meeting

Behind a door on the third floor was a room with seemingly no visible windows. Despite of the orange glow coming from lamps arranged behind wooden benches lining all four walls, the general hue of the room was rather neutral. The walls seemed orange, but the air appeared greyish, maybe bluish. There were several people in the room. Some were equipped with various cameras. Some were whispering. Some were actually taking pictures. It was rather cool. There was a humming in the room that felt as if the inside here actually meant outside. And it did. The most prominent light source of the room was a rectangle in the ceiling. This is where the grey light was coming from. It was a powerful and very equally distributed light. This is what the two Japanese tourists were talking about. This was what that couple cuddled into one of the corners kept staring at. This is what a man with a giant digital camera kept taking pictures of. I had no idea this room existed. It has been here since the fall of 1989. Who knew. We were now in a meeting. That is the name of the piece. New visitors would enter. Some people happened to be more quiet than others. We were all here to see something we could have as well seen at a very different location, but here it felt completely different. Here it was prepared for us humans. We were given a color contrast, a reference, an enclosed space, we were given other humans to share with. We were given all the things that make us pay attention to the world, be it natural or made by artists or anything in-between. And so we sat there. It was really most beautiful. The light in the ceiling constantly changed color. It went from that greyish fall color through an infinite number of blues. It then finally arrived at a dark black, a black that had one or maybe three little white dots in it. The change of color was only really apparent when one decided to leave the room. Coming back made things more beautiful and more spectacular than possibly could have been expected. How incredibly rich the color could be. How beautiful it was and how every moment glued more than the previous one. And memory was not capable of recording the event. Photographs were just very rough recordings of the changing conditions. It was magic. James Turrell created an amazing space here at P.S.1... amazing. Weather permitting it is open from 3:30pm-6:00pm. At least between November 17th and December 27. The opening times change slightly every few weeks so the room is there for the public about an hour before dusk. I think we will be there on a beautiful day when there are clouds. I want to go... And I will not write about that weird father and his daughter. That was just a bit too disturbing to be described in a nice way. Here is much more about James Turrell