A 40-mile trip over "good" road (gravel, but not necessarily maintained) led us to Nancy Holt's land art piece "Sun Tunnels." Visiting most earthworks involves some sort of pilgrimage, usually into only vaguely charted territory. Our list of directions required us to keep a close eye on the odometer to be sure we hadn't missed our mark. Signs don't really work here; if they don't blow down in the wind, they are used for target practice and rendered unreadable anyhow. With "Sun Tunnels" especially, I felt that it was important to make the journey via the most remote roads we could navigate; interstate highways don't provide the intimate experience of the landscape that smaller roads do, and I wanted to try to understand why Holt chose this location, what was involved in getting there, and how remote it actually was. It turns out, it's quite remote. The high desert location she chose is flat, surrounded by mountains on all sides. Looking through the cylinders provide a perfectly framed view of the landscape - each a carefully composed painting, but in a circular frame rather than the ubiquitous rectangle. The tunnels are aligned to frame the sunrise and sunset at the summer and winter solstice of each year, but alas, we not only came on an arbitrary day - it was cloudy. So although we didn't see the work at its most active moment, we did experience a poignancy that is summed up well in this quote from Holt: “I wanted to bring the vast space of the desert back to human scale…the panoramic view of the landscape is too overwhelming to take in without visual reference points.” To me, the piece also references a mid-point between earth and sky, two fundamental influences you can't escape from here. Holt's tubes provide shade, shelter from the elements, and so that we don't forget the dome of stars above us at night, the constellations Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn cast inside the darkened tunnels via holes neatly cut into the concrete walls. It was a good visit; a four-hour contemplation resulting in an inspired feeling and, for me, an amazed awareness of the wide-open Utah desert - a seemingly primordial landscape; a fascinating place for artwork of this scale and consequence.
Links:
-A FRIEZE article describing the Tunnels and their intriguing Utah site
-An excerpt from Holt's 1977 ArtForum article about Sun Tunnels
