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HOLT, AND THE WORK COMPLETED BY THE SUN
On Sun Tunnels, the Great Basin Desert, and a form of authorship that ends when the frame is built.
Nancy holt’s sun tunnels photograph by Dia Art Foundation
Holt built concrete. The sun finished the work. What she made was a sculpture whose meaning belongs not to her, but to planetary time.
The town of Lucin, in the far northwest corner of Utah, has a population of roughly ten. It has no gas station. Its nearest neighbour, the town of Montello across the Nevada line, is twenty-two miles away on a dirt road. About forty minutes from Lucin, in an open stretch of the Great Basin Desert where the horizon runs as an uninterrupted circle, Nancy Holt built four concrete tunnels between 1973 and 1976. She called the piece Sun Tunnels. It is still there.
Each tunnel is a length of reinforced concrete pipe, eighteen feet long, nine feet in diameter, and two feet thick at the wall. They were cast in a yard and trucked to the site in sections, then lowered into place and aligned. The four tunnels sit in an open X across the basin floor. Two of the four are aimed at the summer solstice sunrise and sunset. The other two are aimed at the winter. On the right day, at the right hour, the sun enters one tunnel along the line of its axis. The interior of a concrete cylinder on a desert floor becomes, for a few minutes, the frame for a planetary alignment that has nothing to do with the concrete, and everything to do with the concrete being exactly where it is.
Sun Tunnels #1 (1988), a photograph by Richard Misrach
of Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels sculpture
of Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels sculpture
The work can be visited on any day of the year. Its full operation occurs twice.
Preparatory Drawing of "Sun Tunnels" Nancy Holt 1975
This is the fact that separates the piece from almost everything else in American sculpture of its period. The object is permanent. The event the object was made to register is not. For most of the year, Sun Tunnels is four concrete pipes in a desert, perfectly still. Then on two mornings and two evenings of the calendar, for about ten minutes each, it becomes what it was built to become. On the other days it is waiting.
What Holt did, in conceiving the piece this way, was define a kind of artistic authorship American art had not quite described before. Most sculpture is a record of the sculptor's decisions. The marks of the chisel, the welds, the cast, the hand. Sun Tunnels has those too: site selection, angle calibration, hole drilling, and concrete pouring. But after those decisions, the rest of the work is made by something Holt did not control and could not revise. She calibrated the geometry. The sun does the rest. She is not present at the event. What is present is her arithmetic.
Nancy Holt at Dia: Sun Tunnels
She finished the work in 1976. Three years earlier, her husband Robert Smithson had been killed in a small plane over Amarillo, surveying the site of a new earthwork he never made. Holt spent the remaining forty years of her life refusing to allow Sun Tunnels to be read as a response to this. She meant it. The piece is not a response to it. The solstice alignments are the solstice alignments. What Holt did, in the years immediately after Smithson's death, was make a sculpture whose subject had nothing to do with her and nothing to do with grief. It is about the planet she was standing on.
Nancy Holt Sun Tunnels, summer solstice in Utah
The site is not incidental. The Great Basin is one of the very few places in the continental United States where the land is flat enough, and empty enough, and unobstructed enough, that a viewer standing at ground level sees the horizon as a full, unbroken circle. Holt specifically required this condition. It is the only landscape in the country where encountering the tunnel frame is possible. She did not place the piece in the desert because the desert was available, or cheap, or romantic. She placed it there because nowhere else had the sky it needed. What remains now is an object in a specific place, doing its full operation four times a year, partial operation every day through the constellation apertures, and waiting the rest of the time for a geometry it cannot hurry.
Nancy Holt at Dia: Sun Tunnels
Someone who arrives at Lucin on the summer solstice sees the piece Holt made. Someone who arrives on the 14th of March, the 2nd of August, or any ordinary day sees the frame she built and the light moving slowly across a concrete wall, as usual.
Both are the work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Holt, Nancy. Sun Tunnels. Artforum, April 1977.
Williams, Alena J., editor. Nancy Holt, Sightlines. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011.
Holt, Nancy; Sullivan, Lucy R.; and others. Nancy Holt, Inside/Outside. Munich, Prestel, 2023.
Holt / Smithson Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Dia Art Foundation, Sun Tunnels, stewardship since 2018.