I’m emailing you the pages from my book where I talk about Turrell, to show how artistic explorations with/variations on light can prompt phenomenological insights into basic concepts. In this case, it’s insights about the inherent relation between things as real and solid, and places in which we experience them.
Some further thoughts:
Xin Wei and Helga, in going back and reading over this material, I was reminded about this connection that in the book I call the ‘thing-place’ relation. This leads me to wonder: maybe the memory-place relation hinges not just on our moving bodies, but on the thing-place relation. Things need places to be the things that they are, and maybe conversely this means that in our encounter with them, things ‘drag along’ their places and places call out for the specific sorts of things that they harbour. So perhaps it’s not just habit body that tunes us in to the past of places, but a past gets sedimented in things too, insofar as they call for something more than themselves, for a place in which to be the things that they are.
In this context, maybe the ‘room effect’ articulates place in ways that ‘help’ things be the things that they are, and thence ‘helps’ memory. Turrell’s piece is a sort of removal of articulate room and thence of determinate place. Put more simply: maybe things need room to be, and this doesn’t mean: room as empty space, but articulate room.
I wonder if this sort of thinking resonates with issues in architecture and lighting, e.g., if architecture and lighting demand of us that we think of things, features, etc. in terms of settings beyond them that let them stand out as what they are. E.g., to let the stairway appear as stairway and safe to go up, we need to think not just of the stairway, but settings and lighting beyond it.
I copy Harry on this too, because of the lighting issue, and because this also sounding to me like the issues are germane to theatre as well. I.e., I am thinking in theatre you can make a thing be a sort of ‘hyper-thing’, over-invested with meaning, by way of lighting, e.g., a chair not just as for sitting on, but as a place of rest, repose, comfort, or in contrast a site of imprisonment, confinement, or sedentariness, by way of lighting.
Best,
David