Taking the Plunge Into a Batch of ‘Heavy Water’ : Art: French patrons who want to fully experience James Turrell’s latest work have to dive under a shaft in a pool to reach a platform where they glimpse the sky.

POITIERS, France —  On a recent day in this central French city, government officials, local politicians, art critics and journalists took the plunge for artist James Turrell.

Turrell’s artwork--which uses light, perception and space--involves the viewer’s participation, and this show was no exception. The plunge at the opening was literal.

All the officials and personalities at the opening, wearing 1920s-style, black-and-white bathing suits designed by Turrell, swam into “Heavy Water,” the show’s highlight. The temporary space--constructed at a cultural center in this city 380 miles southwest of Paris--consists of a 35x35-foot swimming pool with black-and-white walls built above ground level inside an old warehouse. Rising out of the 5-foot-deep pool--complete with filter, heating system and certified lifeguard--is a 17-foot-high, white floating shaft open on both ends.

Sunlight floods into the shaft and the pool through a cut-out square in the ceiling. Visitors who want to fully experience the space have to dive under the shaft to reach a platform where they get a glimpse of the sky.

Water in the pool reflects a fluorescent-like light that changes from blue in the morning and green in the afternoon to misty and somber at night. Turrell, always keen on participation, thinks that since the title refers to the color of the water at night, visitors should come to “Heavy Water” both during the day and after sunset.

“It’s the quality of light in the water and in the air that I’m interested in,” said Turrell. “It’s as if the light was coming out of the water.”

This is the first time Turrell has mixed water with his light-inspired work. He has designed water and light projects for a Napa Valley winery and a private home in San Diego, but they were never built.

“Heavy Water” is a white wood and sheetrock structure that took local craftsmen and sponsors three months to build under Turrell’s specifications. “Turrell is as much an engineer as he is an artist,” says Frederic Migayrou, a French art critic who is working on a catalogue raisonne of the artist’s work. Turrell may have been influenced by his French father, who also was an engineer.

A photography exhibition retraces the different building steps of “Heavy Water” and another space called “Earth Shadow,” which raised the show’s cost to more than $600,000, mostly financed by the Ministry of Culture. At the opening ceremony, Turrell was awarded the medal of Chevalier des Arts et Lettres (Knight of Arts and Letters), France’s highest cultural distinction.

“Earth Shadow,” a 450-square-foot structure, was also built inside the warehouse. Visitors enter through a dark corridor into a room dimly lit by two spotlights on each side. Very slowly, as the eyes adjust to darkness, visitors perceive a lilac-color rectangle, like a shimmering shadow, in front of them.

The rectangle is a cutout from an inclined and curved wall lit from inside with tungsten bulbs. “Your approach to the space changes the space,” Turrell explained. “As the space opens up you actually begin to see it.”

Turrell uses light and color to make visitors aware in a practical manner of their own imperfect way of seeing things. “I hope that when you see my work you are looking at yourself looking,” he explained. He wants to know what the experience of perception can do to people. “Color is just in a small area of our vision and the rest we add with the mind.”

His work with light and perception, he says, claims no spiritual pretentions nor any mystical credo. It comes from an active, experience-oriented type of artist who likes indoor life as much as he does outdoors.

In replying to a French art critic’s insistent question about mysticism and religiousness in his art, Turrell summed up his own attitude: “I’m interested in light. It’s a very direct, pragmatic, American, rather naive approach.”

It’s the same approach he used in the late ‘60s when he was producing skywritings over his native Los Angeles with painter Sam Francis. Turrell, 48, a native Angeleno, now lives in Flagstaff, Ariz., where he flies planes and gliders and skydives regularly in the area. (During the Vietnam War, Turrell combined his Quaker anti-war beliefs with his piloting know-how and flew draft dodgers past the frontiers.)

He has already doubled Lindbergh’s feat of crossing the Atlantic Ocean alone and is building four gliders for his project to follow the jet stream along 2,100 miles from California to Kansas. The four pilots, wearing pressurized suits, will use the air mountain waves behind the Sierra and the Rocky Mountains to reach speeds of up to 160 m.p.h. and altitudes of more than 38,000 feet. No one, Turrell said, has accomplished such a feat before.

Whatever Turrell does in his life is intuitively connected to his interest in light, air, perception and his experience as a pilot. “One way to understand light in the ocean of air is by flying it. Life in the air is an extension of perceiving.”

Near his home in the Painted Desert stands Roden Crater, the extinct volcano Turrell bought in 1977 from a nearby Hopi Indian reservation. Turrell has dug in roads, tunnels and rooms as part of a large, permanent free space where he can experiment with light and create a “natural sky observatory.” He hopes to be finished soon. “I certainly would like to celebrate the millennium with it,” he sighs, “and make a big party then.”

Turrell feels that he leads visitors to his spaces through labyrinth-like places--dark and somber corridors or tunnels, with precise and clear entrances, exits and roads--into a new perception and knowledge through light.

The “Irish Sky Garden” Turrell is working on is one example of the active, apprenticeship-like projects Turrell favors. It’s located in southwestern Ireland, where he found a sky different from his native California. “It’s a much more dramatic, cloudy and brooding sky,” Turrell said. The project will lead visitors around a series of individual spaces that include walks, terraces and tunnels. Each new step of the way is hidden from the following one. In the garden an old Celtic earthen structure is the center of the promenade from which the land drops gradually down to a lake.

All through the walk, and especially at the end of it, visitors will get different perceptions of the Irish sky, according to Turrell.

For many, these places have symbolic meaning as paths and steps to learning, but Turrell calmly denies it, saying, “I’m just interested in what experience does to someone.”