositions," Progress in

Human Geography 33, no. 6 (2009): 766.

120 Laura U. Marks, The skin of the film : intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses (Durham: Duke University Press,

2000). 144.
121 Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place: 13.
122 Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film: 247.
123 Ibid., 253.

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“relating to a person’s body, especially as opposed to their spirit.“124 Diana Tietjens Meyers (2004)
writes about “psycho-corporeal” identity paying particular attention to the context of feminist
theories. She uses the term in order to “highlight[...] embodiment by ascribing presumptively
mental properties and/or capacities to the body.”125 She further identifies: “Instead of locating
individual identity primarily in the isolation of rational minds or in the continuity of streams of
mental representations, [...] theorists assert the priority of physical self-awareness in their accounts
of selfhood.”126 These ideas will become clearer later on.

This introductory chapter serves a valuable explanation why it is important to shift the theoretical
point of departure of the upcoming discussions to a non-visual focus for once. This new standpoint
foregrounds the notions of the somatic senses, spatial experience and the haptic. These are remarkably
recurrent in Turrell’s and Graham’s works and will therefore be scrutinized in the following
chapters.

124 Oxford Online Dictionary, s.v. "corporeal, " URL:

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/corporeal?q=corporeal++ (28/07/2012)
125 Diana Tietjens Meyers, Being Yourself: Essays on Identity, Action, and Social Life (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield

Publishers, 2004). 78.

126 Ibid., 78. (Emphasis added).

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3.1 (Spatial) Experience

“We are in constant dialogue and interaction with the environment, to the degree that it is
impossible to detach the image of the Self from its spatial and situational existence,”127 Juhani
Pallasmaa urges. Indeed, the bodily senses can only make sense if they are put into context, i.e. in
relation with the surrounding space. In Western culture, spatial experience is inherently somatic
in nature: “In fact, without our bodies we would have no geography – orientation, measure,
locomotion, coherence,”128 Rodaway affirms. He explains: “The senses are geographical in that
they contribute to orientation in space, an awareness of spatial relationships and appreciation of
the specific qualities of different places, both currently removed and experienced in time.”129

Paterson alleges that the aforementioned visual tendencies have led to an under-representation of
the notion of the haptic (this term will be further discussed in the ensuing subchapter). He further
argues that “our spatial experience is haptic as well as visual” and aims at “reveal[ing] the
underlying haptic (tactile, kinaesthetic) aspects of spatial experience and to reinscribe them into
cultural history.”130 For this reason Paterson focuses his study on other senses apart from the
ones listed above. These are “proprioception - the sense of bodily position,”131 “the vestibular
system - the sense of balance,”132 and “kinaesthesia - the sense of movement.”133 Paterson refers
to these other senses as somatic senses, as the term “acknowledges the multiplicity and the
interaction between different internally felt and outwardly orientated senses.”134 These somatic
senses are of particular importance regarding Turrell’s and Graham’s artworks. Not only are the
artists’ art spaces influenced by or influence themselves the somatic senses, they also make the
beholder highly aware of reflexes and bodily perception.

127 Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses: 64.
128 Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place: 31.
129 Ibid., 37.
130 Mark Paterson, "The Forgetting of touch: re-membering geometry with eyes and hands," Angelaki Journal of the

theoretical humanities 10, no. 3 (2005): 115.

131 "Proprioception is a perceptual system based on the sensory returns from nerve endings in the muscles, so that as

part of one’s embodiment the position of the body and limbs are felt," in: Paterson, "Haptic geographies:
ethnography, haptic knowlegdes and sensuous dispositions," 769.
132 "Deriving from the ‘vestibule’ area of the inner ear, the vestibular system connects up information picked up from

weighted hair cells in the cochlea, triggered by movements of fluid within three semicircular canals orientated
roughly along the three spatial axes. These are the horizontal, anterior and posterior canals which pick up turning
movements and bodily orientation, and lateral movement is picked up through the otoliths, which sense linear
accelerations," (Paterson is referring to Lackner and DiZio, 2005: 117). In: ibid., 770.
133 Ibid., 769.
134 Ibid., 768.

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It is crucial for Turrell’s light and dark installations that a feeling of being lost is invoked by the
beholder. The spectator’s bodily and spatial awareness is put into question as the major sense of
sight is constrained. The outcome that has been identified was disorientation and immersion (the
latter primarily in ganzfelds). On this peculiar feeling Tuan contemplates:

What does it mean to be lost? I follow a path into the forest, stray from the path, and all
of a sudden feel completely disoriented. Space is still organized in conformity with the
sides of my body. There are the regions to my front and back, to my right and left, but
they are not geared to external reference points and hence they are quite useless. Front
and back regions suddenly feel arbitrary, since I have no better reason to go forward than
to go back. Let a flickering light appear behind a distant clump of trees. I remain lost in
the sense that I still do not know where I am in the forest, but space has dramatically
regained its structure. The flickering light has established a goal. As I move toward that
goal, front and back, right and left, have resumed their meaning: I stride forward, am glad
to have left darks space behind.135

Likewise, the Projection Pieces let the beholder see a light, which after some scrutiny turns out to
be a mirage; untouchable, surreal, but yet visible. In contrast to Tuan, Rudolf Arnheim holds:
“Spatial orientation presupposes a frame of reference. In empty space, pervaded by no forces of
attraction, there would be no up and down, no straightness or tilt. Our visual field provides such
a framework – [which he calls] ‘retinal orientation.’”136

Never is the feeling of being lost as strong in Graham’s mirror-installations as it is in Turrell’s spaces,
because in Graham’s pavilions the (architectural) boundaries stay constantly visible. By means of
his mirror and maze-like structures Graham deceives the viewer’s experience of space, but always
in a playful manner - never depriving the viewer of the actual boundaries and therewith keeping
the viewer in a safe area. Nevertheless, as Lefebvre points out, the mirror is an essential
component in the perception of space:

The mirror is thus at once an object among others and an object different from all others,
evanescent, fascinating. In and through the mirror, the traits of other objects in
relationship to their spatial environment are brought together; the mirror is an object in
space which informs us about space, which speaks of space.137

135 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place. The perspective of experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). 36.
136 Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1974). 99-100.
137 Lefebvre, The production of space: 186.

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Graham’s mirrors show the spectators their world from a different angle, where left is right and right
is left. This is a habitual view which regular people experience everyday (and, when being
confronted with a real and not inverted opposing image of themselves, they struggle with the
unfamiliar visual inversion). Graham, however, combines various mirroring structures, such as
regular mirrors, two-way mirrors, or plain translucent glass in order to heighten the spatial
experience of the viewer. This experience is extended in Graham’s video installations, which
confront the beholder with one of Graham’s substantial concerns; the experience of the just-past.
Graham explores this notion intensensely in his video-works, including Present Continuous Past(s).
Graham explains that this notion is “about the paradox of present time. Because neither stays in
the present time as they speak or behave, it’s impossible for there to be present time. The only
thing resembling present time is a slight projection into the future, or into the just-past.138
Unfortunately, the space-time relationship Graham hints at here is beyond the scope of this
study.

Naturally, in his writings on the production of space Lefebvre deliberates on the question of how
space is perceived:

‘Nature’ can only apprehend through objects and shapes, but this perception occurs
within an overall context of illumination where bodies pass from their natural obscurity
into the light, not in an arbitrary manner but according to a specific sequence, order and
articulation. [...] It is in fact part and parcel of the way in which the existence of space is
established. This incessant deciphering activity is objective as much as subjective – in
which respect it indeed transcends the old philosophical distinction between objectivity
and subjectivity.139

It has become clear that precisely this “sequence and order” of the physical body perception of
space is impaired in Graham’s Ganzfeld Pieces. In chapter 4 “Space and the individual,” the
subjectmatter of the relationship of the spectator and the (art-) space will be further elaborated. It
will become clear that “his terrain [of psychogeography] – which comprehends haptic ‘space’ – is
also the place where a tactile eye and a visual touch develop, for this way of looking is inscribed
in the movement of psychogeography.”140 The haptic system, as Gibson calls it, opposed with the
notion of the visual/optical, will be further discussed in the following subchapter.

138 Graham in: Adachiara Zevi, Dan Graham: Selected Writings and Interviews on Art Works, 1965-1995 (Rome: I Libri di
Zerynthia, 1996). 110.(Emphasis added).
139 Lefebvre, The production of space: 183.
140 Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film: 253.

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“(Spatial) Experience” has dealt with the body senses and their influence on one’s spatial
experience. The subchapter has contributed some relevant elements to the overall analysis,
focusing on the motive of being lost, which recapitulates the theme of spatial decpetion from
chapter 2. Moreover, this section marks the transition to a haptic point of view, which will be
exemplified by some of Graham’s and Turrell’s artworks in the subsequent section.

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3.1.1 Optic-haptic

When you first encounter the works, you see something made out of veils of light, that looks
stable, solid and almost like it’s a thing [...]. [Viewers intuitionally] reach out to touch the - , to
feel the plain of light [...] [as if it were] tactile. [...] Your imagination insists that there is
something that’s quite solid, quite palpable.141

The above description could easily be associated with Turrell’s light installation. However, these
are the words Anthony McCall uses to describe his Solid Light Projections (Fig. 48). His projections
highly resemble Turrell’s light installations in their visual appearance. The above statement shows
that, although shaped from nothing but light, McCall’s objects prompt haptic responses among the
viewers. Likewise Adcock characterizes Turrell’s light works: “He encourages viewers to see in
ways that are haptic, as if they could feel light with their eyes, like pressure on the skin of visual
perception.”142 About the Ganzfeld Piece Wide Out (1998) (Fig. 27) Rech remarks: “The air takes
on a texture, no wall can be sensed, the space seems endless,”143 as well as about Turrell’s
ganzfelds in general: “Light becomes a tangible material.”144 Furthermore, Graham himself
alleges: “All my glass pavilions are made in relation to architectural forms as well as to the
sculptural (haptic) and visual (optic) senses,” 145 In this section, it will be demonstrated if and to
what extend Turrell’s and Graham’s works correspond to the distinction of optic-haptic.

In fact, the term haptic “extends beyond straightforward skin contact, that is, cutaneous touch,“146
Paterson asserts. The term has been handled variably in literature, be it humanistically or
phenomenologically, or film-theoretically. The latter field describes Giuliana Bruno’s main focus.
Bruno (2002) and Paul Rodaway (1994) address the geographic notions of the haptic in their
respective works. Bruno commentates on Rodaway’s work by hinting at some flaws concerning
“problems of cultural space and delineating cultural differences”147 However, as Bruno readily
admits, Rodaway’s Senuous Geographies is designed as being introductory and not, like Bruno’s own
work, principally focused on cinematic aspects. Nevertheless, they both stress that haptic aspects

141 McCall in: Felix von Boehm, "Anthony McCall - Five Minutes of Sculpture," (Germany: Hamburger Bahnhof -
Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin, 2012).
142 Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 2.
143 Rech, "The Eye of the Beholder," 76.
144 Ibid., 50.
145Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power: 172.
146 Paterson, "Haptic geographies: ethnography, haptic knowlegdes and sensuous dispositions," 768.
147 Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film: 254.

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have been much overlooked in ocular-dominated Western culture. The term optic(al) will be assumed
as denoting ocular sight.

Alois Riegl introduced the terminology of tactile-optical in his description of late Roman art
industry (Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, 1901). In this analysis the terminology of haptic-optical will be
adopted, as revised by Riegl himself.148 In a chapter on form and surface in his book Stilfragen (1893),
Riegl wrote: “All things in nature are shaped, i.e. they extend in all three dimensions of height,
width, and depth. Immediate assurance of this fact only the sense of touch can provide.” In
contrast to the tactile sense, Riegl asserted that “impressions of exterior things are registered via
the sense of sight, which in turn is receptive to deceiving the viewer in seeing three-
dimensionally. Only by using the sense of touch as an aid can the two-dimensional visual surface
become a three-dimensional form.”149

In his Late Roman Art Industry Riegl distinguishes the three categories of Nah-, Normal-, and
Fernsicht which he traces along and attributes to a historical development. He assigns the
categories to respective various historical eras and geographical areas.150 For Riegl, the haptic
perspective is equivalent to the view one has of an object if one moves extremely close so that
one can neither make out any shadows or contours anymore, nor spatial depth. Accordingly, the
categories of haptic and optical correspond to close vision [Nahsicht] and clear visibility [Fernsicht]
(in the sense of visible from afar), respectively.151

In his analysis of the development of the depiction of visual arts in ancient times, Riegl suggests
that the general pictorial aim was to portray somatic individuals [stoffliche Individuen] in the most
objective way possible. As a consequence, the spatial surrounding [der Raum], and spatial depth
[Tiefenraum] in particular, were considered less important in the pictorial depiction. Riegl further
implies that medieval visual depiction took place on a plane.152 He distinguishes three levels the
ancient arts underwent; first the ancient Egyptians, second the ancient Greeks, and third; the late
148 In a magazine discussion one year after the first publishing, Riegl admitted that the term ‘tactile’ was not well
chosen and should be replaced with the term ‘haptic’ instead. In: Alois Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Wien:
Österreichische Staatsdruckerei in Wien, 1927). 32.
149 "Alle Dinge in der Natur sind geformt, d.h. sie erstrecken sich nach den drei Dimensionen der Höhe, Breite und

Tiefe. Die unmittelbare Überzeugung von diesem Tatbestande vermag uns aber nur der Tastsinn zu verschaffen [...].
Um die Eindrücke der äußeren Dinge in sich aufzunehmen – der Gesichtssinn - [ist] eher geeignet, uns über die
Dreisdimensionalität des Geschauten zu täuschen. [...] Erst indem wir die Erfahrung des Tastsinns zu Hilfe nehmen,
ergänzen wir im Geiste die mit den Augen geschaute zweidimensionale Fläche zu einer dreidimensionalen Form."
Translated quotes from Riegl in this paragraph derive from: Fend, "Körpersehen: Über das Haptische bei Alois
Riegl," 173-74. (Author's translation).
150 Cf. Ibid., 178.
151 Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie: 32.
152 This paragraph is based on: ibid., 30-31.

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Roman period. Based on these three categories Riegl indicates the development of a haptic via a
haptic-optic to an optical-colored manner of pictorial representation.

As the portrayal of spatial depth is to be avoided in favor of the somatic individual, shadow
especially appears as a treacherous visual element. Riegl categorized the first stage of the ancient
arts, the Egyptians, as having a haptic pictorial representation; the portrayed individuals stay within
the plane, viewed from a close vision [Nahsicht] and literally one-sided.153 Subsequently a
loosening of the presumption of spatial representation followed with the Greeks. Partial shades,
though no deep shade (full shadow) is introduced. The viewer is granted to see a partial structure.
In this stage, Riegl defines a haptic-optic and thus regular sighted view [Normalsicht].154 The last level,
the late Roman period, presents for Riegl the optical-colored representation. Three-dimensionality
and thus the existence of pictorial space are admitted to, although not over-emphasized and only if the
space is cubic measurable and not of infinite spatial depth.155 There is no haptic plane any longer
as deep shadows are introduced and therewith clear visibility [Fernsicht].156

Riegl’s classifications have proven to be very influential to subsequent theorists. In fact, “Riegls
Late Roman Art Industry supplied the distinction between optical and haptic or tactile visual
experience which lies behind Benjamin’s characterization of the object’s aura, as ‘the unique
phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.’”157 Recently, Riegl’s notion of the haptic
has been subject to studies of cinema perception, as e.g. Marks (2000) proves with her work.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari distinguish between haptic and optic space and acknowledge
Riegl’s work in the field.158

Classifying Turrell’s and Graham’s works according to Riegl’s categorisation appears, at first, to
be a simple matter. Turrell’s Ganzfeld Pieces and Dark Spaces negate, in a pictorial sense, the
presense of spatial depth, if the effect of spatial depth is defined as being relative to shadows in
the surface area (Fig. 28, Bridget’s Bardo). The Ganzfeld Pieces and Dark Spaces ususally present a
total visual or dark field and do not create perspectival shadows as such and therefore could be
categorized as being haptic. The Projection Pieces and Wedgework Pieces, though, present a

153 Ibid., 32.

154 "Andererseits darf nun aber auch das Auge als das wichtigste Berichterstattungsorgan das Vorhandensein von
ausladenden Teilgliederungen wahrnehmen; diese verraten sich vor allem durch Schatten [...]." In: ibid., 33-34.
155 Ibid., 34.
156 Ibid., 35.
157 Graham MacPhee, "Review Essay: On the incompleteness of history: Benjamin’s arcades project and the optic of

historiography," Textual Practice 14, no. 3 (2000): 585. (Original emphasis).

158 Cf. this paragraph mainly: Fend, "Körpersehen: Über das Haptische bei Alois Riegl," 170.

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different case. The first create the illusion of spatial depth: “Light creates a surface where none
actually exists,”159 (cf. Fig. 29, Catso, Red). Although they are fake three dimensional objects, they
create a sense of spatiality. Therefore, the Projection Series would have been categorized as
optical-colored. The Wedgework Series, visually negate a depth effect (Fig. 30, Wedgework III).
However, in reality, the space does expand further. Thus, this series should be categorized as haptic-
optical because the general effect of regular sight is aimed at but, an optical-colored effect is achieved
(thus a depth experience) only after discovering the deception via what Zschocke calls haptic
assurance; i.e using hands and feet in order to make out spatial dimensions and directions.160.
Graham’s two-way mirror pavilions on the one hand create illusionary or virtual space (within the
mirror) as well as effects of shadows and ghostly reflections. Virtual is here understood as
signifying either imaginary or feigned traits as well as the 17th- and 18th-century’s sense of the term:
“In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century optics, ‘virtual’ was used to describe an image that was
seen by looking through a lens or that appeared in a mirror,”161 Friedberg explains. In this sense,
Graham’s pavilions thus are to be classified as optical. They allow clear visibility and different
(depth) views from various angles.

Marks, in turn, identifies a haptic visuality with regard to film studies. Evidently, her definition is
deduced from Alois Riegl’s reasoning.162 “In haptic visuality, the eyes themselves function like
organs of touch.”163 It is worth quoting her explanation of the variation of haptic visuality and
haptic perception at length:

Haptic visuality is distinguished from optical visuality, which sees things from enough
distance to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space: in other words, how we usually
conceive of vision. Optical visuality depends on separation between the viewing subject
and the object. Haptic looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to
plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is
more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze.164

But for all that, the classic optic-haptic relationship applied to Graham’s and Turrell’s works
appears to be unsatisfactory. It becomes clear that this distinction does not prove extremely
significant considering Graham and Turrell. The notions of the somatic senses, or the haptic system,

159 Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 29.
160 Zschocke, Der irritierte Blick: Kunstrezeption und Aufmerksamkeit: 145.
161 Friedberg, The Virtual Window: 8.
162 "Riegl borrowed the term haptic from physiology (from haptein, to fasten), since the term tactile might be taken

too literally as ‘touching,'" Marks adds. In: Marks, The skin of the film : intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses: 162.
163 All quotes from Marks in this paragraph are from: ibid., 162. (Original emphases).
164 Ibid., 162. (Emphasis added).

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as mentioned in the preceding chapter, appear to be more relevant regarding the effects and
expectations the artworks hold on the beholders. “The haptic system, unlike the other perceptual
systems, includes the whole body, most of its parts, and all of its [sic] surface,”165 Gibson writes
in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1968). He defines the haptic system as “the sensibility of
the individual to the world adjacent to his body by the use of his body.” It is

an apparatus by which the individual gets information about both the environment and
his body. He feels an object relative to the body and the body relative to an object. It is
the perceptual system by which animals and men are literally in touch with the
environment.166

Likewise, Graham refers to Gibson when saying “we discover things visually by moving our body
in a particular location. The visual experience is something that happens in a real extended time
period as we move around in space.”167 In fact, only by moving within the art space will the
beholder be able to grasp the scope of the dimensions of the work; kinaesthesia and
proprioception are activated. Meyers adds: “On [...] [a] psycho-corporeal view, proprioception –
that is, the unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation that arises from within
the body – is crucial to sustaining the individual’s body image, which, in turn, is indispensable to
identity and agency.”168 In this sense Rodaway proposes: “Movement is of two types: exploratory
and performatory, the first serves perception and the second behaviour.”169 Whereas Graham
enhances performatory and exploratory actions on the visitor’s part in his pavilions and
installations, Turrell seems to serve an exploratory function with his art spaces. Although for
some of Turrell’s works, such as the Space Division Constructions, it is crucial to move within the
art space in order to unmask and unravel the deception which takes place. In other cases, such as
the Dark Spaces or the Ganzfeld Pieces, it does not make much of a difference if the beholder
moves around or not, as the spatial and visual boundaries are undefined, as described in chapter
2.1.2.

As earlier mentioned, Mark Paterson maintains that “the haptic involves not only touch but also
the bodily senses of movement (kinaesthesia), the body’s felt position (proprioception), and
balance (the vestibular sense).” He highlights that “these somatosensory experiences of space,” as

165 Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems: 99.

166 This and the preceding quote are from: ibid., 97. (Original emphasis).
167 Graham in: Eric De Bruyn and Dan Graham, "Interview with Dan Graham," in Dan Graham, ed. Gloria Moure

(Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 1996), 203.

168 Meyers, Being Yourself: Essays on Identity, Action, and Social Life: 78-79.
169 Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place: 30.

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he calls them, “have usually been disregarded due to the philosophical correlation of abstract
thinking with visual experience, especially since the Greeks.”170 Paterson’s somatic senses appear to
correspond to Gibson’s haptic system and Marks’ haptic perception. “Haptic perception,” in contrast to
haptic visuality, “is usually defined by psychologists as the combination of tactile, kinesthetic, and
proprioceptive functions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our
bodies [...],” Marks recapitulates. In this sense, Gibson states:

More than any other perceptual system, the haptic apparatus incorporates receptors that
are distributed all over the body and this diversity of anatomy makes it hard to understand
the unity of function that nevertheless exists. Moreover, it is so obviously involved in the
control of performance that we are introspectively not aware of its capability to yield
perception; we allow the visual system to dominate our consciousness.171

Thus, this new insight of Paterson’s somatic senses allocated to Graham’s and Turrell’s spaces lead
to the following conclusion: (1) The Ganzfeld Pieces, as previously indicated, are addressing the
vestibular sense by causing disorientation and immersion due to undefined spatial structures.
Also, the beholder’s sense of bodily position, proprioception, is rattled – again it will be stressed
that visitors have reported to strongly feel disequilibrated. (2) The Space Division Constructions
are of interest here as they suggest flat surfaces (Fig. 31, Danae) which turn out much deeper once
the viewer tries to touch the wall (Fig. 31a); a haptic illusion using the sense of touch is achieved.
(2a) Likewise, entering a DarkSpace one has to feel for the adjacent wall in order to find the way
due to the extremely low light levels in the room. Often the viewers stumble into the dark room
or even are accompanied by a museum guard equipped with a torch. (3) Graham’s two-way
mirror pavilions markedly call for the visitors’ active engagement via body movement, i.e.
kinaesthesia.

Nevertheless, calling into mind the effect of immersion caused by Turrell’s ganzfelds, the peculiar
consequence of light being felt, thus holding actual physical qualities (altough this generally
appears to be impossible) still remains unsolved. Turrell urges in this respect: “I like to work with
these lower levels of light because it's when you reduce light that the eye opens and you no longer
squint. The pupil opens and when that happens, feeling goes out of the eyes like touch, so we actually feel
with the eyes.”172

170 The quotes from this paragraph are from: Paterson, "The Forgetting of touch: re-membering geometry with eyes
and hands," 115.
171 Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems: 134.
172 Turrell in: Staff, "Adventures in Perception: James Turrell". (Emphasis added).

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3.2 Visible – Invisible

The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

(Oscar Wilde.173)

“Art and architecture seek visibility. They are attempts to give sensible form to the moods,
feelings, and rhythms of functional life,”174 Tuan writes. Visible and invisible elements are both
inherent to Graham’s and Turrell’s artworks. In fact, visibility and invisibility at first glance seem
to be two ordinary opposite poles. In a further analysis of Graham’s and Turrell’s artworks, these
poles turn out to be a lot more intertwined than one might have guessed.In his unfinished edition
of The Visible and the Invisible (1968), Merleau-Ponty points out: “The invisible is not the
contradictory of the visible: the visible itself had an invisible inner framework (membrure), and the
in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible.”175 The quote makes clear that Merleau-Ponty
does not understand visible-invisible as contrastive attributes but as concepts that are mutually
dependent and may even occur simultaneously.

The mirror, and in this particular case the two-way mirror, does not simply display the viewer’s
visible reflected image. As noted earlier; “at the same time that glass reveals, it conceals,”176 it can
be described as having both visible and invisible qualities; transparent and opaque, as “glass is
noticeable yet not quite visible.”177 Particulary the two-way mirror glass proved to hold
characteristics that enable a play of visibility and invisibility, i.e. translucency and opacity.
Friedrich Wolfram Heubach remarks:

Standing before an image of oneself one begins to understand the visible as a judgement.
One begins to guess that ‘visibility’ is not a simple attribute of what is given but a

173 As quoted by: Dalia Judovitz, "Vision, Representation, and Technology in Descartes," in Modernity and the
Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley: Universitiy of California Press, 1993), 63.
174 Tuan, Space and Place. The perspective of experience: 164-66.
175 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Working Notes," in The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, ed. Claude

Lefort Evanston (Northwestern University Press, 1968), 215. Due to Merleau-Ponty's unexpected death, he could
not finish his work on "The Visible and Invisible." The work in its version as a draft thus proves at times difficult to
grasp.
176 Graham, "Essay on Video, Architecture and Television," 59.
177 Korn, "Glass in Modern Architecture (1929)," 170.

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 considerably complicated and complicating fact implying the intention of the observer. It
is a complex product of perception.178

With these findings in mind, the analysis of Graham’s pavilion Two-way Mirror Triangle with One
Curved Side (Fig. 32) will be continued. Standing in front of the convex two-way mirror, the
viewers cannot but see their own reflection, thereby being part of the picture. Burckhardt emphasizes
in this respect: “The illusion of pictorial space can only be fully achieved if the viewers are
mentally included, if they can ‘put themselves into’ the picture.”179 If the viewers on the other
hand decide to enter the pavilion, their view turns into the mirror’s view, as they literally see what the
mirror sees, i.e. from the mirror’s perspective. As a result, a tripartite outcome imposes itself on the
viewers. (1) The viewers stand in front of the semi-reflective glass, and, although relative to the
light and weather conditions, most certainly will see their own reflection including the reflection
of the rear landscape. (2) The viewers look at the pavilion from an angle from which they will not
be part of the reflection, thereby they will see a reflected view of the mountains, lake, and
landscape from a new perspective. (3) The viewers enter the pavilion and, so to speak, see with the
mirrors eyes, therefore see every detail of the landscape they could before only have seen partially
(in the reflection). As a result, the Two-way Mirror Triangle with One Curved Side offers the viewer an
instance of “comprehensive seeing,” in other words, a form of pure visibility.

Gibson may point out one of the most prominent qualitites of the mirror: it “arises upon the
open circuit (that goes) from seeing body to visible body.”180 However, reading Gibson’s
statement in terms of Lefebvre’s theory of space, it becomes clear that the viewer’s visible body
resembles a more profound idea than simply the body’s physical effigy. For further elucidation of
this hypothesis, it is worth quoting Lefebvre’s explanation of the process the viewer undergoes in
relationship with the mirror at length:

If my body may be said to enshrine a generative principle, at once abstract and concrete,
the mirror’s surface makes this principle invisible, deciphers it. The mirror discloses the
relationship between me and myself, my body and the consciousness of my body – not
because the reflection constitutes my unity qua subject [...], but because it transforms what
I am into the sign of what I am. This ice-smooth barrier, itself merely an inert sheen,
reproduces and displays what I am – in a word, signifies what I am – within an imaginary

178 Friedrich Wolfram Heubach, "The Observed Eye, or: Making Seeing Visible (On the video works of Dan
Graham)," in Dan Graham, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998), 192.
179 "[...] die Raumillusion des Bildes erst dann vollkommen ist, wenn die psychologische Seite mit einbezogen ist,

wenn der Betrachter nicht ‚außen vor‘ bleibt, sondern selbst sich ins Bild setzen kann," in: Burckhardt, Metamorphosen
von Raum und Zeit: eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung: 114-15. (Author's translation.)
180 Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," 168.

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 sphere which is yet quite real. A process of abstraction then – but a fascinating abstraction.
In order to know myself, I ‘separate myself out from myself’. The effect is dizzying.181

Thus, what becomes visible in Graham’s mirror works (in a Lefebvrian reading) is not only the
beholder’s image, but first and foremost the beholder’s Self. Merleau-Ponty, points out another
option for understanding of the mirror-image, which suggests the opposite of Lefebvre’s
182
thoughts: “A Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror; he sees a dummy, an ‘outside.’”
However, Merleau-Ponty’s general mindset involves an “ambiguity of the body,” which includes
the division of the subject into “touched and seen body” and “touching and seeing body,” which
in effect means that the subject “is a body and has a body.”183 This idea will be adopted here, as it
has earlier been successfully pointed out that firstly, in Graham’s mirror-structures a conceptual
blending of the subject and object of contemplation occurs. Secondly, Graham’s mirror
installations do not only engender visual but haptic sensations within the beholder; in this case
the stimulation of the sense of kinaesthesia, i.e engaging the body with reference to its
environment.

Degrees of visibility and invisibility also play an important role in Turrell’s light and dark
installations. Adcock warns: “In fact, it [the light in the installations] is so unusual that, in
laboratory conditions, it is not uncommon for viewers to experience a complete shutdown of
their visual systems. The ability to see just turns off – an experience very different from seeing
the darkness in a room without light.”184 Hence, the difficulty that presents itself considering
Turrell’s art pieces is not only that “the actual situation of light and space is ‘in front of‘ the
viewer’s eyes but still stays hidden,”185 to speak with Zschocke’s words (Cf. Fig. 3 and 3a), but
also that degrees of in-visibility occur that are unaccustomed to the beholder. Zschocke further
presumes: “The absolute darkness of a Dark Space confronts the viewer [den Sehenden] with the
absence of the familiar object world, i.e. the absence of any kind of visible room. Therefore the
viewer is in a situation which completely eludes any kind of cognitive seeing [erkennendes Sehen] (of
a possible object).”186 One might feel inclined to leap to the conclusion that, obviously, what is
both visible and invisible in Turrell’s installations is light (e.g in the Ganzfeld Pieces or Dark
Spaces, respectively). However, Adcocks abovementioned warning suggests that the situation in

181 Lefebvre, The production of space: 185. (Original emphasis).

182 Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," 170.
183 Schürmann, Erscheinen und Wahrnehmen - Eine vergleichende Studie zur Kunst von James Turrell und der Philosophie Merleau-

Pontys: 25.
184 Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 221.
185 "Die tatsächliche Licht-und Raumsituation liegt direkt vor den Augen des Betrachters und bleibt dennoch

verborgen." Zschocke writes in: Zschocke, Der irritierte Blick: Kunstrezeption und Aufmerksamkeit: 148.
186 Ibid., 164.

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Turrell’s artspaces is more complex. The shut-down of the visual system of the spectator can be
understood as a white-or blackout. Zschocke describes the combination of circumstances the
spectator undergoes in a ganzfeld: “The exterior world seems to disappear in the ganzfeld and the
person experiencing the phenomenon is surrounded first by white (or colored) light and
eventually in darkness. As ‘normal vision’ connotes the seeing of something and always is an act of
‘establishing a relation’ between different elements and stimuli, the ganzfeld constantly evokes the
feeling of seeing ‘nothing with your eyes wide open.’”187 Adcock further elucidates: “Ganzfelds
are most often experienced as white-outs in arctic conditions and pilots flying in fogs sometimes
experience them, but otherwise they are very rare.”188

Whiteout and blackout are two visual phenomena that apply to Turrell’s Ganzfeld Pieces and
Dark Spaces, especially in the context of “visible-invisible.” Gibson describes the two
phenomena as follows: “Blackout provides no information about the world because energy is
absent; whiteout provides no information about the world, because, although energy is present,
structure is absent.” These instances, he adds, are “said to be a very alarming experience.“
Applying Gibson’s analysis, which appears suitable, means in turn that neither the Ganzfeld
Pieces nor the Dark Spaces provide any information (about the world), thus do not provide for
visibility. Gibson confirms: “The occurence of ‘whiteout’ in the environment of a level snowplain
under certain weather conditions [...]. It is analogous to ‘blackout,’ in which case also nothing is
visible.” In this sense, Zschocke suggests: “Whether the ganzfeld is experienced as if one is
touching the light physcially or a complete emptiness is felt, the experience always is a negation
of representational sight.”189

However, it has also been identified that visitors experience visual phenomena such as retinal
afterimages in the Darks Spaces, as well as becoming aware of “nerve firings,” that are almost
indistinguishable from the low light sources installed in the Dark Space. Furthermore, in other
installation pieces which do not interfere as much with the individual’s body system as the
Ganzfeld Pieces, such as the Projection Pieces or Wedgework Series, light figures and beams are
discernable, light does become visible. Adcock notes accordingly:

187 “Die Außenwelt scheint im Ganzfeld zu verschwinden und der Wahrnehmende bleibt in einer weißen (oder
farbigen) Leere und schließlich Dunkelheit zurück. Da das normale Sehen immer das Sehen von etwas ist, immer ein
In-Beziehung-Setzen von verschiedenen Elementen oder Reizen zueinander, hat man im Ganzfeld das Gefühl, trotz
der Anwesenheit von Licht mit offenen Augen ‘Nichts‘ zu sehen.” In: ibid., 163. (Original emphasis / Author's
translation).
188 Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 221.
189 Quotes of Gibson in this paragraph derive from: Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems: 293.

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 The light in the Single-Wall Projections often seems real while the actual walls onto which
they are projected dissolve into nothingness. Visually, their physical containment becomes
ghost-like. In many cases, the light seems to create spaces that exist outside the actual
boundaries of architecture. When a Single-Wall Projection is activated, viewers have
difficulty locating the actual position of the wall.190

Again, the visual deception which had been identified in chapter 2 takes on great significance
here as visual and spatial boundaries are blurred. Thus, it can be inferred that Turrell circulates
between the realms of visibility and invisibility191, playing with the boundaries of both and intensifying
them in extreme variations.

In this analysis it has been pointed out that Graham succeeds to create forms of pure visibility of
the viewer’s environment by the help of his two-way mirror structures, in this case the Two-way
Mirror Triangle with One Curved Side has served as an example. Turrell, on the other hand, hides the
architectural environment of the beholder, i.e. the contours of the exhibition room, and chooses
to make pure light, visible – that is, light as a substance and not as being reflected by an object.
The section “Visible-Invisible” can be concluded by saying that Graham and Turrell both create
“spaces without hiding places.”192

190 Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 23.
191 For the idea of the realm of visibility and invisibility cf. also the conclusion of this paper, chapter 5.
192 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd,

2005). 173.

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3.2.1 “Making seeing visible”

“As you plumb a space with vision, it is possible to ‘see yourself see,’”193 James Turrell contends.
This statement, however, will not be supported in this analysis. “Turrell’s art is about the ability
of light to fill up a space and saturate it with seeing,”194 Daniel Birnbaum claims and continues:
“Thus, seeing itself becomes visible – you see yourself see,“ thereby referring back to a statement
from Turrell. In fact, Birnbaum’s analysis appears somehow contradictory as he also asserts that
“Turrell’s works do not represent anything. They are themselves: light and darkness, space and
perception. [...] [His art] is not about what is before, but rather what is behind our eyes – about the
preconditions of seeing and the limits of perceptions.” 195 In fact, the latter statement seems to
apply more fittingly than the one claiming that Turrell’s (light) artworks “make seeing visible” and
make the spectators “see themselves see.” The analysis will reveal that Graham, via the mirroring
effect of e.g. Present Continuous Past(s), which includes videotaping and -playback, far more “makes
visible” to the viewers their own act of seeing and observing, than Turrell’s light and dark spaces.

In Graham’s mirror installations, the viewer adopts the position of being subject and object of
the art work simultaneously (as noted earlier). The viewer is the subject viewing and, at the same
time, is the object of observation (in the mirror). Heubach states accordingly:

As a subject, he [the visitor, A/N] knows himself to be the object of reproduction but
does not actually see himself as such. Video technology provides a direct image playback
on the monitor enabling the person portrayed to experience himself simultaneously as
both subject and object. He looks and he sees himself looking; he perceives himself and is
perceived in the same moment, in one and the same act of perception. 196

The room-environment Present Continuous Past(s) (1974) (Fig. 33 and 33a) is one of many
installation pieces in Graham’s œuvre which deal with the subject of the relationship between the
beholder, the object and space in time. In fact, one may regard it as the basic unit on which he
further develops his later works, i.e. his pavilions. According to Heubach, Graham’s
video/performance-installations “make [...] one conscious that seeing contains an objectifying

193 Turrell cited in: Daniel Birnbaum, "Eyes & Notes on the Sun," in James Turrell: the other horizon, ed. Peter Noever

(Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001), 227.

194 Ibid., 227.
195 Ibid., 227.
196 Heubach, "The Observed Eye, or: Making Seeing Visible (On the video works of Dan Graham)," 191. (Original

emphasis).

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moment which does not include the present.” 197 Present Continuous Past(s) addresses exactly this
paradox of time, which Graham has found fascinating throughout his career.198 In this installation
spectators literally see themselves seeing by means of an immediate videotape playback on the
screen underneath the camera. On entering the installation, the viewer is immediately confronted
with a man-high mirror wall (Fig. 31a). In fact, all walls are mirror-clad, except the one belonging
to the entrance. In the centre of the mirror-wall on the viewer’s left side, a monitor topped by the
camera lens of a video camera is installed. As the official description given by Graham continues:
“The video camera tapes what is immediately in front of it and the entire reflection on the
opposite mirrored wall. The image seen by the camera (reflecting everything in the room) appears
8 seconds later in the video monitor (via tape delay [...]).”199

Therefore, if the viewer does not stand right in front of the lens, the mirror behind the viewer is
taped as well, including the viewer’s back. Therefore, “a person viewing the monitor sees both
the image of himself, 8 seconds ago, and what was reflected on the mirror from the monitor, 8
seconds ago of himself which is 16 seconds in the past.” What results is “an infinite regress of
time continuums within time continuums (always separated by 8 seconds intervals).”200

Thus Graham creates an opportunity for an infinite time and space loop whereby the viewer and
his or her consecutive eight seconds past(s) are captured on the screen. The title of the work
refers back, linguistically, to the English verb tense Present Continuous, also known as Present
Progressive. This tense is used in order to express an action which is in the making or restricted to a
certain timeframe; e.g. “I am doing my homework.” By combining Present Continuous with not only
one but several instances or possibilities of Past(s), Graham anticipates the artworks idea in its
title. He grasps the concept of temporality and self-perception in time including several versions
of pasts in form of an eight seconds delayed video-playback in a pun rooted in English grammar.
Additionally, a future aspect is suggested, as through the delayed playback the viewer’s behaviour
is manipulated (e.g. the viewer might be over articulating movements like waving hands or jumping,
in order to enjoy the blatant video-taped copy which appears on the screen only shortly
afterwards). This mechanism will be explained later on. Interestingly, Present Continuous can be
used in order to express a future action as well; e.g. “She is going to leave.” Graham’s earlier

197 Ibid., 192.

198 Graham and Gerdes, "Dan Graham Interviewed by Ludger Gerdes (1991)."
199 Dan Graham in: Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ed. Dan Graham: Video-Architecture-Television (Halifax: The Press of

Novia Scotia College of Art & Design, 1979), 7.

200 Dan Graham in: ibid., 7.

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mentioned assertion of the just-past, which thus revreberates in Present Continuous Past(s), is
enhanced by Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts:

Although my present draws into itself time past and time to come, it possesses them only
in intention, and even if, for example, the consciousness of my past which I now have
seems to me to cover exactly the past as it was, the past which I claim to recapture is not
the real past, but my past as I now see it, perhaps after altering it. Similarly in the future I
may have a mistaken idea about the present which I now experience.201

It is important to note two essential elements in the discussed piece. (1) Graham makes use of
both video/monitor- and mirror-components. In doing so, he combines two elements that
depend strongly on visual perception. Thanks to the interplay between mirror and video, a
“multiplicity of spaces [...] can be experienced in Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Past(s).”202 (2)
The work is dependent on the beholder. In fact, it is the viewer who interacts with the artwork
and therewith not only contributes but triggers the activation of the installation which is required
for the piece to work properly.

“Graham’s work forms in a deliberately ironic way a perceptual and temporal sort of Möbius
strip; a kind of loop which is found in many conceptual works of Graham [...],”203 Marie-Paule
MacDonald suggests. Indeed, Graham writes accordingly: “By linking perception of exterior
behaviour and its interior, mental perception, an observer’s ‘self’, like a topological Möbius strip,
can be apparently without ‘inside’ or ‘outside.’”204 The idea of infinity suggested by means of the
Möbius strip is and shall remain a subject to speculations in various academic disciplines as well
as to every day life – as the simple fact of something having no ending and the scope of this
possibility is not a concept that one can easily grasp.

In fact, “as the observer approaches, the mirror opens up a wider and deeper view of the room-
environment.”205 The mirrors thus stand for the static medium which reflects the viewer one-to-
one. Awareness and self-consciousness are generated via the interaction between viewer and
installation, a certain kind of sensual experience for the viewer being a natural result. Just like the

201 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: 60.

202 Barbara London, "Time as Medium: Five Artists' Video Installations," Leonardo 28, no. 5 (1995): 425.
203 "Cette œuvre forme en toute connaissance de cause une espèce de paradoxal ruban de Moëbius perceptuel,

temporel, une mise en spirale qui se retrouve dans nombre de travaux conceptuels de Graham [...]", in: MacDonald,
"Matéralisations. Production de masse, espace public et convention architecturale dans l'œuvre de Dan Graham," 62.
(Author's translation).
204 Graham, "Essay on Video, Architecture and Television," 56.
205 Ibid., 54.

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 206
mirror-image, “video is a present-time medium.” The video-playback provided in Present
Continuous Past(s) is crucial, because it combines in its recording the mirror-walls and the viewer’s
reflections on them as well as its own screen. The medium “video feeds back indigenous data in
the immediate, present-time environment or connects parallel time/space continua,” whereas, on
the other hand, according to Graham, “film [...] detaches the viewer from present reality and
makes him a spectator.” In Present Continuous Past(s), though, not only the video camera is used,
but via the video-playback a certain kind of film-situation is created, even though it is only for 8
respective seconds. Therefore, a complex situation of spectator as subject and object is created, as
it has been earlier on suggested and will be further investigated in the subsequent chapter.

In Turrell’s artspaces one becomes aware of the senses and feel them more strongly and deeply;
one is confronted with unusual and large quantities of darkness or light but in the end, one
cannot “see oneself (seeing),” as a sort of (self-) reflection takes places namely not outside of the
physical body but within. Rech acknowledges that inside a Darks Space, “the position of the
viewer is a determining factor in the conception of the work.” She differentiates between an
“inside seeing” and an “outside seeing,” although her understanding of these terms deviate from
the ones held in this paper. She defines the viewing space as the “seat of ‘inside seeing’” and the
sensing space as the “seat of ‘outside seeing.”’ But Rech’s statement that “viewers realize that their
perception constitutes the work,” appears erroneous. How is the visitor to know that the space
actually is divided into viewing space and sensing space?207 The visual deception that takes place
deprives the viewer from perceiving some crucial details (like for instance the actual space division
in the Space Division Constructions) and some might not even distinguish that they are being
deceived at all. Only of the viewer first settles in to the surrounding and then moves around the
installation in order to gradually and actively explore the conditions of the space, an
understanding of the seeing that takes place might be distinguished. Hence, the prevailing assertion
that the possibility of “watching yourself when you see”208 relating to Turrell’s artspaces remains
hasty.

In fact, it remains unclear, how Turrell precisely defines vision. Is vision the act of seeing or does
vision comprise everything that is visual? What does it mean to fill a space with vision? In Turrell’s
light spaces one rather feels oneself seeing than seeing oneself seeing. The same applies to the dark

206 The quotes from this paragraph derive from Graham's 'Essay on Video, Architecture, and Television:' ibid., 52.
207 Rech, "The Eye of the Beholder," 88.
208 Markus Brüderlin, "The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld: James Turrell and the Boundaries

between Sensory and Spiritual Experience," in James Turrell, the Wolfsburg Project, ed. Markus Brüderling (Ostfildern:
Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009), 133.

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spaces; one becomes aware of the reinal afterimages and is confronted with pitch black darkness,
and yet, the eyes seem to sense some light sparks. Hence, one does not actually see the stimuli but
rather sense them, feel them. Adcock voices adequately: “His medium is visual sensing.”209
Therefore to “see yourself see” in a strict sense does not apply in this respect to Turrell’s art. In
contrast, it seems a lot more accurate to ascribe Graham’s Two-way Mirror Pavilions and Video
Installations the potential to “make seeing visible.” In this respect a fitting quote from Merleau-
Ponty can be applied to Graham’s mirror-pieces:

The feeling that one feels, the seeing one sees, is not a thought of seeing or feeling, but
vision, feeling, mute experience of a mute meaning - - The quasi ‘reflective’ redoubling,
the reflexivity of the body, the fact that it touches itself touching, sees itself seeing, does
not consist in surprising a connecting activity behind the connected, in reinstalling oneself
in this constitutive activity; the self-perception [...] or perception of perception does not
convert what it apprehends into an object and does not coincide with a constitutive
source of perception: in fact I do not entirely succeed in touching myself touching, in
seeing myself seeing, the experience I have of myself perceiving does not go beyond a
sort of imminence, it terminates in the invisible [...] of the concrete vision I have of my
body in the mirror. The self-perception is still a perception [...].210

For Turrell’s art in terms of “making seeing visible” a conclusion can be drawn with Craig
Adcock’s words: “Looking at Turrell’s light images, viewers gain insight into the workings of
their own visual systems and discover that within the simple act of seeing there is considerable
room for wonder.” 211 In Turrell’s art pieces, one becomes aware of the act of seeing, but one
does not see the self seeing, but is seeing. The viewer goes through a transition from being subject
to being a more understanding subject. Graham, on the other hand, by intensifying the already
reflective mirror with a video playback installation, lets the beholders observe themselves in the
act of their own seeing. This is engendered due to the fact that “the subject does not comprehend
itself as such by perceiving but by being perceived or perceiving that it is being perceived as an
object.”212 Therefore, by letting the viewer both perceive and be perceived by him- or herself,
Graham facilitates a situation wherein “seeing is made visible.”

209 Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 2.

210 Merleau-Ponty, "Working Notes," 249. (Original emphasis).
211 Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 216.
212 Heubach, "The Observed Eye, or: Making Seeing Visible (On the video works of Dan Graham)," 192.

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4 Space and the individual body

And, stooping through the doorway of the bulky, spreading house, I looked up into the
sunny sky. Here, I saw the real medium of architecture – space.213

Discussing the different definitions of space and place has been subject to numerous philosophical,
geographical, anthropological, and architectural studies (cf. Bachelard 1969; de Certeau 1984;
Relph 1976; Augé 1995; Norberg-Schulz 1980/1984; Tuan 1977), up to even a Marxist analysis of
“the production of space” (Lefebvre 1974). Defining these concepts is not an easy task; the
familiarity with the terms ‘place’ and ‘space as well as a widespread use of thereof makes it
difficult to define the concepts for this analysis. As Yi-Fu Tuan has noted:

‘Space’ and ‘place’ are familiar words denoting common experiences. We live in space. [...]
Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other. [...]
Space and place are basic components of the lived world: we take them for granted.214

A detailed discussion of the various definitions of these notions of space and place does not seem
relevant at this point. Still, as the analysis in chapter 3 has shown, “the organization of human
space is uniquely dependent on sight.” 215 In fact, Chris Jenks urges in his account of “the history
and practice of the flâneur”: “Space has to be conceptualised in order to be experienced and
understood, our ‘sites’ are informed by the predisposed character of our ‘sight’. ‘Space’, like
‘time’, in a post-Kantian world, has come to be regarded with a categorical fixity and
inviolability.”216 In chapter 4.2.2 “Private vs. public space” it will be discussed to what extent
Graham designs social spaces with his pavilions and how Turrell creates light environments that
question the borders of architectural space, maybe metaphysics even, which usually require a
solitary experience.

Regarding the relationship of space and the individual body, Irene Rice Pereira claims:

213 Rudolph Michael Schindler, "Space Architecture," in Form and Function: A Source Book for the History of Architecture

and Design 1890-1939, ed. Tim Benton, Charlotte Benton, and Dennis Sharp (London: Granada, 1975), 183.
214 Tuan, Space and Place. The perspective of experience: 3.
215 Ibid., 17.
216 Jenks, "Watching yout step: The history and practice of the flâneur," 144.

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 The apprehension of space and the development of human consciousness are parallel.
The more energy that is illuminated and redeemed from the substance of matter, the
more fluid the perceptions become and the more the mind sums up into abstraction. The
mind’s capacity for dimensionality and the structure of consciousness become available
through experiencing one’s own action. [...] One cannot explore a dimension unless the
constellation of one’s own consciousness is prepared to apprehend it.217

With this statement Pereira addresses some fundamental aspects. In order to comprehend the
actual space an individual inhabits, he or she must (1) be aware of the surrounding space, (2) be
actively moving within the space, and (3) be able to fuse the acquired impressions to a meaningful
whole. What does this mean in practice? As mentioned previously, the beholder’s movement
affects the artspace in different ways (This will become even clearer in the following
subchapters.) Likewise, Rodaway maintains the essential role of the indivual’s body in relation to
space and environment: “The body contributes both to spatial and temporal perception [...]. It
mediates between us and the environment, giving us access to a world beyond itself.”218

It is precisely this “world beyond itself” which is suggested in (Graham’s) mirror-image. In this
sense, Lefebvre seems to categorize the modifications the viewer’s own body perception
undergoes with the following statement:

The mirror thus presents or offers the most unifying but also the most disjunctive
relationship between form and content: forms therein have a powerful reality yet remain
unreal; they readily expel or contain their contents, yet theit contents remain an
irreducible force, an irreducible capacity, and this is as true for my body (the content of
‘my consciousness’) as for other bodies, for bodies in general. 219

Via the ubiquitous mirror image, which uncompromisingly reflects everything that it sees, the
viewer cannot but recognize the surrounding space. However, the real space is complemented by
the illusionary mirror-space – whereby the spehere of activity the viewer moves in is (visually)
enlarged. In this overall-analysis, various aspects regarding the fusion of object and subject in
Graham’s mirror-structures had been engendered. Nevertheless, it still stays an imaginary
concurrence. Heubach emphasizes in this respect: “One appears to be existing in two separate
worlds: as an acting, perceiving subject in one and as a perceived object in the other.”220 Graham
puts the viewers in the position to experience their own actions and appearance immediately,

217 Irene Rice Pereira cited from "The Nature of Space" (1956) in: Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension

and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 344.
218 Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place: 31.
219 Lefebvre, The production of space: 185-86.
220 Heubach, "The Observed Eye, or: Making Seeing Visible (On the video works of Dan Graham)," 192.

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thus as Pereira (abovestated) says: “The mind’s capacity for dimensionality and the structure of
consciousness become available through experiencing one’s own action.”

Burckhardt describes the viewer’s reflection in the mirror as a retrojection, i.e. a back projection
which is characterised by the movement of the image back to the viewer and not away from the
latter.221 In Graham’s two-way mirror pavilions the room/space is always a space-illusion: You
can never see the (entire) space itself but only its reflection, Burckhardt further suggest.222 In fact,
what appears to be the space is the spatialized and retrospected mirror-image of one’s own Self.223
Heubach carries forward this mindset by urging: “alongside great curiosity to finally see oneself as
one is perceived by others is the fear of discovering one’s own alienation or being unable to
recognise oneself in the image (any longer).”224

The Perceptual Cells, on which Turrell started working in 1991, present what is probably the
most extreme situation of sensual disorientation, or re-orientation respectively, on the part of the
viewer. Soft Cell (1992) (Fig. 34), for example, is highly reminiscent of the Anechoic Test
Chamber mentioned in the introductory words. Turrell describes the cell as being “both solitary
confinement and infinite space;” additionally, outside and inside walls are covered in “black
anechoic foam.” Inside the cell “there is no sound from within or without save that generated by
one’s body.” After adjusting to the darkness, “the red blush of a barely perceptible beam of light
become[s] visible on the wall directly ahead” and by then “the viewer has become aware of
internal sounds, heartbeat and breathing, and the sensation of sight diminishing and then
returning.”225 Adolf Krischanitz claims that in Turrell’s artworks “the viewer himself is a living
vessel and therefore space,” and further: Turrell’s “machines [his light spaces, A/N] are direct
extensions of the human body and thus, as it were, the viewer’s second skin, with the
corresponding amplification of one particular sense that is specially required, i.e. either the eye or
the ear.“226 If one wishes to regard the light which fills the Ganzfeld Pieces as the object of the
art piece, it surely fuses with the beholding subject via the evoked feeling of immersion. However,
as it has variously been noted, the object of Turrell’s art is perception itself. The space, lit in colored

221 "Rückprojektion, das heißt einer Bewegung, die sich, anstatt vom Betrachter fort, wieder auf ihn zu bewegt.“ In:
Burckhardt, Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung: 116. (Author's translation).
222 "Der Raum [...] ist Raumillusion [...] weil man [...] niemals den Raum zu Gesicht bekommt, sondern lediglich seine

Reflexion [...]," Burckhardt writes. In: ibid., 120. (Author's translation).

223 "Was der Raum selbst zu sein scheint, ist das räumlich gewordene, sich zurückprojizierende Spiegelbild des

eigenen Selbst." In: ibid., 120. (Author's translation).

224 Heubach, "The Observed Eye, or: Making Seeing Visible (On the video works of Dan Graham)," 193.
225 All quotes in this paragraph are from Turrell in: Noever, James Turrell: The other horizon, 145.
226 Krischanitz, "Introduction: James Turrell, the material side of nothing," 7.

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light, thus takes on a mediating role by allowing the viewer can acquire a deeper understanding of
his or her own perception.

Merleau-Ponty and Baudrillard offer conlcuding thoughts for the beginnin of this chapter.
Baudrillard suggests in Simulacra and Simulation: “After the fantasy of seeing oneself (the mirror,
the photograph) comes that of being able to circle around oneself, of passing through one’s own
spectral body – and any holographed object is initially the luminous ectoplasm of your own
body.”227 Merleau-Ponty writes:

We shall need to reawaken our experience of the world as it appears to us in so far as we

are in the world through our body, and in so far as we perceive the world with our body.
But by thus remaking contact with the body and with the world, we shall also rediscover
ourself, since, perceiving as we do with our body, the body is a natural self and, as it were,
the subject of perception.228

This chapter functions not only as an introduction to the upcoming subchapters. The more so,
the intrinsic relationship of the body and its surrounding environment has gained attention,
which is a foundation for the understanding of the artworks of Turrell and Graham.

227 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Fraser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan,
1994). 106.
228 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: 184.

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4.1 Positioning the spectator

In the following, the role of the viewer in the works of Turrell and Graham will be analyzed in
detail. Turrell’s art spaces depend entirely on their essential component light and the perception
thereof. “If space is a symbol for openness and freedom, how will the presence of other people
affect it? What concrete experiences enable us to assign distinctive meanings to space and
spaciousness [...]?”229 Tuan asks. Turrell’s spaces unmistakably ask for an individual
contemplation; he asserts: “My art [...] is only fulfilled by someone perceiving it. [...] It is no thing
without being perceived.”230 If, for example, a single viewer is sitting on a chair in one of the
Dark Pieces or a couple of other people are standing there as well - probably whispering to each
other, mumbling, moving, or chuckling - the single experience of the piece certainly is disturbed,
as the senses are influenced by the presence of others.231 Unfortunately, it is rarely the occasion in
public exhibitions that one can discover an empty art space in which one can take one’s time to
fully perceive the piece. The same applies to the Ganzfeld Pieces. In order not to be affected by
noises or appearances by other viewers and to fully contemplate the experience of the total visual
field, one ought to be in the space alone. If a visitor is at any time finds alone in a Ganzfeld Piece,
a sensual isolation, a feeling of immersion is created.232 Again, it is certainly not often the case that a
single visitor is alone in the installation (Fig. 35 and 35a).

What does a possibly disrupted comtemplation in turn signify for the position of the spectator in
Turrell’s pieces? Turrell found one solution for the solitary experience of a ganzfeld in his
Perceptual Cells. Turrell had worked during the Vietnam War as a drafts counselor. He recollects
from that period:

I spent time in the penitentiary, and, to avoid being assaulted or raped, I would do things
that got me into solitary. Solitary confinement was not a good thing but at least there was
safety [...] the cell isn’t long enough to lie down or tall enough to stand up; it is meant to
be physically confining. At first, as a punishment, they make it extremely dark, so that you
cannot see anything. However, the strange thing that I found out was that there never is
any light. Even when all the light is gone, you can still sense light. In order to get away

229 Tuan, Space and Place. The perspective of experience: 48.

230 In: Schürmann, Erscheinen und Wahrnehmen - Eine vergleichende Studie zur Kunst von James Turrell und der Philosophie
Merleau-Pontys: 87.
231 Adcock writes accordingly: “Turrell’s works are contemplative and quiet. They are otherworldy and best seen in

relative isolation,” in: Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 7.
232 Zschocke, Der irritierte Blick: Kunstrezeption und Aufmerksamkeit: 163.

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 from a sense of claustrophobia or the extremeness of the punishment, the mind
manufactures a bigger space and it doesn’t take long for this to happen.233

From this episode can be inferred that Turrell imitates his experiences from solitary confinement
in his work, though first and foremost in the Perceptual Cells (Fig. 36, Change of State). The main
difference between the Perceputal Cells and the Ganzfeld Pieces is their notably small size and
“autonomous structure that in some manner relates to the space inside.”234 The cells are restricted
in size so that the viewer cannot move much but stand straight; “one enters solely in order to
experience.“235 The total visual field of the ganzfeld, which is induced within the cell, dominates
the vision of the viewer for the time being. One could say that the Perceptual Cells present “an
entire universe enclosed in a small space.”236

In Pleiades, a piece described in chapter 2.1.1, the faint light flashes of the dim light projection in
the Dark Space confuse the viewers additionally to the unusual darknes. They will be wondering
whether the light flashes emanate from within the eye (the retina) or whether they are actual part
of the installation, a question which is not easily answered.

In contrast to Turrell’s spaces, Graham’s mirror pavilions and -installations revolve entirely
around the viewers’ (inter-) action. The works are activated solely by the viewers’ presence as
their fundamental function is to reflect the spectator’s image. Importantly, the visitors have to
move around and within the piece to develop its full potential. If a visitor enters Present Continuous
Past(s) individually, the work evokes self-awareness by allowing the visitor to examine his own
position as an (unconscious) observer. On a busy day, though, the container-like room
installation turns into a busy circus because of the various interactions that are triggered between
artwork and visitors, as well as among the visitors, 237 MacDonald suggests.

Relating to the circumstance of active preoccupation with the artwork (instead of silent
contemplation), Brian Hatton identifies “three factors” that are “featured throughout Graham’s
233 Alison Sarah Jacques and James Turrell, "Interview: There never is no light ... even when all the light is gone, you
can still sense light " in James Turrell: Perceptual Cells, ed. Jiri Svestka (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1992), 57.
234 Turrell in: Noever, James Turrell: The other horizon, 123.
235 Turrell in: ibid., 142.
236 Banana Yoshimoto, Lizard, trans. Ann Sherif (London: Faber & Faber, 1995). 6. "She had [...] big, round eyes,

deep and distant, which reminded me of the ceiling of the first planetarium I ever saw as a child: an entire universe
enclosed in a small space," the narrator describes a woman's eyes.
237 "Quand Present Continuous Past(s) fait l’objet d’une visite par une journée, tranquille, l’œuvre met en cause la

conscience de soi en révélant au visiteur qu’elle lui exhibe á lui-même sa condition d’observateur dépourvu de
conscience de soi. Et par une journée moins tranquille, l’espace-réceptacle devient un véritable cirque, du fait des
interactions qu’il provoque", in: MacDonald, "Matéralisations. Production de masse, espace public et convention
architecturale dans l'œuvre de Dan Graham," 62.

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work: [...] human relation, representation of past time, and the medial function of scale.“238
Regarding the position and/or significance of the spectator Graham indicated that the three
factors “became active only in movement. So long as the viewer was still, there was a single frame
of reference (as Renaissance perspective), but with movement, ‘time begins’, exterior space in
terms of extension is abolished.”239 Likewise, Lefevbre highlights the crucial factor of movement –
an aspect which had been earlier addressed in chapter 3.1.1:

A mere change of position, or a change in a place’s surroundings, is enough to precipitate

an object’s passage into the light: what was covert becomes overt, what was cryptic
becomes limpidly clear. A movement of the body may have a similar goal. Here is the
point of intersection of the two sensory fields.240

In an essay on Sol LeWitt’s art, Graham praised LeWitt’s ability to interconnect the spectator
with the art object. What he writes about LeWitt seems in a way applicable to his own works.

As the viewer moves from point to point about the art object, the physical continuity of
the walk is translated into illusive, self-representing depth; the visual complication of
representations ‘develops’ a discrete non-progressive space and time. There is no
distinction between subject and object. Object is the viewer/the art, and subject is the
viewer/the art. Object and subject are not dialectical oppositions [anymore], but one self-
contained identity: reversible interior and exterior termini. All frames of reference read
simultaneously: object/subject.241

This initiated fusion of object and subject entails a compound relationship of gazes. Heubach affirms:
The observer experiences something concrete which is usually only accessible upon
reflection. He is subject and object at once: walking around and actively perceiving, he is
the subject while (in the mirror and on the screen) he is the object. The person realises
himself as active and finished in one and the same act. Creating this image and being it he
divides himself into subject and object, into consciousness and image. The image cuts the
person in two: is he the one reproducing himself or is the image depicting him? A person
experiences himself irrevocably as subject and object at once, which, concerned with
‘self-unity’, he would otherwise thinks [sic] of as either/or.242

238 Brian Hatton, "Dan Graham in Relation to Architecture," in Dan Graham: Works 1965-2000, ed. Marianne
Brouwer (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2001), 322.
239 Ibid., 322.Integrated quote from Graham from: Graham, Dan: ‘Two Structures/Sol LeWitt’ in Articles 1978; 29-

32.
240 Lefebvre, The production of space: 183.
241Graham cited from "Dan Graham: 'Two Structures/Sol LeWitt,' in: 'Sol LeWitt,' Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag,

1970." In: Hatton, "Dan Graham, Present Continuous," 206.

242 Heubach, "The Observed Eye, or: Making Seeing Visible (On the video works of Dan Graham)," 193.

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The complex system of looking and being looked at, which is established in Graham’s mirror-
structures, generates a conceptual connection between the earlier mentioned piece Present
Continuous Past(s) (1974), as well as Public Space/Two Audiences (1976) and the idea of the panoptic
gaze. Michel Foucault had readopted and fostered this concept in his book Surveiller et punir in
1975. Foucault describes the panoptic system, which in turn is based on Jeremy Bentham’s
concept of the ideal prison, the Panopticon. A panoptic system is hierarchically structured and
dominated by a paradigm of the controlling eye. The primary quality it holds is that the relationship
between watching and being watched is dismantled. An allusion to the panoptic system is to be
observed in Present Continuous Past(s) and takes definite shape in the subsequent installations Public
Space/Two Audiences (1976).

Importantly, though, the agencies of the traditional panopticon are not strictly followed in Present
Continuous Past(s). Here, the spectator becomes the participant and vice versa, even more so, they
exist simultaneously. In this installation, the function of observer and observee melts into one.
The beholder thus is in an enclosed space confronted with the (self-) perception being gradually
undermined, as “the mirror alienates the ‘self.’” At the same time, “video encloses the ‘self’
within its perception [...] giving a person the feeling of a perceptible control over his responses
through the feedback [sic] mechanism.”243 Public Space/Two Audiences (1976), on the other hand
illustrates the panoptic gaze more adequatly as it is “aimed at a large and anonymous public,” as
Graham specifies in the corresponding scheme (Fig. 37), and not, like Present Continuous Past(s),
for a single or restricted number of visitors (Fig. 38). Equally important is the fact that in Public
Space/Two Audiences the opportunities of observing and the visibility of the visitors is unequally
distributed, due to the fact that the divided rooms are conceptualized differently; whereas one
back wall is a mirror, the other is a plain white wall. Therefore, Public Space/Two Audiences creates
asymmetrical viewing conditions for the viewers, which are highly reminiscent of a panoptic
installation.

The earlier mentioned idea of the Looking –glass self is, according to Cooley, constituted of “three
principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his
judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.”244 The
daily habit of interacting with a mirror is put into an entirely new context, adding not only a
moment of objectification but the presence of Others too; “when one observes another
individual performing a particular action, this activates the representations in one’s own action

243 Graham, "Essay on Video, Architecture and Television," 56.

244 Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order: 184.

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system that one uses to perform the observed action.”245 By doing so, Graham blurs the
boundaries of private and public. “His structures alter conditions of social interaction to reveal
the mutability of our sense of both self and others,”246 Hatton alleges. Cooley continues:

As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they
are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to
what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another's mind some
thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are
variously affected by it.247

In fact, in Graham’s mirror- and two-way mirror structures the viewers not only project the
Other’s gaze/opinion onto their mental self-image, but the more so does the semi-translucent
wall possibly hide a real Other behind the (reflecting) glass (i.e. somebody who is looking at them
and perhaps judging their appearance).

245 Günther Knoblich and Nathalie Sebanz, "The Social Nature of Perception and Action," Association for Psychological
Science 15, no. 3 (2006): 99.
246 Hatton, "Dan Graham, Present Continuous," 206.
247 Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order: 184.

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4.2 Inside – Outside

L’espace, mais vous ne pouvez concevoir, cet horrible en dedans – en dehors qu’est le vrai
espace. 248

Outside and inside are both intimate – they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange
their hostility. 249

The relationship of inside-outside is particularly interesting with respect to Graham’s and

Turrell’s works as they both create spaces that do not respond to a clear architectural model.
Turrell’s Mendota Stoppages for example, presented a direct interrelation between inside and outside
space as a “sight-specific sensing space – a space that responds to a space outside with a logic or
consciousness formed by its look into that space,”250 with the help of no other means than sheer
light. According to Edward Relph, “the essence of place lies [...] in the experience of an ‘inside’
that is distinct from an ‘outside.’”251 In fact, these are two fundamental positions one can
generally adopt when analyzing architecture and (installation) art. The distinction of inside and
outside might appear banal at first, but exploring the ambiguous relationship, these two notions
will reveal their timeless significance.

In fact, the problematic nature of inside- and outside-space had already manifested itself in the
artworld in medieval times. In his analysis of the depiction of pictorial space since Giotto,
Wolfgang Kemp surveys the shift medieval painters underwent concerning their understanding
of depth of pictorial space as a means of conveying some sort of narrative. Characteristic for the
1200s medieval painting and representations of (predominantly) biblical tales is, according to
Kemp, the fact that until Giotto (thus the late 13th century) there had been no pictorial
differentiation between inside- and outside-spaces within the pictorial narrative. By introducing a
second room (or environment) into the story told within the picture, several plots could be
placed within the same frame, moreover, communication between these two or more worlds was
facilitated.252

248 Henri Michaux cited in: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

216. Bachelard translates: "Space, but you cannot even conceive the horrible inside-outside that real space is."
249 Ibid., 217-18.
250 Noever, James Turrell: The other horizon, 90.
251 Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976). 49.
252 cf. Wolfgang Kemp, Die Räume der Maler: Zur Bilderzählung seit Giotto (München: C.H. Beck, 1996). 16 ff.

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Relph (1976) analyzes in detail the notions of insideness and outsideness regarding the role they play
in creating an identity of place. According to Relph, a precise distinction between inside and outside
proves to be extremely difficult for an individual. “The identity of a place is comprised of [...]
interrelated components,” such as “physical appearance,” “observable activities,” or “meanings
and symbols,” Relph indicates. Most importantly, these components hold “an infinite range of
content [...] and numberless ways in which they can combine.”253 Thus, one reason for this
difficulty of defining the identity of place is that a place does not hold one identity but various
identities. Relph points out several modes of experiences of insideness and outsideness which can be
encountered in a specific situation involving inside or outside constituents. Insideness and
outsideness manifest themselves here as precise materializations of the feeling of being inside or
outside (of a place).254 The modes of experiences are differentiated into various types such as as
e.g. existential outsideness/insideness or empathetic insideness. Relph’s in-depth analysis of inside(ness)
and outside(ness) demonstrates the relevance the concepts of inside and outside hold – not only
architecturally but the more so psychologically. In Turrell’s and Graham’s artworks the borders
between inside and outside are continuously in a state of transition. In this chapter it will be
explored how the notions of inside and outside are exemplified in the respective artworks of the
two artists. The exploration of inside and outside necessarily will lead to subchapter 4.2.1 which
will deal with the intermediate space one crosses “on entering and leaving.” In chapter 3 the
senses and their effect on spatial perception had been discussed. With this discussion in mind, it
is worthwhile to recall that, using Paterson’s words, “these bodily (somatic) senses inform our
perception of ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ of inner and outer space.”255

In Graham’s partly see-through, partly opaque Two-way Mirror Pavilions, the situation of inside-
outside is highly complex - one could say that inside and outside almost form inseparable entities.
“Being mirror-reflective, glass reflects the mirror-image of an observer, as well as the particular
inside or outside world behind him, into the image of the space into which he is looking,”256
Graham notes. The pavilions usually are installed out in the open, in a (sculptural) garden or
parkscape. Generally, they can be experienced from the inside as well as from the outside. Both
standpoints are equally important, as the interplay between inside and outside is crucial for the
favored situational effect. “Both inside and outside spaces are in constant flux according to the
changing light conditions and the position of the sun, which affects the reflection and

253 Relph, Place and Placelessness: 61.

254 Relph explains: “The lack of clarity in the distinction between inside and outside can be understood [...] as a
function of the different levels of intensity with which we experience outsideness and insideness.” In: ibid., 50.
255 Paterson, "Haptics".
256 Graham, "Essay on Video, Architecture and Television," 56.

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transparency of the glass,”257 Graham writes. Hoewever, in contrast to what Bachelard suggests in
his Poetics of Space, here outside and inside do not “form a dialectic of division.”258 The factual and
the visual situation of the beholder are entangled in a dualism.

Christian Norberg-Schulz describes the architectural design of houses conceptualized by Le

Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, whose constructions allow for a lot of light and space to
dominate the building. These have occasionally been associated with Graham’s pavilions.
Norberg-Schulz notes in this context that Le Corbusier and other architects conceived the
“modern house as ‘open’” and “space as flowing,” so that there was “hardly a distinction
between inside and outside.”259 In fact, this assumption will be adopted in this chapter’s
discussion of Graham’s Two-way Mirror Pavilions.

Walter Benjamin turned in his famous and unfinished Passagen-Werk towards the subject-matter
of the mirror: “Where doors and walls are made of mirrors, there is no telling outside from in,
with all the equivocal illumination,”260 he wrote. He resumed: “Let two mirrors reflect each other:
then Satan plays his favorite trick and opens here in his way [...] the perspective of infinity.”261 As
a matter of fact, this “perspective of infinity” is created in Graham’s installation of the double
piece Two Adjacent Pavilions (1978-81) (Fig. 39, 39a and 39b). The piece is Graham’s “first outdoor
two-way mirror pavilion” in a series of mirror glass pavilions that continue up to today.262 Two
Adjacent Pavilions confronts the spectator with a prototype of the inside-outside dualism. Graham
describes the installation as follows:

Each of the two square, enterable forms allows four to six people to stand or lie prone
inside. Each structure is the same size as the other. The four sides of each structure are
made from two-way mirror glass of the same percentage reflectivity. The difference is
that one pavilion has a transparent glass ceiling, while the other’s ceiling is covered with a
dark, non-light-admitting material. The properties of the mirror-reflective glass used in
the pavilions’ sides cause one side to be either more reflective or more transparent than
the other side at any given moment, depending on which side receives more light.263

257 Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power: 173.

258 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: 211.
259 Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a phenomenology of architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1980).

194.
260 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin

(Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). 537.
261 Ibid., 538.
262Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power: 174.
263 Ibid., 174.

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The two pavilions are slightly differently conceptualised - a fact the viewer only comes to learn by
interacting with the piece. This results in different effects on the viewer’s perception;

One of the two pavilions, the one whose ceiling is opaque, remains more reflective on the
outside and transparent to the inside. The other pavilion is flooded with changing interior
light, depending on the sun and clouds shifting between being more reflective or more
transparent.264

Logically, the beholder adjourns from the outside to the inside of a pavilion. Being in there,
though, one is looking out, so that a feeling of being outside still prevails. Due to the cubicle’s
open and mostly transparent character the beholders find themselves in a somewhat outside-
situation again. The outside-inside-movement thus functions as a junction, a moment of
transition; as a vestibule. After crossing this intersection, the viewer technically is inside the cube, but
visually and emotionally in an outside-situation, as the view is instantly directed outside. If the
weather conditions, as Graham has noted above, are different though, i.e. a cloudy sky, the
viewers might be watching their own mirror-image. As earlier suggested, Graham’s two-way
mirror pavilion-structures bear an unequivocal resemblance to windows. The feasibility of looking
out or looking in further heightens the inside-outside relationship at hand. “Mirrors also frame an
empty pictorial space: the image inside each mirror is an image of the window. In the Galerie des
Glaces, the mirrors supply a virtual plane of reflection and representation, and hence they form,
in a direct sense, virtual windows,”265 Friedberg indicates. Windows are also the subject of Gillian
Beer’s essay (2011), wherein she reveals the purporse of the window as an essential signifier of
the threshold:

The window registers connection and difference between interior and exterior. It allows
us to be in two scenes at once. It affirms the presence of other ways of being, other
patterns of objects, just beyond the concentrated space of the observer.266

Further in his notes on the Arcades Project, Benjamin quotes Alfred Gotthold Meyer, who had
noted relevantly:

The increasing transparency of glass in colorless glazing draws the outer world into the
interior space, while covering the walls with mirrors projects the image of the interior

264 Ibid., 174.

265 Friedberg, The Virtual Window: 109. (Original emphasis).
266 Gillian Beer, "Windows: Looking in, Looking out, Breaking Through," in Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of

Transitive Spaces, ed. Subha Mukherji (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 5.

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 space into the outer world. In either case the ‘wall,’ as a container of space, is deprived of
its significance.267

Graham’s Heart Pavilion has been completed in two versions; one interior and one exterior
exemplar. This presents an interesting opportunity to examine the various effects of an interior,
or respectively exterior installation of principally the same pavilion. The first version from 1991
was realised at an exhibition at the Carnegie International (Pittsburgh, USA). The Heart Pavilion,
as its name implies, is shaped like an oversized heart lying flat on the ground. Looking down at the
upper end where two convex curves form the top of the heart, a complex game of double-
reflected interior space occurs (Fig. 40 and 40a).268 The curved endings both reflect the same
surrounding room, only slightly from a different angle. Therefore, although its size is quite
enormous for being installed in an interior (240 x 500 x 500 cm), the pavilion does not appear
physically oppressing or confining. Thanks to the mirroring effects and the spacious and
relatively empty and modern hall it is situated in, the pavilion blends into the architecture
smoothly. And yet, the feeling prevails that the pavilion is somehow misplaced, that it presents
neither a place to stay, nor to rush through. It seems as if this pavilion (and in the same sense
most of Graham’s Two-way Mirror Pavilions) creates a place on the threshold, where one is never
really inside, neither remote/outside it. This idea will be futher discussed in the next subchapter.

The second version of the Heart Pavilion (1992-93), which is a variation of the first, additionally
used perforated stainless steel as an architectural element. The impact it has on the viewer and
the surrounding area is remarkably different. On the photographs (Fig. 41 and 41a) it becomes
apparent that the outside situation (sunlight/clouds/shadows from the trees) has a distinct effect
on the two-way mirror construction. The perspective from which the picture of the second
version is taken is almost the same as in Fig. , but the back wall of the heart’s cone is a lot better
visible than it is in the Carnegie version. Again, it is worth citing Graham at length:

This version [...], situated outdoors in a private collector’s patio garden, uses a punched
stainless-steel sheet in place of one of the two-way mirror sides of the Carnegie Art
Institute version. The holes are small enough so that the screen reads as opaque from a
distance, but becomes transparent when the spectator gazes flush against the screen.269

267 Benjamin quotes here: Alfred Gotthold Meyer, “Eisenbauten”, Esslingen 1907, pp. 65-66. In: Benjamin, The
Arcades Project: 541.
268 The artificial light inside the building is probably kept at a constant level and therefore dominates the natural light

coming from the glass entrance doors and windows (Fig. 40a). The status of the mirror-reflection thus ususally stays
the same during the day (the opening hours of the Carnegie building respectively).
269 Graham in: Moure, Dan Graham, 167.

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Due to the wide spatiality the outside environment provides, the viewer has the chance to
approach the piece from a distance, which in fact, as Graham stated above, provides a very
different view of the pavilion than from nearby. Graham further implies: “The glass in the
window through its reflectiveness unites, and by its physical impenetrability separates the inside
and outside,”270 Indeed, the viewer never is in a distinct inside or outside, never is in an isolated
inside or outside, as it is the case in Turrell’s light and dark spaces. Not even interior pavilions,
like the Heart Pavilion (Version I), succeed in enclosing the viewer –the exterior (via the building’s
mirrors) is always reflected, there is always a way out – visually and physically – given. It has
become clear that in Graham’s Two-way Mirror Pavilions no straightforward distinction of inside
and outside is rendered. “The glass in the window through its reflectiveness unites and by its
physical impenetrability separates inside and outside,”271 Graham maintains. Instead, the viewer is
confronted with fluctuating situational conditions that seem to imply a state of in-betweenness,
which will be further elaborated on in the following subchapter; “on entering and leaving.”

In Huis-Clos, Inès replies to Estelle: “Vous avez de la chance. Moi, je me sens toujours de
l’intérieur.“ Estelle answers: “Ah! Oui, de l’intérieur... Tout ce qui se passe dans les têtes est si
vague, ça m’endort.“272 Keeping Estelle’s and Inès’ conversation in mind, it becomes apparent
that in contrast to Graham’s alternating (architectural) states of flux, Turrell produces situational
extensions on behalf of the spectator, which mainly take place in the spectator’s mind. “In
creating the chambers [at the Roden Crater], I was also interested in the idea of the relationship
of inside to outside, which also relates to the way that the soul inhabits the body and the body
inhabits the building,”273 Turrell explains. In a ganzfeld “the visual system is ‘looking for’
structure, spatial alignment and representative objectivity”274 but this search is belied – just as well
as the notions of inside and outside: “There is an expectation as to how we go about seeing –
how we perceive – and I’m using these simple archetypical structures because they always have an
outside and an inside, but the inside is often belied by what the outside form is. [...] outside that
belies the inside [...],“275 Turrell alleges. The encounter of a distinct outside (that is the world), and

270 Graham, "Essay on Video, Architecture and Television," 54.

271 Ibid., 56.
272 Inès: "You are lucky. I always feel like I am (trapped) inside." Estelle: "Ah, yes, the inside...Everything that

happens within one's head is so vague, it makes me feel drowsy." In: Sartre, "Huis-Clos: Pièce en un acte," 149.
(Author's translation).
273 Turrell in: Staff, "Adventures in Perception: James Turrell".
274 "Das visuelle System ['sucht'] nach Struktur, räumlicher Ordnung und Gegenständlichkeit," in: Zschocke, Der

irritierte Blick: Kunstrezeption und Aufmerksamkeit: 163. (Author's translation).

275 Jacques and Turrell, "Interview: There never is no light ... even when all the light is gone, you can still sense light "

63.

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an inside (the subject) is what Zschocke establishes as an outcome of having experienced one of
Turrell’s works.276 However, the world as such is not literally represented in Turrell’s light and
dark spaces; despite in the subjects themselves: The subject, that is the viewer, is the only bearer
of the world, so to speak, within the (artificial) art space. No signifier of the everday world is
depicted in Turrell’s total visual or completely dark fields. Therefore, a clear distinction between
inside connotating an interior and outside connotating an exterior is not given in the ganzfelds or
Dark Spaces, neither in the Projection Pieces nor the Perceptual Cells. In fact, it becomes clear
that the significant distinction of inside and outside takes place not so much in an architectural
sense but more so on a mental level. Didi-Hubermann words adequately: “The object of vision,
habitually in front of us, becomes the place of our seeing. We are inside it.”277

In his early Mendota-years, i.e. “in late 1968 and 1969, a work began which used the full
dimensionality of the space occupied by the viewer and its relationship to actual space outside it.
The Ocean Park studio had been entirely closed off to outside light.” 278 Turrell recalls about the
Mendota Stoppages that the light in the different rooms of the installation“received and emitted at
the same time, rendering the border between the inside and the outside of studio fluid.”279 As he
developed his light and dark spaces further, the question of inside-outside was not so much to be
sought in the architectural conditions of the spaces anymore but shifted to the relevance of the
mental space that is created. “I’m interested in the seeing that takes place inside. [...] I’m interested
in the point where the imaginative seeing and outside seeing meet,“280 Turrell confirms. “Any
enclosure is defined by a boundary,”281 which is why in Turrell’s Ganzfeld Pieces and Dark
Spaces, as the architectural boundaries are not visible to the viewer, the mind can wander and the
body is visually extended, although technically it is spatially enclosed. “The outside-inside relation
which is a preliminary aspect of concrete space implies extension and enclosure,”282 Norberg-
Schulz assumes accordingly. “Experiencing a Dark Space is a memorable event for the viewer,
who becomes aware of the light generated from the inside,”283 Almine Rech adds. Indeed, in the
Dark Spaces “the light levels are extremely low, to allow the juncture between the seeing from

276 “So gerät im Werk Turrells das Zusammentreffen eines “Außen” und “Innen”, der Welt und des Subjektes, in

den Fokus der Aufmerksamkeit," Zschocke writes. In: Zschocke, Der irritierte Blick: Kunstrezeption und Aufmerksamkeit:
161.
277 Didi-Hubermann, "The Fable of the Place," 48. (Original emphasis).
278 Noever, James Turrell: The other horizon, 88.
279 Rech, "The Eye of the Beholder," 54.
280 Turrell in: Noever, James Turrell: The other horizon, 130.
281 Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a phenomenology of architecture: 13.
282 Ibid., 12.
283 Rech, "The Eye of the Beholder," 88.

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without and the seeing from within [...] to become apparent.”284 Rech identifies besides two
gradations of insideness in Turrell’s works: “In a Ganzfeld Piece, the viewer is or moves inside
the piece. [...] In a Wedgework, the viewer is inside a space that has been fitted for him, a viewing
space where he can sit down and view [...].”285 The latter applies to the previously mentioned
Perceptual Cells as well, even more intensely.

If one is inside the artwork, one is so completely and utterly. The same applies to being outside,
as one obviously is not participating in the experience of the total visual field/darkness then. On
the other hand, once being part of the artwork, the feeling of the classic distinction between
inside and outside intuitively disappears, as there are no discernable borders any more. The
situation is different with Graham’s pavilions; here one always sees the limits of the artwork, or
rather; the limits melt into the surrounding architecture/nature. In sum, a relationship of inside
towards inside, rather than a traditional inside to outside (or the reverse, respectively), is attained
considering Turrell’s Ganzfeld Pieces and Dark Spaces. An effect of going from the inside (of the
room) to the inside (of oneself, into the mind) is engendered. The contours and borders of the
installation room are unrecognizable due to the homogeneous light which hides all surfaces.
Therefore, the beholder is either in a complete outside, i.e. outside of the visible limits of the space,
or in a complete inside. The outcome of the first instance is, in this case, inapt, as logic
understanding tells the beholders that they have (consciously) entered a room and therefore must
be inside some place. The instance of a total inside on the other hand is enhanced by the fact that
the beholder will experience visual and physical illusions after having spent some time within the
art space. Along with these phenomena comes an uncertainty on the beholder’s part; immersion
makes the beholder feel unsure about his or her body’s borders.286 The viewer might be perplexed;
“Do the phenomena emerge from inside one’s mind or from the installation?” is the consequent
enduring question. It can be inferred that Turrell’s artworks not so much address an inside-outside
relationship with respect to the viewer but rather a gradation of inside-inside.

The various instantiations of inside-outside relationships in the works of Graham and Turrell
have shown that the viewer is required to perform innately different actions considering moving
between inside or outside or staying within either of the two concepts. The transition - namely
entering and leaving - of inside and outside will be further under study in the consecutive
subchapter.

284 Noever, James Turrell: The other horizon, 127.

285 Rech, "The Eye of the Beholder," 80.
286 Cf. Schlachter, "Licht ohne Schatten: Ganzfelder in Psychologie und Kunst," 63.

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4.2.1 On entering and leaving

As with the human body, essential elements of any building or house are the openings
between interior space and the outside world which permit interchange [...]. The location
of the threshold and its unique configuration varies in different cultures and offers a
287
symbolic metaphor for the individual’s relationship with the world outside the door.

The entrance- and exit-motive will be focused on in this section. This motive is vital as entrance
and exit function as a vehicle for communication between the concepts of inside and outside.
Between entering and leaving the art-space, the meaning of the door opening will have
fundamentally changed. The threshold denotes a profound key moment here because it allows
for the transition of inside-outside and outside-inside to take place. “In general the conception of
the private inside becomes manifest in the ‘threshold’ or boundary which separates it from and
unifies it with the outside,”288 Norberg-Schulz remarks accordingly. Most importantly, “The
threshold concentrates not only on the boundary between inside and outside but also the
possibility of passage from one to the other.”289

Adcock describes the Single-Wall Projection Phantom (Fig. 5) by saying: “creates a sense of
aperture.”290 Turrell creates extraordinary illusionary spatial depth out of nothing but light. Which in
turn fosters an idea of entering another reality, seeing another possible world Through the Looking-
Glass, as Alice has demonstrated it in Carroll’s novel - in this case through a light-aperture. Again,
the deception is successful, the light projection hides nothing but the wall behind and the viewer
is left behind, literally puzzled by the deception, and probably even dazzled. Rech describes the
movement inside Turrell’s ganzfelds: “Entering a Ganzfeld Piece is like entering a color.”291
Between entering and leaving the Turrell’s light and dark installations, the viewer will have passed
through the experience either of a ganzfeld or a pitch dark space with or without beams of light
creating certain disorienting shapes. The spectator’s view or feeling towards the aperture, which
first had been the entrance and later will be the exit, will have changed altogether. In this sense,

287 Maxine Borowsky Junge, "The Perception of Doors, A Sociodynamic Investigation of Doors in 20th Century
Painting," in Mourning, Memory and Life Itself: Essays by an Art Therapist (Springfield (Ilinois): Charles C Thomas Pub
Limited, 2008), 27. (Original emphasis).
288 Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a phenomenology of architecture: 182. (Emphasis added).
289 Relph quotes here: Mircea Eliade, "The sacred and the profane," New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959, p.

18 and 25. In: Relph, Place and Placelessness: 49.

290 Adcock, James Turrell: the art of light and space: 23.
291 Rech, "The Eye of the Beholder," 76.

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the entrance/exit of Turrell’s Ganzfeld Piece Bridget’s Bardo (2009) will be further examined (Fig.
42 and 3b). In a video interview accompanying the exhibition in Wolfsburg (2009), Markus
Brüderlin recounts about the entrance of Bridget’s Bardo:

Inspite of a regular entry, we see a glowing flat picture on the wall, which in reality turns
out not to be a painting, but a light space, which has no contours; (If we move closer to the
rectangle on the wall) all of a sudden, the flat picture becomes a room with spatial depth.
The picture turns into something from which you can step out [or step in, respectively,
A/N]. This ‘stepping out of the picture’ - this ‘spatialisation’ of the flat picture - is a
crucial moment in modern art history; – and there is no one who has put this
spatialisation into action quite as successfully as James Turrell with this Ganzfeld Piece.292

Entrance and exit usually are one and the same entity in Turrell’s installations. One single opening
assumes the function of both. “The work-type of the Ganzfeld Pieces consists of two spaces
joined via a rectangular aperture in the wall, each of which is flooded with its own colored light
from concealed light sources: the Viewing Space and the Sensing Space,”293 Brüderlin remarks. In
fact, although architecturally entrance and exit might connote the same access path, it becomes
clear that psychologically entrance and exit are not the same constituent here. In the meantime
between entering and leaving the artpiece, the beholder will have undergone a radical
(perspectival) change. Additionally, a “new feature” was introduced to the ganzfeld installation of
Bridget’s Bardo, namely a “slow changing of the colored light, which allows infinitely many
contrasts between the spaces.”294 These oscillating light effects (Fig. 43, 43a and 43b) further
heighten the visual experience the beholder undergoes, which in turn affects the viewer’s change of
state (literally, also Turrell suggests it in his Perceptual Cell Change of State, Fig. 36) between
entering and leaving. Again, a ghost-like figure of speech appears applicable; Merleau-Ponty
writes: “Light, lighting, shadows, reflections; color, all the objects of his [the painter’s] quest are
not altogether real objects; like ghosts, they have only visual existence. In fact they exist at the
threshold of profane vision; they are not seen by everyone.”295 Hence, again it is not an actual,
physical threshold that manifests itself in Turrell’s art but a threshold of vision.

Likewise, Graham’s crossovers are particulary visual instead of clearly architectural (i.e. a door that
needs to be opened or closed). On the one hand, some pavilions, like the Heart Pavilion (Version

292 Cf.: Brüderlin, "James Turrell: The Wolfsburg Project."

293 Brüderlin, "The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld: James Turrell and the Boundaries between
Sensory and Spiritual Experience," 129.
294 Ibid., 129.
295 Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," 166.

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I) (Fig. 40a) are themselves situated in a transitive environment, i.e a lobby or the like. Graham
describes the interior Heart Pavilion:

Here the two-way mirror glass pavilion is in a lobby or corridor space which generally is a
dead space for art, but is related to the look of recent atria in corporate buildings or
hotels in which an illusory space, neither inside nor outside, is constructed.296

Graham mentions the architectural element of the atrium, a term which today (as Graham has
noted himself) usually describes spatial lobbies, waiting or lounge areas in business buildings.297
Also, the artrium calls into mind Benjamin’s much mused about arcades.

Most of Graham’s pavilions invite visitors to pass their time in the installation. They form
passages, where the visitor can rest for a little while and get lost in thoughts while maybe
engaging with the reflected mirror images (Fig. 24, Fun House for Münster). It must be noted that
Graham’s pavilions and environment are reminiscent of architectural elements recurrent in
Renaissance gardens, which were highly allegorical places to ponder and wander about.298 However,
never does the dwelling imply a lengthy abidance. Between entering and leaving the viewer will
have undergone moments of reflection – i.e. both in the literal sense of being reflected by the mirror-
glass and reflecting in the sense of contemplating thoughts or the visual situation.

On the contrary, an actual implementation of a situative pass-through is the Two-way Mirror Pergola
Bridge (1988) (Fig. 44).299 The installation, a bridgework–crossing of a small river, is literally a
transitive element in the park wherein it is situated. The park’s nature is implemented in the
pavilion in form of the pergola, an arcade covered in creepers. The triangle-shape of the piece,
however is vested only on one of the long sides in climbing plants. The plants are twining around
an aluminium latticework which allows for a natural incidence of light. The light is, in turn,
reflected by the water underneath the steel grit walkway (Fig. 44a). The beholder may enjoy the
scenery of the parkscape and use the Pergola Bridge as a photo-background (Fig. 44b).
Additionally, the element of the two-way mirror allows for the viewer to be part of the reflection,
Graham points out: “The two-way mirror overhead [reflects] [...] views of the spectator’s body

296Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power: 172.

297 The artrium was originally the main room of a Roman residence, encircled by other chambers; but it is also a term
used in order to descirbe the vestibule of Early Medieval basilicas. In: "Atrium," in Kleines Wörterbuch der Architektur
(Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun. GmbH, 1995), 13.
298 Unfortunately, there is no space for a detailed discussion of the Renaissance-garden motive with reference to

Graham's pavilions. However, Graham covers the subjectmatter substantially in: Dan Graham, "Garden as Theater
as Museum (1989)," in Dan Graham: Beyond, ed. Bennett Simpson and Chrissie Iles (Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary Art Los Angeles and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009).
299 For a more detailed description see Appendix (II).

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and the surrounding landscape. The effect is prismatic.”300 Due to the triangular shape, the bridge
does not contain a lateral handrail or armrest, which usually motivates visitors to pause at the
center of tbridge and lean over the side to watch the water and nature. Thus, the Two-way Mirror
Pergola Bridge is a fitting example of Graham’s transitional installations, which do not seem to
allow for either an inside- nor an outside-feeling but something in between. As it has been identified
in the prior subchapter, inside and outside - i.e. interior and exterior - do not form distinct
opposing entities, but engage in intermediate situative conditions. The viewer circulates in a
somewhat blurred situation, not inside nor outside, but in the state in-between of two scenes at once:

The window registers connection and difference between interior and exterior. It allows
us to be in two scenes at once. It affirms the presence of other ways of being, other
patterns of objects, just beyond the concentrated space of the observer.301

The possibly fatal aspect which presents itself here is that “windows can become reflecting
looking-glass, dwelling on the self rather than the scene beyond,”302 in which case a situation of
mental, literally self-reflective, inside is attained (which must not be confused with Turrell’s mental
inside, which has been identified in the previous subchapter). This outcome can remain
unspecified at this point of the analysis as the mirror provides a secular and actual self-image
which is not provided for in Turrell’s spaces.

This chapter on entering and leaving has demonstrated that Graham and Turrell both create dwelling
places. Not so much, though, as Walter Benjamin understands the term in the sense of “’to dwell’
as a transitive verb – as in the notion of ‘indwelt spaces,’”303 but more as in to dwell in terms of
sojourning, pausing, or musing – to dwell on thoughts. On the one hand, Turrell’s ganzfelds and
darkspaces require the viewer to spend a certain amount of time in them in order to experience
the visual (and physical) effects the spaces engender. The dual intenseness of visual and physical
impacts, however, limits the duration of stay in Turrell’s environments. Graham’s pavilions, on
the other hand, are transitive thresholds that invite visitors to interact and pass-through. Turrell’s
chambers of light and darkness are often referred to as meditative or solitary places in contrast to
Graham’s pavililions in parkscapes which engage groups of people. The latter topic will form a
basis for the following chapter.

300 Graham in: Moure, Dan Graham, 182.

301 Beer, "Windows: Looking in, Looking out, Breaking Through," 5.
302 Ibid., 10.
303 Benjamin, The Arcades Project: 221.

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4.3 Private vs. public space

Graham asserts in his “Essay on Video, Architecture and Television: “Public versus private
can be dependent upon architectural conventions. By social convention, a window
mediates between private (inside) and public (outside) space. [...] An architectural division,
the ‘house,’ separates the ‘private’ person from the ‘public’ person and sanctions certain
kinds of behaviour for each,”304

In a society where cameras in various types seem to be omnipresent - may it be surveillance

cameras in shopping malls (“for your own security”), or one’s very own smartphone - it seems
increasingly difficult to distinguish between which factors of daily life actually are public and which
are private. In a society where it seems indispensable to share electronically whatever one might be
doing at the moment or to check in online to a café or store, it seems that more and more, the
privat sphere mutates into public property. Keeping these thoughts in mind, the notions of public
and private space appear deeply relevant for detailed examination regarding Graham’s mirror
structures and Turrell’s light spaces.

Effectively, at this point it is arguable to assume in advance that whereas on the one side,
Graham creates public spaces, and Turrell on the other side rather calls private or personal spaces into
existence. “Graham’s art is aesthetic as well as functional. There is also a third element: that of
shared public space,”305 Birgit Pelzer announces. Graham’s outdoor pavilions are undeniably
public spaces due to the fact that they are generally accessible to anyone who wants to engage
themselves with the piece and because they consciously echo their environment. Graham states:
“The two-way mirror glass delibeately alludes to the modern bank and administrative building’s
facades in the surrounding city, while at the same time reflecting the arcadian parkscape.”306 The
Fun House for Münster (1997) for example is situated in a recreational park area close to a
playground (Fig. 45 and 45a). Whereas 10 years earlier Graham had contributed the Octagon (Fig.
46) to the Münster Sculpture Projects, the Fun House is a dynamic place emphatically designed
for adults and children to interact.307 The Fun House for Münster was designed “as a narrow, open

304 Graham, "Essay on Video, Architecture and Television," 53. (Original emphasis).
305 Birgit Pelzer, "Survey: Double Intersections: The Optics of Dan Graham," in Dan Graham, ed. Birgit Pelzer, Mark
Francis, and Beatriz Colomina (London / New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2001), 75.
306 Graham in: Moure, Dan Graham, 165.
307 "Skulptur. Projekte in Münster 1997. Dan Graham: Fun House für Münster," http://www.lwl.org/skulptur-

projekte-download/muenster/97/graham/index.htm.

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two-way parallelogram with one side curved to relate to the children’s playground to the other
side of the path.”308

Instead of placing a closed summer house in a secluded and idyllic park situation, Graham chose an
open sculpture out of mirrored glass walls for the populated inner city area near the
Neubrückentor, directly neighboring the children's playground. He combines a Renaissance
perspective with the baroque idea of endlessly duplicating, anamorphic reflection. Not least of all,
he views this project as an aesthetic-pedagogic learning aid for children.309 One must not forget,
however, that although the Octagon, “an eight-cornered pavilion, whose sides were made out of
two-way mirrored glass,” strictly speaking is a classical garden pavilion, it nevertheless presents a
rendezvous area. This is also the case with the Heart Pavilion, about which Graham affirms: “It is a
romantic abstraction of an anthropometric form which can serve as a meeting point.”310

Like Graham, Norberg-Schulz distinguishes a private inside from a public outside.311 This leads to the
assumption that, whereas Graham creates public outside spaces, Turrell conveys a private inside, some
may even say that he creates spiritual spaces. It has been asserted that in the Ganzfeld Pieces or
Dark Spaces, an inside-inside movement takes place and a mental space is foregrounded, a fact which
has been sufficiently discussed in chapters 4.2 and 4.2.1. Beveridge proposes accordingly: “These
works made viewers attentive to states of receptivity and the masking effects of colors seemingly
close to the eye.” 312 Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes in this respect:

The power of artificial light to create its own reality only reveals itself in darkness [...] The
spectator in the dark is alone with himself and the illuminated image because social
connections cease to exist in the dark. Darkness heightens individual perceptions,
magnifying them many times.313

This finding reaffirms the proposition of the private insides Turrell initiates (Fig. 47, Bridget’s Bardo).
In fact, Maria Schlachter remarks: “The outside light is only the medium with the help of which
the inner light of the beholder is activated.”314

308 Graham adds that the Fun House "is also related to [...] [his] museum interior, "Children’s Day Care, CD-Rom,
Cartoon and Computer Screen Library Project" (1998-2000), cf. in: Brouwer, "Dan Graham : Works 1965-2000,"
300.
309 "Skulptur. Projekte in Münster 1997. Dan Graham: Fun House für Münster".
310 Moure, Dan Graham, 167.
311 Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a phenomenology of architecture: 182.
312 Beveridge, "Color Perception and the Art of James Turrell," 305.
313 Wolfgang Schivelbusch cited in: Friedberg, The Virtual Window: 152.
314 Cf. Schlachter, "Licht ohne Schatten: Ganzfelder in Psychologie und Kunst," 78.

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However, it must be noted that the classification made in this subchapter applies to first and
foremost the abovementioned artworks of the artists. In contrast with Turrell’s Ganzfeld Pieces
(including the Perceptual Cells) and Dark Spaces, which had been identified as requiring a solitary
contemplation, the Skyspaces, for example, do engender a jointly perception of the spectacle, as
proposed in the Live Oak Friends Meeting in Texas. Likewise, amongst Graham’s works there are
pieces to be found that do not ask for a group to interact. Graham indicates:

In rectilinear enclosures, mirrors create illusory perspective boxes. The symmetry of mirrors
tends to conceal or cancel the passage of time, so that the overall architectural form appears
to transcend time, while the interior area of the architecture, inhabited by human
movements, process, and gradual change, is emptied of significance.315

Such a “rectliniear enclosure” is found for instance in Present Continuous Past(s). This last chapter
has provided an analysis of selected artworks from Graham and Turrell to their private or public
character. The comparison has comprised various aspects from previous analyses such as, for
instance, the inside-outside relationship.

315 Zevi, Dan Graham: Selected Writings and Interviews on Art Works, 1965-1995: 110.

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5 Conclusion

There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently
than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if
one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.
(Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure 316)

This paper has brought together two artists who ususally are not mentioned in the same breath.
However, the conducted analyses have not only helped to gain a deeper insight into the artists’
workings but also revealed surprising similarities. The way in which Turrell and Graham make
space and (in-) visibility experiental has proven extraordinary and cunning. The more so, in their
rendering of spatial experience they have proven to employ different concepts in order to extend
space. The agglomeration of identical structures is a feature which is rooted in Graham’s early
Magazine Works and takes on definite shape in the mirror-structures he applies to his pavilions
and video installations. Graham’s infinite space is grounded in a form of infinite regress as a zooming
out of visible structure, hence a mise en abyme induced by combined mirror elements. Turrell’s
sense of infinity, on the other hand, is not maintained by the apposition of structure but rather by a
loss of focus which is acquired by the help of the total visual field of a ganzfeld. Turrell proposes in
this sense: “Psychological or perceptual cues can take us beyond the space that we’re actually in,
extend it so that we’re in a space bigger than its physical dimensions.”317 The analysis has shown
that the extension of space in the form of a feeling of infinity in Turrell’s and Graham’s works
remains illusionary but nevertheless convincing.

By using habitual elements, i.e. features that the beholders know from their everyday life like
mirror or glass, and by situating these in urban, museum, or park envirvonments, Graham always
meets the visitors in a familiar situation wherein they can explore the artpiece at ease.
Nevertheless, Graham’s installation can equally affect the visitors in a disturbing manner;
Graham indicates: “A sense of uneasiness and psychological alienation is produced by a constant
play between feelings of inclusion and exclusion.”318 His pavilions engender social interactions
which are to the same effect questioned. How does a group observe, how does an individual
watch him- or herself or others? Graham lets the beholders engage in a playful manner in his

316 Foucault quoted in: David Michael Levin, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (London: University of
California Press, 1993), V.
317 Turrell in: Staff, "Adventures in Perception: James Turrell".
318Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power: 173.

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artpieces but, as it has been identified in this paper, keeps them in a transitive state. Thereby he
attempts at opening their eyes to - and deepen their understanding of - seemingly obvious
relationships like, for instance, seeing and be seen, or moving consciously through their own immediate
environment.

Turrell’s Ganzfeld Pieces and Dark Spaces cause strong physical effects on part of the beholder.
Likewise, Turrell’s Space Division Constructions or Projection Pieces convey substantial visual
and tangible characteristics which trigger haptic reactions on part of the spectator. The notions of
optic and haptic have been studied in this regard, with particular respect to the existing literature on
the topic. Applying Riegl’s classic distinction of optic-haptic to the artworks of Turrell and Graham
has proven elusive, though. Instead, concepts of (sensuous) geographies showed suitable
preconditions for the analysis of the discussed artworks. Lefebvre finds adequate words for the
relationship that has thus been identified between space and the body; but also the body’s
relationship to itself; relationships which are crucial for the experience of both Graham’s and
Turrell’s artworks:

Space – my space – is not the context of which I constitute the ‘textuality’: instead, it is first
of all my body, and then it is my body’s counterpart or ‘other’, its mirror-image or shadow: it
is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my
body on the one hand, and all other bodies on the other.319

The dual nature of space (may it be public/social or private), which Lefebvre suggests, has proved
applicable in this thesis, especially to Graham’s mirror-works.320 Lefebvre continues:

Space serves an intermediary or mediating role: beyond each plane surface, beyond each
opaque form, ‘one’ seeks to apprehend something else. This tends to turn social space
into a transparent medium occupied solely by light [...], therefore, space contains
opacities, bodies and objects, [...] it offers sequences, sets of objects, concatenations of
bodies – so much, so, in fact, that anyone can at any time discover new ones, forever
slipping from the non-visible realm into the visible, from opacity into transparency. 321

Precisely this ambiguity of transparency and opacity is the primary quality of Graham’s favored
material, the two-way mirror glass, as also is the “slipping from the non-visible realm into the
visible” of Turrell’s light spaces.

319 Lefebvre, The production of space: 184. (Original emphasis).

320 Ibid., 182.
321 Ibid., 183.

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One of the most striking similarities of the artworks of Turrell and Graham has turned out to be
the concept of reflection, which is a notion that combines and requires to be embedded firmly in
distinct circumstances of space and the visible. Graham makes use of a literal mirror-reflection in
order to, literally, hold up a mirror to the beholder and enable a merging of the beholder’s
feelings of being object and also being subject of the Other’s/one’s own gaze. Lefebvre concludes in
astounding conformity with Graham’s fusions of subject and object and the two-way mirror’s
visibility and invisibility: “Here [in the mirror] what is identical is at the same time radically other,
radically different – and transparency is equivalent to opacity.”322 Turrell, on the other hand,
engenders an inner-reflection. It has been found that, contrary to usual statements about his light-
spaces, in fact, the spaces do not give the opportunity to see oneself seeing, but the chance of
feeling oneself seeing. Therefore, Turrell indeed enables the viewer to experience a “space imbued
with consciousness.”323

This paper has provided an in-depth analysis of selected artworks of Dan Graham and James
Turrell, two artists who mainly work with space and (in-) visibility. Not only has this paper
therewith acknowledged the relevance of their artworks today, but the more so, it has helped to
understand the importance of seemingly obvious subjectmatters of one’s surrounding space and
how one sees it (or does not see it) and moves through it. The paper thus proved the significance of
experiencing (art) spaces as well as one’s body in a more conscious manner.

322
Ibid., 185.
323James Turrell cited from an interview with Julia Brown, in Brown, Julia (ed.) Santa Monica et al., 1985) p.43. In:
Brüderlin, "The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld: James Turrell and the Boundaries between
Sensory and Spiritual Experience," 143.

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7 Appendix
(I)
Exerpt from: Dan Graham: Public Space/Two Audiences, (1976) (In: Moure, Gloria, ed. Dan Graham.
Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998, p. 120.)

A spectator in the room with the mirror can choose several alternative ways of looking:
he may look only at his own image in the mirror, he may observe himself in the mirror
while observing his relation to his group; he may, as an individual, observe in the mirror
the other audience (seeing himself in relation to the other audience and perhaps the
audience observing him at the same time as he observers them); he may, feeling himself a
collective part of the audience, observe both audiences observing each other. If the
spectator changes his position and looks away from the mirror, he may observe his own
audience (as in normal life). Finally, if he faces the glass divider, he may observe members
of the other audience but not see an image of himself looking (because the far wall of the
other space is blank).

In contrast, members of the other audience tend to look collectively in only one direction,
as both the image of the other audience and the image of themselves is to be found by
looking toward the distant mirror. When members of this audience observe, they will
always see at the same time their own image (an image of themselves looking) reflected in
both the mirror and the glass.

(II)

Graham: “Two-way Mirror Pergola Bridge, 1988. Installed at Clisson, France.” From: Moure, Gloria, ed. Dan
Graham. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998, p. 184.

This is a 4 meter long equilateral triangle bridge with a two-way mirror half-reflective and
half-transparent glass side, opposed to an alluminium lattice with climbing plants on the
other side. The spectator walks across the river on a steel grid open enough to show the
reflective water surface. The reflective glass and the river surface under the grid reflect each
other’s surfaces of sky, water and sky seen through the plants. The reflective glass’s [sic]
reflection as against transparent surface continuously alters as the sunlight changes, as do the
shadows created by the dappling sunlight on the plants.

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8 Figures

Fig. 1 Fig. 1a

Fig. 1
Turrell, James, Catso, Blue, 1991. Xenon light installation, size variable. Installed at Williams
College Museum of Art 1991, Williamstown, Massachussetts, USA, 1991.

Source: Rothschild, Deborah Menaker, ed. James Turrell. Williamstown (Massachusetts, USA);
Williams College Museum of Art, 1991, p. 8.

Fig. 1a
Turrell, James, Catso, Blue, 1967. Xenon light installation, size variable.

Source: Noever, Peter, ed. James Turrell: The Other Horizon, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, p. 62.

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 Fig. 2

Fig. 2a

Fig. 2 and 2a

Graham, Dan, Public Space/Two Audiences, 1976. Two rooms, each with separate entrance,
divided by a sound insulating glass panel; one mirrored wall; muslin; fluorescent lights; and
painted wood. 304,8 x 701,4 x 289,59 cm. Installation at Ambiente Arte, Venice Biennale, 1976.
Collection Herbert, Ghent, Belgium. Photo: André Morin.

Source Fig. 2: Simpson, Bennett and Chrissie Iles. “Dan Graham: Beyond.” edited by Museum of
Contemporary Art Los Angeles and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Los Angeles,
2009, p. 319.

Source Fig. 2a: Prometheus Image Archive, URL: http://prometheus.uni-

koeln.de/pandora/image/large/bochum_kgi-
ba2e8aa59e4161ee5807078f7226c405fde751a6 (26/06/2012)

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Fig. 3 Fig. 3a

Turrell, James, Wide Out, 1998. Ganzfeld installation at the MAK Exhibition Hall, MAK –
Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, Austria, 1998-99.

Source Fig. 3: Noever, Peter, ed. James Turrell: The Other Horizon, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, p.
16.

Source Fig. 3a: Noever, Peter, ed. James Turrell: The Other Horizon, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, p.
19.

Fig. 3b
Turrell, James: Bridget's Bardo, 2009. Ganzfeld light installation, ca. 120 x 400 x 170,5 cm.
Entrance/exit, installed at “The Wolfsburg Project,” Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg,
Germany, 2009.

Source: Andrea Incontri (web-blog), URL: http://aiunderscore.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/2-

the-wolfsburg-project-_-james-turrell-arsenale-biennale-2011.png?w=500 (30/06/2012)

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Fig. 4
Lubliner, Malcolm (photographer): James Turrell and Robert Irwin inside Anechoic Chamber
at the University of California at Los Angeles, USA, 1968.

Source: Adcock, Craig. James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990, p. 71.

Fig. 5
Wheeler, Doug, DW 68 VEN MCASD 11, 1968-2011. Installed at Doug Gates/Museum of
Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, USA.

Source: The New York Times, URL:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/01/15/arts/15WHEELER1_SPAN/15JP
WHEELER1-articleLarge.jpg (19/07/2012)

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Fig. 6 Fig. 6a

Turrell, James; Mendota Stoppages, 1970. 20,3 x 25,4 cm. Black-and-White Photograph
(multiple exposure to phase 5 and 6), Mendota Building Ocean Park, California, USA.

Source Fig. 6: Brüderlin, Markus and Esther B. Kirschner (eds.): James Turrell, The Wolfsburg Project,
Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009, p. 152.

Source Fig. 6a: Adcock, Craig. James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990, p. 93.

Fig. 7
Turrell, James, Phantom, 1967. Xenon light projection, size variable.

Source: URL: http://phillipsdepury.com:8096/xigen/lotimg/JAMES-

TURRELL/NY010208/161/350/true/lot.aspx (14/07/2012)

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Fig. 8
Turrell, James, Raemar, 1968. Fluorescent light, size variable. Installed at the Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York, USA, 1980. Collection of the artist. Photo: John Cliett.

Source: Adcock, Craig. James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990, p. 142.

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 Fig. 9

Fig. 9a

Fig. 9 and 9a

Turrell, James, Wedgework IV, 1964. Lighting directions and plan view for Hayward Gallery,
London, England, 1993.

Source: Noever, Peter, ed. James Turrell: The Other Horizon, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, p. 82.

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Fig. 10
Turrell, James, Live Oak Friends Meeting (Skyspace), 1995-96. Plan view. Houston, Texas,
USA.

Source: Noever, Peter, ed. James Turrell: The Other Horizon, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, p. 200.

Fig. 10a Fig. 10b

Turrell, James, Live Oak Friends Meeting (Skyspace), 1995-96. Houston, Texas, USA.

Source Fig. 10a: Prometheus Image Archive, URL: http://prometheus.uni-

koeln.de/pandora/image/large/bern-a5791cf170e6ec2827d7d43de8a11bae17446c9f
(30/06/2012)

Source Fig. 10a: Prometheus Image Archive, URL: http://prometheus.uni-

koeln.de/pandora/image/large/bern-8b3ef8e67fb472fcf67a176b26a6722ca3ac372a
(30/06/2012)

| 97
 Fig. 11

Fig. 11a

Fig. 11 and 11a

Turrell, James, Trace Elements (Space Division Construction), 1993. Elevation view and
lighting directions for Hayward Gallery, London, England, 1993.

Source: Noever, Peter, ed. James Turrell: The Other Horizon, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, p. 105.

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Fig. 12
Turrell, James, Pleiades, 1983. Low-wattage tungsten projection. Plan an elevation of
permanent installation at The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Collection
Barbara Luderowski.

Source: Adcock, Craig. James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990, p. 108.

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Fig. 13 Fig. 13a

Fig. 13
Turrell, James, City of Arhirit, 1976. Draft.

Source: Prometheus Image Archive, URL: http://prometheus.uni-

koeln.de/pandora/image/large/trier-37900357d107bfd204afe73d365fcf23ace3c082
(18/05/2012)

Fig. 13a
Turrell, James, City of Arhirit, 1976. Filtered ambient sunlight, as installed at the Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Collection of the artist.

Source: Adcock, Craig. James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990, p. 125.

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Fig. 14
Turrell, James: Bridget's Bardo, 2009. Ganzfeld light installation, ca. 120 x 400 x 175 cm,
installed at “The Wolfsburg Project,” Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, Germany, 2009.

Source: Brüderlin, Markus and Esther Barbara Kirschner, eds. James Turrell, The Wolfsburg Project.
Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag 2009, p. 59.

Fig. 14a
Turrell; James: Bridget's Bardo, 2009, Ganzfeld light installation, ca. 120 x 400 x 175 cm,
cross-section plan view of the walk-in installation at “The Wolfsburg Project,” Wolfsburg
Kunstmuseum, Woflsburg Germany, 2009.

Source: Brüderlin, Markus and Esther Barbara Kirschner, eds. James Turrell, The Wolfsburg Project.
Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag 2009, p. 52.

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Fig. 15
Graham, Dan, Schema (March 1966), 1966. Published in Aspen, 5-6, 1966-67. Original in
Collection Daled, Brussels, Belgium.

Source: Moure, Gloria, ed. Dan Graham. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998, p. 69.

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Fig. 16 Fig. 16a
Graham, Dan, Scheme, 1966.
Published as illustration in Quasi-infinities and the Waning of Space by Robert Smithson, Arts¸
november, 1966. Collection Daled, Brussels.
Project for book exhibited in Cre-ation, Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, 1967 / Project for book
published in 1973 in an edition of six by Gerald Ferguson. Collection Daled, Brussels, Belgium.

Source Fig. 16: Moure, Gloria, ed. Dan Graham. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998, p. 67.

Source Fig. 16a: Moure, Gloria, ed. Dan Graham. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998, p. 68.

| 103
Fig. 17
Graham, Dan, Homes for America, 1966-67. Published in Art Magazine, December 1966 -
January 1967. Original work formed by two panels with texts and photographs color and b/w. 40
x 33.3 inches each. Collection Daled, Brussels, Belgium.

Source: Simpson, Bennett and Chrissie Iles. “Dan Graham: Beyond.” Edited by Museum of
Contemporary Art Los Angeles and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Los Angeles,
2009, p. 128-129.

| 104
 Fig. 18

Fig. 18a

Fig. 18b
Fig. 18, 18a, 18b Graham, Dan:

Fig. 18
Row of Tract House, Bayonne, N.J., 1966. C-print, 26,67 x 34,29 cm. Marian Goodman
Gallery, New York. Photo: Dan Graham.

Source: Moure, Gloria, ed. Dan Graham. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998, p. 40.

Fig. 18a
Housing Development, Bayonne, N.J, 1966. C-print, 27,94 x 35,59 cm. Marian Goodman
Gallery, New York. Photo: Dan Graham.

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Source: Moure, Gloria, ed. Dan Graham. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998, p. 44.

Fig. 18b
Row of New Tract House, Bayonne, N.J., 1966. C-print, 27,94 x 35,59 cm. Marian Goodman
Gallery, New York. Photo: Dan Graham.

Source: Moure, Gloria, ed. Dan Graham. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998, p. 49.

Fig. 19
Graham, Dan, Tract Houses, Bayonne, N.J., 1966. C-print, 27,94 x 35,59 cm. Marian
Goodman Gallery, New York. Photograph: Dan Graham.

Source: Moure, Gloria, ed. Dan Graham. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998, p. 41.

| 106
Fig. 20 Fig. 20a

Fig. 20
Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni (?) Arnolfini and his wife (also know as The Arnolfini
Wedding), 1434. Oil on oak, 82,2 x 60 cm. (Inventory nummer National Gallery London: NG
186), London, England.

Source: Prometheus Image Archive URL: http://prometheus.uni-

koeln.de/pandora/image/large/tuberlin-43ab1f4f80cef6c03a04f7ed0009884473bea0ba
(02/08/2012)

Fig. 20a
Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni (?)Arnolfini and his wife (also know as The Arnolfini
Wedding) (Detail), 1434. Oil on oak, 82,2 x 60 cm. (Inventory nummer National Gallery
London: NG 186), London, England.

Source: Prometheus Image Archive, URL: http://prometheus.uni-

koeln.de/pandora/image/large/bochum_kgi-
932b682c389cfb0e093464e5578fe1b0a7638c47 (02/08/2012)

| 107
Fig. 21
Graham, Dan, Two-way Mirror Triangle with One Curved Side, 1996. Two-way mirror,
aluminium, 250 x 300 cm, “Nordscape” Project, Norway. Vågan County Collection.

Source: URL: http://fopnews.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/graham_reflect.jpg?w=660

(16/06/2012)

| 108
 Fig. 22

Fig. 22a

Fig. 22 and 22a

Graham, Dan, Two-Way Mirror Hedge Labyrinth, 1989-1993. Two-way mirror glass,
aluminium. Collection Bob Orton, La Jolla. Photos: Dan Graham.

Source: Simpson, Bennett and Chrissie Iles. “Dan Graham: Beyond.” Edited by Museum of
Contemporary Art Los Angeles and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Los Angeles,
2009, p. 179.

| 109
Fig. 23
Pepper’s Ghost.

Source: Realms of Light: Uses and Perceptions of the magic lantern from the 17th century to the 21st century.
Edited by Richard Crangle, Mervyn Heard, Ine van Dooren. London: The Magic Lantern
Society 2005, p. 19.

Fig. 24
Graham, Dan, Fun House für Münster, 1997. 230 x 500 x 200 cm, installation at the Sculpture
Projects Münster, Germany, 1993.

Source: Prometheus Image Archive, URL: http://prometheus.uni-

koeln.de/pandora/image/large/bochum_kgi-
7c753b72486156bc11e7416305a9c87ada24439e (16/06/2012)

| 110
Fig. 25 Fig. 25a

Fig. 25
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1601-02. Oil on
canvas, 107 x 146 cm, Neues Palais Schloss Sains souci, Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und
Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Potsdam, Germany.

Source: Prometheus Image Archive, URL: http://prometheus.uni-

koeln.de/pandora/image/large/heidicon_kg-
5fce443f822e27a324931eb2869539db3f33537c (23/05/2012)

Fig. 25a
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Detail), 1601-02.
Oil on canvas, 107x146 cm Neues Palais Schloss Sains souci, Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und
Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Potsdam, Germany.

Source: Prometheus Image Archive, URL: http://prometheus.uni-

koeln.de/pandora/image/show/augsburg_kg-
5a1c9bb5817bf8134244e8139add046f55f86f86 (23/05/2012)

| 111
Fig. 26 Fig. 27

Fig. 26
The range of the senses. (Original source cited by Paul Rodaway: Skurnik, L.S and F. George.
Psychology for Everyone, Harmondsworth: Pelican/Penguin, 1967, p. 14.)

Source: Rodayway, Paul. Sensuous Geographies: Body Sense, and Place. London: Routledge, 1994, p. 27.

Fig. 27
Turrell, James, Wide Out, 1998. Ganzfeld installation at the MAK Exhibition Hall, MAK –
Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, Austria, 1998-99.

Source: Noever, Peter, ed. James Turrell: The Other Horizon, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, p. 21.

| 112
Fig. 28
Turrell, James: Bridget's Bardo, 2009. Ganzfeld light installation, ca. 120 x 400 x 175 cm,
installed at “The Wolfsburg Project,” Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, Germany, 2009.

Source: Brüderlin, Markus and Esther Barbara Kirschner, eds. James Turrell, The Wolfsburg Project.
Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag 2009, p. 58.

Fig. 29
Turrell, James, Catso Red. 1967. Xenon light installation, size variable, installation view at The
Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 1994.

Source: Easy DB Archive, URL: http://easydb.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/EZDB-

BildSuche?easydb=51e0b3163fcc77fd1384c0a49819a51f (07/08/2012)

| 113
Fig. 30
Turrell, James, Wedgework III, 1969. Installation view at the Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York, 1980.

Source: Müller, Axel: An der Grenze der Materialität: Turrells ‘Lichtbilder‘. In: Kritisches Lexikon der
Gegenwartskunst. Lothar Romain, Detlef Bluemler (ed.), Munich, 1994, p. 5.

Fig. 31 Fig. 31a

Fig. 31
Turrell, James, Danae, 1983. Tungsten and ultraviolett light. The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, USA. Photo: Marc Luttrell.

Source Fig. 31: Noever, Peter, ed. James Turrell: The Other Horizon, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, p.
21.

Source Fig. 31a: URL: http://representingplace.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/turrell.jpg

(09/08/2012)

| 114
Fig. 32
Graham, Dan, Two-way Mirror Triangle with One Curved Side, 1996. Two-way mirror,
aluminium, 250 x 300 cm, “Nordscape” Project, Norway. Vågan County Collection.

Source: URL: http://www.artdesigncafe.com/IMG/jpg/dan-graham-vagan-nordland-lg.jpg

(16/06/2012)

| 115
 Fig. 33

Fig. 33a

Fig. 33 and Fig. 33a

Graham, Dan: Present Continous Past(s) (installation view), 1974. Two-way mirror, one
monitor b/w, one camera zoom b/w, one microprocessor. 320 x 320 x 279,4 cm (mirror), 30,5 x
40,64 cm (monitor). First exhibition: Project’74, Kunstverein Köln, Cologne, 1974. Collection
Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

Source Fig. 33a: Prometheus Image Archive, URL: http://prometheus.uni-

koeln.de/images/genf/r8192/$@$DB_HostID=bird.unige.ch&DB_InstanceName=aca
prd&DB_Tablename=ha_fiches&DB_PKColName=HA_FICHES_ID&DB_PKColVal
=23799&DB_DataColName=datah&DB_MIMEColName=mimetypeh?_asd=004fb520
8048ffea73c1ffaffa900d6caa3dd7668c1a5f20ec (26/06/2012)

Source Fig. 33a: Alberro, Alexander (ed.), Two-Way Mirror Power. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, p.
40.

| 116
Fig. 34
Turrell, James, Soft Cell, 1992. Plywood, foam, incandescent light, carpet. 284,5 x 208,3 x 208,3
cm.

Source: Noever, Peter, ed. James Turrell: The Other Horizon, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, p. 144.

Fig. 35 Fig. 35a

Turrell, James: Bridget's Bardo, 2009. Ganzfeld light installation, ca. 120 x 400 x 175 cm,
installed at “The Wolfsburg Project,” Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, Germany, 2009.

Source Fig. 35: URL:

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.6739.1313651882!/img/httpImage/image.j
pg_gen/derivatives/gallery_635/image.jpg (30/06/2012)

Source Fig. 35a: URL:

http://www.n-
tv.de/img/55/557942/Img_16_9_450_2n4d1626.jpg4134983015808985931.jpg
(30/06/2012)

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Fig. 36
Turrell, James, Change of State, 1992. Painted wood and plastic.

Source: Prometheus Image Archive, URL: http://prometheus.uni-

koeln.de/pandora/image/show/trier-94c53384537aa00ef055dd852b9d5618a7b7d33c
(07/08/2012)

Fig. 37
Graham, Dan: Public Space/Two Audiences (scheme), 1976.

Source: Alberro, Alexander (ed.), Two-Way Mirror Power. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, p. 156.

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Fig. 38
Graham, Dan: Present Continous Past(s) (scheme), 1974.

Source: Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., ed. Dan Graham: Video-Architecture-Television. Halifax: The Press
of Novia Scotia College of Art & Design, 1979, p. 8.

Fig. 39
Graham, Dan: Two Adjacent Pavilions, 1978-82. Two-way mirrors, glass, steel. Two units.
259,7 x 185,9 x 185,9 cm. Installation at Documenta 7, Kassel, 1982.Collection Kröller Müller
Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

Source: Prometheus Image Archive, URL: http://prometheus.uni-

koeln.de/pandora/image/large/genf-6857a3d065e5c3d3b4f25b9f62300bc7e4c2a147
(26/06/2012)

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Fig. 39a Fig. 39b

Graham, Dan, Two Adjacent Pavilions (“Graham photographing Two Adjacent Pavillions”),
1978-82. Two-way mirrors, glass, steel. Two units. 259,7 x 185,9 x 185,9 cm. Installation at
Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany, 1982.

Source Fig. 39a: Easy DB Image Archive, URL: http://easydb.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/EZDB-

BildSuche?easydb=74782ac50e42b3d505bdc217a38ee5a7 (26/06/2012)

Source Fig. 39b: Moure, Gloria, ed. Dan Graham. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998, p.
130.

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Fig. 40
Graham, Dan, Heart Pavilion (Version I) (“Graham photographing Heart Pavilion, Version I”),
1991. Two-way mirror glass, aluminium, 240 x 500 x 500 cm, The Carnegie Museum of Art,
Pittsburgh, USA, (realized for the ‘1991 Carnegie International’).

Source: Simpson, Bennett and Chrissie Iles (eds.): “Dan Graham: Beyond,” Exhib. Cat., Los
Angeles 2009, p. 200.

Fig. 40a
Graham, Dan, Heart Pavilion (Version I), 1991. Two-way mirror glass, aluminium, 240 x 500
x 500 cm, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA, (realized for the ‘1991 Carnegie
International’).

Source: Simpson, Bennett and Chrissie Iles. "Dan Graham: Beyond." edited by Museum of
Contemporary Art Los Angeles and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Los Angeles,
2009, p. 200.

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Fig. 41
Graham, Dan, Heart Pavilion (Version II), 1992-1993. Two-way mirror, glass, steel, 244 x 389
x 498 cm, Collection Eileen Rosenau, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, USA.

Source: Moure, Gloria, ed. Dan Graham. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998, p. 68.

Fig. 41a
Graham, Dan, Heart Pavilion (Version II), 1992-1993. Two-way mirror, glass, steel, 240 x 500
x 400 cm, Collection Eileen Rosenau, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, USA.

Source: Pelzer, Birgit, Mark Francis and Beatriz Colomina, eds. Dan Graham. London / New
York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2001, p. 23.

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Fig. 42
Turrell, James: Bridget's Bardo, 2009. Ganzfeld light installation (view from outside the room-
in-room-construction), ca. 12 x 40 x 17,5 m, installed at “The Wolfsburg Project,” Wolfsburg,
Germany, 2009.

Source: Brüderlin, Markus and Esther Barbara Kirschner, eds. James Turrell, The Wolfsburg Project,
Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag 2009, p. 66.

Fig. 43

Fig. 43a

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 Fig. 43b

Fig. 43, 43a and 43b

Turrell, James: Bridget's Bardo, 2009. Ganzfeld light installation, ca. 120 x 400 x 175 cm,
installed at “The Wolfsburg Project,” Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, Germany, 2009.

Source Fig.43: Easy DB Image Archive, URL:

https://bilddatenbank.kunsthist.unibas.ch/eas/partitions/2/0/22000/22947/326982f022
42438b02fa6c7940141dc22bf779e4/image/jpeg/preview.jpg (30/06/2012)

Source Fig. 43a: Easy DB Image Archive, URL:

https://bilddatenbank.kunsthist.unibas.ch/eas/partitions/2/0/22000/22946/d341fd74b
0c0b9bc7aaa5eb71474bb15fe180f67/image/jpeg/preview.jpg (30/06/2012)

Source Fig. 43b: Brüderlin, Markus and Esther Barbara Kirschner, eds. James Turrell, The Wolfsburg
Project. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag 2009, p. 63.

Fig. 44
Graham, Dan, Two-way Mirror Pergola Bridge, 1988-90. Two-way mirror, glass, steel and
aluminium. 301 x 339,1 x 430,5 cm. Installation at “Les grâces de la nature,” Clisson, France,
1988.

Source: Moure, Gloria, ed. Dan Graham. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998, p. 183.

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Fig. 44a Fig. 44b

Graham, Dan, Two-way Mirror Pergola Bridge, 1988-90. Two-way mirror, glass, steel and
aluminium. 301 x 339,1 x 430,5 cm. Installation at “Les grâces de la nature,” Clisson, France,
1988.

Source: Simpson, Bennett and Chrissie Iles. “Dan Graham: Beyond.” Edited by Museum of
Contemporary Art Los Angeles and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Los Angeles,
2009, p. 252 and 253.

Fig. 45

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 Fig. 45a
Fig. 45 and 45a
Graham, Dan, Fun House für Münster, 1997. 230 x 500 x 200 cm, installation at the Sculpture
Projects Münster, Germany, 1993.

Source Fig.45: URL: http://www.damm-net.org/graham_muenster.jpg (08/07/2012)

Source Fig. 45a: Medien Kunst Netz

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/assets/img/data/2244/bild.jpg (08/07/2012), (photo:
Rudolf Frieling).

Fig. 46
Graham, Dan, Octagon for Münster, 1987. Two-way mirrors, wood, steel. 240 x 365 cm in
diameter. Collection Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster,
Germany

Source: Prometheus Image Archive, URL: http://prometheus.uni-

koeln.de/pandora/image/large/genf-2e23f0c00fde0bd44f78f44ba09e8c6fd4f20338
(16/06/2012)

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Fig. 47
Turrell, James: Bridget's Bardo, 2009. Ganzfeld light installation, ca. 120 x 400 x 175 cm,
installed at “The Wolfsburg Project,” Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, Germany, 2009.

Source: Brüderlin, Markus and Esther Barbara Kirschner, eds. James Turrell, The Wolfsburg Project.
Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag 2009, p. 107.

Fig. 48
McCall, Anthony, Meeting You Halfway, 2009, Installation view at Hangar Bicocca, Milan
2009. Photographer: Giulio Buono.

Source: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz, URL:

http://www.smb.museum/smb/media/exhibition/32936/g_mccall.jpg (08/08/2012)

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