16 DIGS.NET | 8.30.2019
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L E G E N D S | D I A A R T
H
olt may have named her installation after
the sun, but as an artist, she lingered too
long in the shadow of her more acclaimed
husband, Robert Smithson, a significant figure
in the Land Art movement. In the years after
Smithson's sudden death, however, Holt emerged
as a force in her own right, completing the career-
defining Sun Tunnels in 1976. In later years she
also finished projects in the likes of New York and
Finland, but the American West—specifically
its openness and expanse—had something of an
imaginative chokehold on Holt, appealing to her
as a canvas for the eco-minded constructions she
created meant to reframe our perception of and
connection to nature.
Holt brought her broad appreciation for science
(she studied biology at Tufts) to her most reliable
gallery, the earth, and saw in the arid environs
of Utah how Sun Tunnels would put one closer in
consciousness to that which is infinite—time and
the universe. Her vision: a life-size instrument
for charting sun and stars. It's a colossus of a
viewfinder, to be sure. Each tunnel is punctured
with holes of varying size, and these openings
form a pattern that corresponds to a different
constellation: Draco, Perseus, Columba, and
Capricorn. Sun Tunnels is also a coda of a kind to
Holt's experimentations with light, both artificial
and natural, and the work is especially transfixing
during summer and winter solstice, when the tubes
align with the rising and setting sun, putting one
into a trance in proportion to the view, which is a
magnificence rarely seen.
What is not seen is imagined: Here one considers
Holt at the site, calculating a way to express that
which is beyond human understanding but crucial
to humankind. How to translate this thought
as a physical projection? In a personal essay for
Artforum, she recalled standing in the desert,
"watching the sun rising and setting, keeping time
of the earth." Disoriented by the emptiness, Holt
approached the project as one might a compass, a
means of direction. "Sun Tunnels," she explained,
"can exist only in that particular place—the work
evolved out of its site." In the end, it is a monument,
in a monumental place, to the cornerstones of
monumentality itself.
diaart.org
NANCY HOLT'S SUN TUNNELS IS A SIGNIFICANT WORK OF
LAND ART THAT NODS TO THE VASTNESS OF THE UNIVERSE
AND THE DIMENSIONS OF TIME.
PHOTOGRAPHS: NANCY HOLT, SUN TUNNELS, 1973–76.
GREAT BASIN DESERT, UTAH. DIA ART FOUNDATION
WITH SUPPORT FROM HOLT/SMITHSON FOUNDATION.
© HOLT/SMITHSON FOUNDATION AND DIA ART
FOUNDATION/LICENSED BY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS
SOCIETY (ARS), NY. PHOTO: NANCY HOLT, COURTESY
HOLT/SMITHSON FOUNDATION
