Light court, Diözesanmuseum Freising. The inscription above, Turrell's luminous portal below
The fog hangs low over the Domberg this November day. Good. It muffles, veils, turns the town below into a suggestion. What happens up here needs this seclusion.
TIMOR DOMINI PRINCIPIUM SAPIENTIAE – the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The inscription from Proverbs runs along the middle gallery of the light court in this classical building by Matthias Berger from 1869. Fifty-one years ago, I went to school here on the Domberg, at the cathedral school. Different building, same place, same atmosphere. Today the Berger building is a museum, reopened in October 2022 after nine years of renovation. The second-largest art collection of the Catholic Church worldwide, after the Vatican Museums.
I don't come as a believer. But not as a tourist either. More as someone searching for something, without knowing exactly what.
First the chapel, now James Turrell's Ganzfeld "A Chapel for Luke and his scribe Lucius the Cyrene". A museum guard accompanies us – some have fallen from the stairs, she says. A few steps lead up into a space that seems to have no boundaries. At the front wall floats a luminous form – pink, peach-colored, with a second, brighter circle behind it. Two visitors sit on a bench in front of it, silent.
I try to photograph. The iPhone collapses immediately. It searches desperately for something to focus on, finds nothing, averages everything to a homogeneous blue surface. Later with the Leica Q3 it works better – the camera at least captures nuances, color gradients, a hint of spatial depth.
But what my eye sees there cannot be captured.
That's Turrell's point. Born in Los Angeles in 1943, the artist has worked exclusively with light for over 50 years. Not light on something, but light itself. "My works are not about light, they are light," he says. The Ganzfeld – a term from perceptual psychology – creates a completely homogeneous visual field. All architectural features dissolve, depth perception disappears.
You have to bring time. The eye adapts, searches, probes. What first looks like a flat disk on the wall begins to float, to shift, to become space. Photography fails at this because it freezes a moment. But Turrell's work exists in time, in perception, not on the memory card.
James Turrell: "A Chapel for Luke and his scribe Lucius the Cyrene". You have to bring time
I think of the inscription in the light court. The fear of the Lord. Not fear of punishment, but awe. The acknowledgment of something that eludes quick grasp. The iPhone wants to focus, categorize, possess. It knows only one mode. That's why it fails.
From the immateriality of light to the materiality of color. Judith Milberg's works accompany the walk around the second floor. Her installation "Imagine all the Pieces" – 24 panels in four groups of six – pours pigmented ink onto wood, rubs pastel chalk deep into the material with her hands. Amorphous forms grow, organic strands intertwine, yellow, red, black pulsate.
The conceptual claim is large: Big Bang, origin of the universe, development of Earth. But for all its physical presence, it remains decorative. The color harmonies are too calculated, the compositions too balanced. Viewed from the distance of the light court, the works become colored accents that must compete with the strict classical architecture – and lose their effect in the process.
What is conceived as a boundless process fits too neatly into the museum order. The difference to Turrell becomes palpable: his work eludes, cannot be possessed. It demands a different form of attention.
