Abstract
On several occasions during the years 1968–1971 artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell, an experimental psychologist named Ed Wortz, and a number of UCLA student volunteers spent hours depriving themselves of light, sound and human contact. They were engaged in a series of experiments involving an anechoic chamber used for psycho-physical experimentation by the Garrett Corporation, a contractor to the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA). The interior of the chamber was soundproofed, suspended to minimize the effects of the earth’s rotation and utterly darkened. Self-projected sounds like speech were deadened. Sitting in these reduced surroundings was exhausting; rather than depriving the subject of the senses of sight and hearing, the lack of focal markers proved to heighten them, causing the subject to strain his eyes and ears, searching for something upon which to focus his attention. Most startling were the effects upon leaving the chamber when the body re-adjusted to the overwhelming array of stimuli in daily life and the world became intensely bright, loud and noticeable.
[A]part from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.
Alfred North Whitehead, 1929
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Notes
- 1.
“Bracketing” (Einklammerung) is a term first posited in Edmund Husserl (1991, original 1913). The term is succinctly defined by Husserl scholar David Woodruff Smith (2007, 429) as “the method or technique of turning our attention from the objects of our consciousness to our consciousness of those objects”, an awareness of being aware, so to speak.
- 2.
This is my primary reason for not including images with this text. While I acknowledge that my own descriptions are limited, they are less likely to be mistaken for “the thing itself” than are photographs, which at best offer only severely limited versions of the work in question, and prioritize visual perception at the expense of other sensory percepts present in the immediate experience. For years, Robert Irwin held the same position and refused to allow his work to be photographed, though he has since relented.
- 3.
Robert Irwin, quoted in Weschler (1982, 99).
- 4.
Davis (1992, 54–62); and Tuchman (1971). For more extensive histories on the development and presence of the scientific community and specifically the aerospace industry in Southern California see: Newell (1980) and Koppes (1982), whose work relies upon an in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as gleaned from its (de-classified) records.
- 5.
Some have interpreted this proposal as especially disturbing and manipulative, seeing the viewers as playing the part of unsuspecting test subjects (Perchuk 2006). Though the experience would likely have been discomfiting, I can’t agree entirely. Considering that the option to participate would have been solely the viewer’s, and that no evidence indicates that the results would be “classified” or that one viewer would be prevented from discussing the procedure with the next, participants could hardly accuse the artists—who if anything were looking for ways to communicate the experience—of coercive tactics.
- 6.
Joseph Kosuth, quoted in Alberro and Stimson (1999, xxxi n. 7).
- 7.
The laboratory analogy is by no means isolated, nor was it particularly new by the middle of the twentieth century. In 1905, for example, the trustees of the Boston Museum of Art specially commissioned an experimental gallery for the purpose of testing conditions especially lighting conditions in a scientific manner (Gilman 1905, 1906). Excessive glare and shadow especially were to be avoided. The Boston trustees’ prejudice in favor of the eye (rather than brain) as the critical viewing organ continued in the preparation of gallery spaces elsewhere in twentieth-century America. Seventy years later Brian O’Doherty (1976, 29) asserted how this prejudice had come to dominate curatorial practice: “It is now impossible to paint up an exhibition without surveying the wall like a health inspector …” The irony of discussing these experiments in this context is that light and space art often consists of nothing but glare and/or shadow.
- 8.
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Schuld, D. (2010). Lost in Space: Consciousness and Experiment in the Work of Irwin and Turrell. In: Frigg, R., Hunter, M. (eds) Beyond Mimesis and Convention. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 262. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3851-7_10
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