James Turrell at Pace
James Turrell
After Effect, 2021
Ad Reinhardt
”Color Out of Darkness” curated by James Turrell
Pace
February 11 - March 19
Sometimes I want to accuse James Turrell of cheating. Not with the fluorescent bulbs, those play by the rules, but the wedgeworks, skylights and ganzfelds: those are too perfect, too total in their absorption, too successful in their deception.
At Pace, which may as well be a private museum at this point, I was shuffled with 7 strangers into a blackout gallery and seated, disoriented, eyes not adjusted to the dark, ass to ass on a bench as a docent gave the introductory spiel for this new wedgework. It was a little too intimate given the emergent eroticism of the piece, a great pulsating womb begging penetration and threatening (promising?) envelopment.
Upstairs Turrell has curated the paintings of his hero, Ad Reinhardt. What can I say, they’re Reinhardts. They’re great. I appreciate that each is set apart in its own little annex chapel with a bench to sit worshipfully before it, which proves rewarding. It is a bit much to make them all into altarpieces and it’s unclear if Turrell is curating Reinhardt or appropriating him. But a bit much may be what is needed for the hypnic jerk to take place.