27.05.25
Time Well Spent
It is the Urban Jürgensen philosophy that the way we keep time inspires how we spend it. In our Time Well Spent series, brought to life by UJ’s Photography Director, Ellen von Unwerth, we look at what it means to use and spend time with passion, interest, joy, and meaning.
“I like to say that my work is
an architecture of light into space.”
In our Time Well Spent series we peek into the lives of creative individuals and look at how they spend their time, and how that, in turn, shapes their work, our culture, and their lives. In our first installment, photographed at Roden Crater, Max Berlinger examines the interplay between light and time that defines the work of James Turrell and how the master of light uses his hours in the sun to find joy and meaning in a vast universe.
His luminous works — somewhere between sculpture, immersive environment, and installation — are known for their otherworldly, silky glow. “Making light palpable,” is how Michael Govan, the CEO and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, describes them. Or from the artist himself: “I like to say that my work is an architecture of light into space.”
And yet his work, by Turrell’s own explanation, is, in many ways, about time. An aviator, sailor and scientist at heart, celestial and astronomical forces and their interplay with the earth is at the core of how he sees the world.
Beyond their lush, lambent appearance, Turrell’s work is concerned with the temporal experience of being alive, of moving ever forward. Turrell uses light and space the way a portraitist uses paint and canvas — but time is the unspoken component that brings it all together. The colors he evokes, the dusty-pinks of dawn and the inky indigo of a night sky, are his way of making time a visible, observable phenomenon.
Turrell’s career is not one of linear progression despite his highly attuned sense of logic. Raised a Quaker, he was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Yet, as a skilled pilot, he agreed to use his talents to fly monks out of Tibet to safety. After being shot down twice and returning to civilian life, he found work in the film industry, as a second director of photography on Norman Jewison’s “Fiddler on the Roof.” He then went on to assist photographer Ansel Adams, traveling the west with Adams and setting up his large format cameras, much like the ones Turrell uses today on his prop planes to photograph the Crater from the heavens.
Turrell’s output is an exercise in extreme craftsmanship that yields something alluring in its simplicity. Take what are probably his most familiar series, his Skyspaces, large site specific rooms built with an opening cut into their ceilings, acting as an aperture to the sky. To some, it may seem a gimmick almost — just a hole in the roof, with Mother Nature doing the heavy lifting — but the amount of calculation and planning that go into making them appear natural and effortless is sheer artistry and brilliance brought together through the lens of time. The aperture's dimensions, the chamber's proportions, the angles of approach: all are determined by complex equations that account for a variety of ever-shifting earthly circumstances, trying to bring them together in some sense of unity. Tellingly, his goal is to have a Skyspace in every time zone in the world; currently there are more than 85.
How he spends his time is as rich a field of pleasure and beauty as his light sculptures. His life and his work share the tenets of hard work and the application of mathematics and astronomy to the real world.
Over the course of a seven month skyward sabbatical across the American Southwest, seeking salvation in that ineffable place where the Earth and heavens meet, the seeds of his art practice were planted, as he chased the light of day across the craggy land below. “The sky always seems to be out there, away from us,” he once said of that period. “I like to bring it down in close contact with us, so you feel you are in it.”
Flying brought him to the Roden Crater. After years of searching, soaring from Canada to Mexico, he spotted from the air the perfect installation to realize his lofty ideas.
And the Crater brought James to cattle ranching, an occupation he took on to receive a loan for his Arizona ranch and which he now does joyfully with his wife, watching and assisting as the large herds breed and give birth. He oversees some 145,000 acres of land in the state’s Painted Desert, a careful, thoughtful and committed steward. Through that practice Turrell has become finely attuned to the way the time passes, watching the seasons sweep across the region’s majestic, aching flatlands.
On the other side of the country, where he also finds himself at home, he once wiled away the hours trying to build his own boat. He is a noted sailor who spends his days navigating the water, often with his family, at his home on the Eastern Shore. From the boat he watches the ephemeral interplay between light and water, as the former bounces off the latter’s dancing ripples. There he experiences time as mariners have for millennia — tied to tides,governed by weather patterns, measured by the steady progression of celestial navigation. Sailing requires the kind of patience that our accelerated culture has largely abandoned, attention to subtle environmental changes that occur over hours rather than seconds. It's perfect preparation for an artist whose works often require similar patience from viewers.
His patient perfectionism and outside interests inescapably bleed into his art-making, perhaps best expressed in Roden Crater, his monumental land art piece in Arizona. It is Turrell’s life work. He has spent nearly half a century transforming a dormant volcano into what amounts to the world's most expansive meditation on duration, patience, and, indeed, timekeeping. He has taken this 400,000-year-old natural phenomenon and, with sheer grit and devotion, injected into it an internal system of chambers, rooms, and tunnels precisely calibrated to frame celestial events across multiple lifetimes. While, yes, it is an artwork of staggering ambition, it is also a man, molding the earth in a way that uses sunlight to help measure time, not in days or minutes but in eras and epochs. It is a man trying to achieve something like immortality. And to share that with the world, through his plans to open the work to the public as part of a foundation.
Roden Crater embodies everything that makes Turrell’s oeuvre so awe inspiring, so transfixing: a pilot's understanding of the atmosphere, a mathematician's precision with geometry, a mystic's search for truths beyond what is easily perceived by the eye. Like the complications in some grande sonnerie timepiece, these elements serve multiple functions, operate on different temporal frequencies, and contribute to an experience that transcends its individual components.
His career-spanning devotion to light, flight, water, mathematics, and space represents an investigation of time as the fundamental medium of human experience. Like the finest complications in haute horlogerie, his work transforms mechanical precision into transcendent experience, revealing that the measurement of time is ultimately inseparable from the art of living beautifully within it.
Photographs by Ellen von Unwerth
May 27, 2025
By Max Berlinger