The Brooklyn Rail

In the rugged landscape of Utah’s Great Basin Desert, four massive concrete cylinders lie in a precise X-shaped formation. Maybe, at first glance, they suggest industrial pipes abandoned on an empty plain; further contemplation might have the viewer recalling the monoliths of Stonehenge. Their sheer immensity raises the question often asked about the Stonehenge boulders: how did they arrive at this remote site? Sun Tunnels (1973–76) was the culmination of years of research, planning, labor, and collaboration on the part of Nancy Holt, a pioneering figure of the Land art movement. The erudite exhibition on view at Sprüth Magers, Echoes & Evolutions: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels outlines the narrative of how Sun Tunnels was birthed, using the artist’s drawings and schematics, models, photography, film, and ephemera to tell its story.

The idea came to her while experimenting with projected light in her New York studio. By putting paper cutouts and “Locators” (adjustable steel pipes she used to examine different light configurations) at her windows, she began tracking the movement of the sun on an intimate scale. Two of these Locators are installed in the gallery’s windows, allowing the viewer a sense of what Holt herself experienced in her studio. Collages composed from photos of early 1970s New York street scenes, sheathed by her cutouts, are also on display. Seeing the Locators (both dated 1971) and the collages (both dated 1972) is instructive in understanding how her conception of the Sun Tunnels began to take shape.

Holt bought the land on which Sun Tunnels rests in 1974, after a long search for an ideal location—flat terrain, encircled by a mountain range—for what she envisioned. In the desert, the four cylinders align precisely with the rising and setting sun at the summer and winter solstices. On those days, rays beam directly through the tunnels and bounce off their surfaces, illuminating them with a celestial glow. Beyond the solstice alignments, each tunnel is drilled with its own, specific pattern of holes. These orifices correspond to four different astral constellations—Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn—that are visible as projections inside the tunnels, an effect of the way the natural light of the sun and moon radiate through them. Holt selected these four according to a set of stringent criteria—including magnitude of the stars and their number and position in the composition of the constellation—so that their alignment with the concrete shafts would meet her intention. Standing inside a tunnel, one can gaze outwards to the night sky and constellations above, the windswept land, and through holes aligned with apertures of the other tunnels, a perceptual experience Holt calculated.

Her exactitude in realizing the complex structures that make up Sun Tunnels was not without precedent. Throughout the exhibition, traces of her research and trials are discernible. A number of photo collages line the walls, each composed of images of cardboard tubes pierced with holes. Holt made these test models so she could understand how different configurations would filter light. Installed at the center of the exhibition rests Model for Sun Tunnels (undated), which features small, wooden versions of the vessels that translate her photographic observations into three dimensions and anticipate what would eventually come to fruition in the desert.

If all of this sounds highly technical, a documentary film and photographs Holt made during and after the assembly of Sun Tunnels reconnect the viewer with the veritable awe it inspires, and with the awe Holt herself experienced, and translated to the work. Engaging multiple scales of experience, the artist drew warmth, humanity, and even an erotics from these sterile hunks of concrete. Meditating on Sunlight in Sun Tunnels (1976), a set of thirty prints Holt made after the work was completed, one can’t help but dwell on the nature of a tunnel itself—a conduit, a portal, an entity that is our first encounter with the wider world as we leave the mother’s womb. In the film Sun Tunnels (1978) that plays in the darkened back room of the gallery, a drill bores sensually into concrete, marking the smooth surface with the first perforation. We witness Holt supervising a league of men as they guide her tunnels to their final resting places in the sand, and we sense the desert expanse itself, an austere, lonely, yet intoxicating landscape rimmed in the distance by towering mountain ranges.

Echoes & Evolutions strives to convey all that Holt put into this feat of Land art—a work that turns its back on any sort of commercial viability but manifests in the viewer a sense of humility and wonder at our connection with and place in an infinite universe. “Words and photographs of the work are memory traces, not art. At best, they are inducements for people to go and see the actual work,” Holt wrote of the Sun Tunnels in 1977. While it is certainly not a substitute for a direct encounter with the Sun Tunnels, this show elucidates a pivotal moment when one artist expanded the possibilities of sculpture by integrating it with the body, the landscape, and the cosmic world.