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"Watch video of Turrell's comments and glowing Guggenheim HERE.&amp;nbsp;\u201CThank you for coming here on such a beautiful day, it\u2019s terrific outside and we probably all oughta be there,\u201D quipped&amp;nbsp;James Turrell in a moment of on-stage banter at the press conference for his eponymous exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. What seemed to be a throwaway remark is actually telling. If Turrell had his druthers, everyone would just go outside and experience the light \u2014 the primary medium and subject of his art since he cut apertures into an abandoned hotel in 1966.Happening concurrently with shows at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Guggenheim exhibition forms a sweeping trifecta of surveys devoted to the pioneer of California light and space. \u201CIt\u2019s not so much that I want to hog all the museum space,\u201D Turrell said of his sudden omnipresence, \u201Cthe work that I have done [requires] space, because of how I like to look at light.\u201DTurrell gets plenty of space in the Guggenheim show. The uncluttered exhibition \u2014 organized by the museum\u2019s Twentieth Century Curator Carmen Gim\u00E9nez and associate curator Nat Trotman \u2014 comprises a series of etchings, four early light works from the '60's, and the ballyhood site-specific extravaganza, \u201CAten Reign.\u201D Occupying an undecidable position between mass-spectacle and quiet meditation, \u201CAten Reign\u201D blockades the Guggenheim\u2019s spiraling ramps with a hidden scaffold of semitransparent scrims and computerized light fixtures, draping the atrium in alternating veils of misty colored light. Over the course of an hour, the rotunda takes on an evolving cycle of colors. Pearly white light gives way to misty lavender, which deepens into an electric purple. The museum\u2019s famous concentric curves become diffused towards the ceiling, as daylight streams down from the building\u2019s oculus.At the press conference, Richard Armstrong thanked the artist for \u201Ctransforming the rotunda into a luminous and immersive skyspace.\u201D In fact, the \u201CAten Reign\u201D is neither immersive, nor it is strictly speaking a skyspace (For Turrell\u2019s famous architectural interventions that make the sky appear flush with the building\u2019s architecture, see \u201C1986: Meeting\u201D at PS1). Viewers cannot ascend into the vacillating polychrome firmament; they can only ogle at it from below. The hanging scrims enclose the Guggenheim\u2019s open, corkscrew-shaped arcades, making the walk up to the upperfloor galleries a rather joyless task.It\u2019s a soft, tranquilizing pleasure to lie down in the Rotunda and watch the display of undulating colors (this his how  Aten Reign  should best be viewed: on your back \u2014 and for at least 20 minutes), but visitors expecting a hallucinatory, mind-blowing experience might be mildly disappointed. Turrell\u2019s blissed-out, quasi-spectacular riff on Frank Loyd Wright\u2019s iconic architecture has none of the radical spatial disorientation of Doug Wheeler\u2019s \u201CInfinity Environment,\u201D nor does it touch the narcotic voluptuous of Pipilotti Rist\u2019s \u201CPour Your Body Out.\u201D Though low-fi and modest in scale, Turrell\u2019s 1968 LED light installation, \u201CRonan\u201D (on view in the Guggenheim\u2019s high gallery) is more phenomenologically powerful and unsettling. Viewed up close, a shaft of radiant white light makes what is actually a shallow crevice in the wall look like a dizzying infinitude.At 70, the white-bearded Turrell seems like a cross between a cowboy and Obi wan Kenobi. The former Quaker, who has famously spent over 30 years retrofitting an extinct volcano into a naked-eye observatory \u2014 speaks lucidly about the \u201Cthingness of light\u201D and \u201Clight as a revelation itself.\u201D Discussions of Turrell\u2019s work often collapse into the critically untouchable vagaries of religious metaphor and Jedi magic. The man seems to have both God and science on his side. The Guggenheim wall text calls Turrell\u2019s chilled-out pleasure dome a \u201Ctemple of spirit\u201D \u2014 as in a gothic cathedral; one feels gently coerced into a sublime, monotheistic experience. Stripped of its spiritual trappings, Turrell\u2019s slow-burning phantasmagoria of light and color is good, clean site-specific fun. It's pleasures are similiar other low-stakes feel-good summer pastimes like visting an aquarium or an observatory. On the other hand, why not take Turrell at his word and go outside on a beautiful day?&amp;nbsp; James Turrell  is at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Musuem,&amp;nbsp;1071 5th Ave,&amp;nbsp;June 21\u2013September 25, 2013&amp;nbsp;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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