Sun Tunnels

Nancy Holt, 1973–76 · Gallery 411 · Floor 4

So, Nancy Holt has the calculations. An astrophysicist has worked out exactly where the sun should rise and set. She's picked her spot in the Utah desert. The angles are staked out. She waits anyway. Before anybody digs a foundation, she wants to see the sun do it. December, the sun comes up exactly where the math said it would. So, now they can build. Four giant concrete pipes, laid out in an open X. Eighteen feet long, about nine feet across. On paper it sounds like a highway project. It's called Sun Tunnels. Holt was one of the artists who took art out of the gallery and into the desert. What you're watching here is her film of how it got made. And it's a serious job. Steel, concrete, trucks, a crane. At times it looks like they're building something for NASA. Except this thing stays on the ground. You climb inside and watch the planet do the moving. Holt said she wanted to bring the desert back to human scale. So look through one of the tunnels. There's the horizon, with an edge around it. A piece of desert small enough to look at. She gave it a frame you could walk into. At the summer and winter solstices, the tunnels frame the rising and setting sun perfectly. It's basically like four pipes and the sun, keeping an appointment. Then there are the smaller holes. Drilled through the concrete in the patterns of four constellations. Draco. Perseus. Columba. Capricorn. Daylight comes through them and falls across the inside of the tunnel. Spots of light shifting over the curved surface as the hours pass. So. Stars, made out of sunlight. Which is a nice trick. The thing that keeps you from seeing the stars all day is now doing an impression of them. Her film ends with a note. Inside the tunnels, it is cool during the heat of the day. And there is an echo.

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