The artist Doug Wheeler tells two stories, both having to do with light, that go a long way toward explaining why he is so revered by many fellow artists — as a visionary and a relentlessly stubborn perfectionist — and also why his work has been seen by so few American artgoers over the last few decades, particularly those in New York.
The first story takes place at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where several years ago Mr. Wheeler created a complex installation he calls an “infinity environment,” featuring a light-saturated, all-white, rounded room with no corners or sharp angles, rendering viewers unable to fix their eyes on any surface. It invokes an experience of light itself as an almost tactile presence. As Mr. Wheeler continued to tweak the piece, a small boy walked up to the room and hesitated before entering, putting his hands in front of him because his senses told him that the square entrance was a wall, not simply a wall of light flooding his vision.
“I thought, ‘O.K., I can stop worrying so much and being mad about them letting people in too early,’ ” Mr. Wheeler said recently over coffee at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, where he has just opened his first solo New York gallery show at the age of 72, remaking a cavernous interior into a kind of immaculate white vacuum tube — the city’s first infinity environment.
The second story he tells happened in the late 1960s, in a former dime store in Venice, Calif., the studio where he first began creating the ethereal, experiential work that made him a founder of the so-called Light and Space movement, along with fellow West Coast artists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Mary Corse. One afternoon Mr. Wheeler welcomed a couple of prominent dealers from a New York gallery — “who shall remain nameless,” he now says tersely — to show off a new work using phosphorus paint and lights to create the sensation of a mistlike plane bisecting part of the studio.
The dealers walked right past the piece without noticing it, making a beeline to some earlier, popular light works that hung on the walls like paintings. “I just thought what idiots they were for not seeing it,” he said. “Now maybe it wasn’t powerful enough. Maybe it was just my arrogance. But at that time I didn’t think of it that way.”
“What they expected to see, they saw,” he added, “and then they left.” He bid them a friendly goodbye and never did business with the gallery again.
His career has been punctuated by such decorous but epic refusals. He has said no to major museum exhibitions, because of his doubts that the works would be shown in the way they were intended. In a career of more than four decades he has never had a full-time American gallery represent him except for a brief, troubled turn with the Los Angeles dealer Doug Chrismas. He even once turned down Leo Castelli, at the time the most powerful dealer in the country, because he felt that Castelli wanted to push him to crank out versions of older works, from which “I’d already learned everything I wanted to learn.” (“I heard he told people he thought I was crazy,” Mr. Wheeler said.)
The effect of this deeply principled approach has been that his work has been seen mostly on the West Coast and in Europe, where the Milanese collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, who died in 2010, and his wife, Giovanna, were enthusiastic supporters. Through the Panza collection, Wheeler pieces are now in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Hirshhorn in Washington. But sightings of the work on the East Coast have been few and far between, partly because of the complexity of their installation.
For several years in the mid-1970s Mr. Wheeler grew so frustrated with the art world that he took up screenwriting to support himself, so he could keep making his art his way. (The one result that made it to the screen was a 1978 television trucker movie, “Steel Cowboy,” with James Brolin and Rip Torn, of which Mr. Wheeler says, gratefully, “There was nothing of my work left in it at all.”)
By the ’80s he had left Los Angeles for Santa Fe, N.M., where he still works. When David Zwirner — whose gallery has dug deeply in recent years into the works of Minimalist and ’60s and ’70s West Coast artists — included a Wheeler piece in a show several years ago, Mr. Zwirner said, he considered Mr. Wheeler a “kind of mythical figure.”
“And then we get an e-mail from Doug Wheeler — he exists! — and he was telling us we’d shown the work the wrong way, that it was not just a wall piece,” he recalled. “We’d screwed it up.” But despite the infelicitous introduction he began to pursue Mr. Wheeler and offered to support him in the creation of an infinity environment in New York. (Besides the version in Bilbao, Mr. Wheeler has made works like it only two other times, in 1975 in Milan and in 1983 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.)
Mr. Zwirner said: “I told him: ‘We’ll give you carte blanche. I mean, we have to see a budget, but once we sign off on it, it’s your baby.’ ”
For the last several weeks this baby, made from precisely curved and fitted fiberglass wall sections, special paints and resins and an elaborate combination of lights, has been growing clandestinely inside one of the Zwirner spaces on West 19th Street, behind papered-over windows. The exhibition, titled “SA MI 75 DZ NY 12,” a reference to the initial 1975 work, will be the most expensive single installation ever mounted by the gallery, said Mr. Zwirner, who had been forewarned.
At the beginning, Mr. Wheeler said, he told Mr. Zwirner: “You know it’s really hard to do that kind of piece, don’t you? It’s very hard to create absence.”
Arguably more so than any other Light and Space artist Mr. Wheeler has made the quest to create a sense of absence — to enable people to perceive space and light in ways they normally cannot — a primary obsession. And his explorations of it were deeply influential in the formation of the loose movement of Los Angeles artists who began to work with light.
“Doug was really the first one out of the box with a lot of these ideas, doing things very early on,” said the painter Ed Moses, who experimented with light environments himself in the 1960s. It was a heady, competitive time. “We were all friends,” Mr. Moses said, “but we all wanted to get the first bite of something, not be the guy who got the second bite.”
In subsequent years, he said, he believed Mr. Wheeler’s role as a pioneer had been diminished in Mr. Irwin’s and Mr. Turrell’s favor, perhaps owing partly to the difficulty of both the work and the artist. “Even the museums wouldn’t often do the kinds of things Doug needed them to do, either because of money or because he was just so exacting,” Mr. Moses said. “He got very despondent about the whole thing, but he just kept on working.”
In person Mr. Wheeler can seem at times like a low-key, latter-day New Mexico cowboy, with flowing white hair and Western-accented belts. But his resolve flashes through quickly, particularly in his reticence about being interviewed. (He said he managed to go more than a couple of decades without finally sitting for one again in 2008.) In talking about his work he is painstakingly methodical, particularly in trying to emphasize what it is not.
Works like the infinity room — which over about a half hour will gradually cycle from light that mimics dawn up to full daylight and then down to dusk — are not designed with the end purpose of creating illusion or destabilizing perception. The works are trying instead to use those things as tools to enable an experience of light and space in a much more direct way than is normally possible, “without,” as Mr. Wheeler once wrote, “the diminishing effect of a learned associative response to explain away” the essence of what is being seen.
Growing up in rural Arizona, he said, he sometimes had such visceral experiences of light and space, almost Proustian in their power. They often occurred with his father, a doctor who became well known for barnstorming the state in a Stagger-wing Beechcraft to attend to patients in remote areas. In the air above the desert, the sky seen between massive cloudbanks could take on an otherworldly aspect.
“It created a torquing in space, a tension that I think is something my work has always tried to achieve,” said Mr. Wheeler, who also became a pilot and flies a 1978 Cessna. “When I was growing up, the sky was everything for me.”
Mr. Wheeler’s family life was often tumultuous. There were times when his father would leave him for days with people he barely knew while he flew off to see patients. “That really did a number on me,” he said. He became headstrong and refused baptism in his family’s faith, Seventh Day Adventism, “because I thought that if I got baptized, it would change me, and I’d be like all these other people.” (Today he divides his time between Santa Fe and Los Angeles with his wife, the film producer Bridget Johnson.)
He first began to find himself at Chouinard Art Institute, later the California Institute of the Arts, one of the most important crucibles of postwar Los Angeles talent, with students and faculty like Mr. Irwin, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari. “I think I was actually pretty crazy in those days,” Mr. Wheeler said. “When I started school, they made me go see the shrink in order to keep my scholarship.”
Like almost everyone he knew at the time he started out as a painter and made “some ugly, horrible stuff for a while.” But it was a series of early paintings — large, mostly white canvases with polished-looking, bulletlike shapes in the corners — that began to lead him to his work with light. “Looking at them I started to realize that what was really important was the space between things,” he said. This led by the late 1960s to works known as light encasements, squares of monochrome plastic with neon lights embedded along the edges, intended to be installed in white rooms with coved corners.
The curator Germano Celant, who included Mr. Wheeler in an influential exhibition of environment-based art at the 1976 Venice Biennale, said in an interview that he considered the kinds of immersive installations that Mr. Wheeler began to gravitate toward to be radical. “He was avoiding representation of any kind,” said Mr. Celant, who is helping to compile a monograph for the Zwirner show. “There was nothing to see — only light. I think it was a big shift.”
It has always been a shift as unearthly to experience as it is difficult to achieve, at least to Mr. Wheeler’s standards. One day this month, as he surveyed painters slowly turning the inside of the installation a blinding, pristine white, he complained gravely that the floor had not been made the way he had wanted and, toward the end of an interview, he excused himself hurriedly with an exasperated look, saying, “I’m sorry, but I have a real crisis on my hands now.”
Mr. Zwirner, the dealer, said that he hopes to represent Mr. Wheeler permanently, but that he will not allow himself any firm expectation of doing so until the show is over and Mr. Wheeler is happy. “I’m treading very lightly,” he said. “I guess I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”