You know, even though I’ve checked out a huge amount of art over the years, in galleries and museums, I can’t claim to have really “understood” much of it, nor did I want to: I’d look at works by Picasso or Monet in much the same way I might check out a band in a club, I wanted it to hit me where I live or make my feel like a child or completely disorient me and alter my perceptions of space, time or even reality. It’s even better if you can physically go inside the art, like with Richard Serra’s 400 ton steel pieces or Carston Holler’s art slides. That’s why this new retrospective exhibit of James Turrell’s works at the Guggenheim kicked my ass so much.

James Turrell has made a career out of manipulating light or focusing on some aspect of how our eyes and brains generate images and then he rides that aspect way the hell out into new territory that can really boggle your mind. Photos (such as the one I took above) really don’t do his pieces justice, particularly as many of them are entire rooms or environments. In the piece above (called “Aten Reign”) Turrell basically created a giant work shaped like a corkscrew that fits into the famous spiral ramp at the Guggenheim perfectly (Indeed, ascending the ramp outside the piece you basically see smooth walls where the open atrium used to be). You basically enter in at the ground level and then stare up into that mesmerizing concentric image that filters and colors the light that shines down through the Guggenheim’s glass ceiling. Hidden LCD lighting slowly changes and radiates outward and, meanwhile, perspective is basically destroyed. So you’re left staring upward at this weird pulsating primordial Bardo light-source that seems to have been pulled out of our normal physical reality.

What’s it all mean? I dunno. But man is it cool.

On upper floors of the Guggenheim there are a few other rooms, some showing earlier works. One of them looked like a box of fluorescent lighting recessed into the wall, but when you got up close you saw that it was nothing but a bright square of light projected onto a surface in a dark room, tricking your brain into believing it was seeing the source of the light itself.

Now if you’re thinking that you have to be in New York to check out Turrell’s installation pieces, there are simultaneous retrospectives in Los Angeles (at the LA County Museum until April 2014) and Houston (at The Museum of Fine Arts until September). The art world has apparently decided to organize itself and promote Turrell and his unique work. It’s worth making the trip as his pieces don’t lend themselves to permanent placement, though here and there you might stumble across one (last week I found out that one of his pieces sits a few blocks from where I work, since 1986, but that I never knew about).

James Turrell himself is quite a character as he owns and operates a ranch in Arizona that contains an extinct volcano he once saw from an airplane he was piloting back in the mid 70s. Since then, he’s been transforming the volcano into an absurdly mind-bogglingly ambitious work of art called “Roden Crater” that many believe is one of the greater works any single human being has ever created.

If you want to call all this overly brainy self-indulgence on a hubristic scale, well to that I say “Who gives a shit?? On that level alone the work is interesting. But check out Turrell’s pieces in real life and you may be tempted to believe that there’s actually some “there” there, even if you can’t put your finger on what it means or precisely what it’s all about.

That’s the best art anyway, isn’t it?

Below, James Turrell talking about his work and revisiting some of his older pieces: