Journeys through Space from Land(art): Sun Tunnels
A loosely connected group of artists came about during the late 1960’s who called their work “land art.” The piece most frequently shown as an example of this movement is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. He tragically died at the age of 35 in a plane crash surveying land for a new earthwork. He was survived by his partner Nancy Holt, a fellow artist whose work with her partner during his installations introduced her to the landscape of the American West. “Holt belongs to a generation of intrepid artists who emerged out of minimalism and conceptual art in the late 1960s and began constructing enormous earthworks in the American West. Rather than presenting simulacra of the landscape, they invited us to engage directly with the great outdoors.” [1] Nancy Holt’s 1976 Sun Tunnels are a site-specific installation in the Utah Desert consisting of four concrete tunnels aligned with the rising and setting sun of the winter or summer solstice. Bored into the side of the massive tunnels are holes which correspond to the stars in several constellations, “Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. The sizes of the holes vary relative to the magnitude of the stars to which they correspond. During the day, the sun shines through the holes, casting a changing pattern of pointed ellipses and circles of light on the bottom half of each tunnel.” [2] Each tunnel is 18 feet long and has an outside diameter or 19 ½ inches. Sun Tunnels investigates the human body’s connection to the earth and cosmos and interrogates our place in the environment through built structure.
The work started as a conception in 1973 and it wasn’t until she bought the land in 1975 and spent a year in Utah consulting several experts in engineering, astronomy, and art was it completed. She investigates the connection between earth and cosmos by creating holes to represent constellations in her tunnels as well as aligning them on an axis that allows the summer and winter solstice sun to rise through the end of the tunnel. “By marking the yearly extreme positions of the sun, Sun Tunnels indicates the “cyclical time” of the solar year. The center of the work becomes the center of the world. The changing pattern of light from our “sun-star” marks the days and hours as it passes through the tunnel’s “star-holes.”’ [3] In some ways she creates a camera obscura or lens through which to view the landscape and astronomical goings on. Experimenting with cut-outs and hoops in her New York apartment, only the manipulation of light changes the concrete forms in the barren landscape.
She connects this to the past and future through a sense of timelessness. “The rocks in the distance are ageless; they have been deposited in layers over hundreds of thousands of year. “Time” takes on a physical presence. Only ten miles south of Sun Tunnels are the Bonneville Salt Flats, one of the few areas in the world where you can actually see the curvature of the earth.” [4] They are neither distinctly modernistic nor trying to appear ancient. In a broad sweeping landscape where no agriculture is possible she has placed something distinctly man-made but still of the Utah valley’s rock and neutral palette with the concrete construction. This piece has drawn parallels to Stonehenge for its aesthetic of large shaped rocks in a natural landscape. It utilizes ancient technology of astronomy with modern construction techniques and engineering.
The tunnels are meant to be interacted with. The land that Sun Tunnels rests on is a large flat valley near a sparsely populated ghost town in Utah. The construction of the piece began with a paving company building out the road to where the tunnels would start. They are large enough to walk in and around. The tunnels themselves are regularly several degrees cooler inside than the surrounding desert and produce an echo inside of them. “She was a pioneer in emphasizing land art’s relationship to the human body and human reality, a stance also adopted by many others at the time and since.” [5] The sense of scale in the environment is challenged in this piece. The environment, mountains, rocks, sky are framed in a new way by viewing the tunnels in the wide landscape. Of the piece her intention was “to bring the vast space of the desert back to human scale. I had no desire to make a megalithic monument.” [6] Instead, she has created a focal point in the vastness of the desert valley. She and her partner Smithson rejected any kind of signage for their pieces, so the journey to see them and the discovery of the piece is part of its process.
Land art serves to dramatize the existing environment. “Holt wrote a letter in protest of the lease of land adjacent to the Sun Tunnels for oil and gas development. ‘BLM has cavalierly ignored my astronomical artwork, ‘Sun Tunnels’ (1976) in deciding to offer this parcel for oil and gas lease,’ she wrote. ‘Any development in the vast, flat, open space in this area would be seen for miles and would impact a visitor’s enjoyment of ‘Sun Tunnels.’” [7] This interrogates the role of humans in art viewing, she takes the work out of the gallery and into nature. We are responsible for our viewing and engagement with art and the environment. “Nothing” surrounds Sun Tunnels, there is a single ghost town and it is several miles away from anything resembling a town. Yet, it can only be here that the piece exists, with its customized positioning and relation to the “nothingness” surrounding it. “So by putting Sun Tunnels in the middle of the desert, I have not put it in the middle of their regular surroundings. The work paradoxically makes available, or focuses on, a part of the environment that many local people wouldn’t normally have seen.” [8] She has made “nothing” a destination and challenged viewers to notice the minutiae of their surroundings to engage with the environment through a new lens.
[1] Sooke, Alastair. “PIPE DREAMS: As an Exhibition of the Artist Nancy Holt’s Photographs Comes to London, Alastair Sooke Travels to the Utah Desert in Search of Her Monumental Sun Tunnels, a Modern-Day Stonehenge Cast in Concrete Tubes.” Telegraph Magazine (2012): 52–.
[2] Holt, Nancy. “Sun Tunnels” ARTFORUM vol. 15 no. 8 (Aprill, 1977)
[3] IBID
[4] IBID
[5] Cheetham, Mark. Landscape into Eco Art : Articulations of Nature Since the ’60s, Penn State University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=6224482.
[6] Holt, Nancy. “Sun Tunnels”
[7] Shapland, Jenn. “Nancy Holt.” Southwest Contemporary, April 1, 2018. https://southwestcontemporary.com/nancy-holt/.
[8] Holt, Nancy. “Sun Tunnels”
Works Cited
Cheetham, Mark. Landscape into Eco Art : Articulations of Nature Since the ’60s, Penn State University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=6224482.
Holt, Nancy. “Sun Tunnels” ARTFORUM vol. 15 no. 8 (Aprill, 1977)
Shapland, Jenn. “Nancy Holt.” Southwest Contemporary, April 1, 2018. https://southwestcontemporary.com/nancy-holt/.
Sooke, Alastair. “PIPE DREAMS: As an Exhibition of the Artist Nancy Holt’s Photographs Comes to London, Alastair Sooke Travels to the Utah Desert in Search of Her Monumental Sun Tunnels, a Modern-Day Stonehenge Cast in Concrete Tubes.” Telegraph Magazine (2012): 52–.