It does not sound particularly sublime: four massive concrete pipes, parked on a crusty desert in rural Utah. They sit at the end of miles of scruffy gravel roads, looking from a distance like abandoned infrastructure left to bake in the sun. But I had traveled nearly 2,000 miles to see them.
Two years ago, I was on the edge of the Great Salt Lake visiting Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson's much photographed work of land art. It is sited in a sublime landscape. The day I was there, the sky was full of fleecy clouds and the land was dotted with clumps of foam blown off the salty water, a band of toxic pearly pink against the horizon. Between the clouds and the foam and the heat shimmering above the exposed lake bed, I felt like I was walking in the sky. I read later that Spiral Jetty's "impressive size and deliberate shape command the surrounding landscape" but I did not find that at all. When I was there, it felt comparatively puny, a thumbprint smudge on the sublime.
Driving away, I knew I wanted to come back to see Sun Tunnels, a work of land art created by Nancy Holt, Smithson's partner in art and life. I had stumbled on a New York gallery exhibit of ancillary work she created about it some time ago, and the little flyer from the show had been sitting on a shelf behind my desk for years. Holt made the Sun Tunnels between 1973 and 1976, positioning four 18 x 9 foot hollow concrete cylinders in a cross formation that precisely frames the rising and setting sun at the summer and winter solstice. Each cylinder is pierced with a constellation of holes–Draco, Perseus, Columba, or Capricorn—allowing for shifting patterns of dappled light to be cast inside.
This month, I finally made it back to Utah, and after visiting a vanished resort and a bulbous tree of rock, driving across fields of salt where a mirage lake hovered in the middle distance, and wandering through the recreation hall of an air field where pilots were trained to drop the atomic bomb, it was time to go to Sun Tunnels.
We took the scenic route, which meant rattling down long lines of road edged by salt and sagebrush, phlegmatic cows and a few rusted-out shipping containers. Miles of wire fence scrawled between posts. We turned, then turned again, and Sun Tunnels came into view, a beige heap on a beige plain (the setting is less immediately spectacular than Spiral Jetty's). As we got closer, we gasped and laughed. Even driving up, Sun Tunnels begin to do their work, framing the landscape into eclipsing circles, waxing and waning to perfect roundness. Reach the end of a cross, where the two tunnels align, and the circles nest like an empyrean diagram: land and sky bound by rings of concrete, light, land, and shadow.
This parcelling of the view was marvelous and addictive; we walked around and around from place to place, watching the view shift. Mountains, clouds, plains, sky. I was not there at the equinox and so did not witness celestial alignment, but it was a clear day with big clouds, and as they moved across the sun, the light around and inside the tunnels shifted. Patterns of brightness cast by the constellation holes shone and faded. Eventually, I stepped inside the tunnels, overcoming years of ingrained museum conditioning to not touch the art. The air was cooler. The hollows were smooth and streaked with what looked like black tire marks. I had no idea how they got there.
On the flight home, I read Helen Georgas' 2019 essay about visiting Sun Tunnels. It captured something I had not been able to articulate, turning over why Sun Tunnels had moved me so much when Spiral Jetty had not:
Holt found the vastness of the desert overwhelming and created a sculpture to help us frame it. This is a form of empathy, even as it’s also an artist’s colonization of place. Indeed, the tunnels are both guides and havens, directing and protecting. ... [T]he tunnels are viewfinders, gently commanding us to pay attention—to the sun shifting over time; to the light spilling through the “star-holes,” spiraling around the tunnel’s interior, across my own body, changing shape, from pointed ellipses (mandorlas) to complete circles and back again; to the mountain ranges, pale violet and then black, muted or in high-relief. ... We become conscious of our ways of seeing and being. Perspective and perception shifts—am I looking at the mountains or are the mountains looking at me? Borders separating interior and exterior, immediate and distant, self and other, finite and infinite, fusion and transcendence begin to dissolve. Another revelation: Holt completed Sun Tunnels in 1976 but the work cannot really be complete without the presence of the viewer(s). We are both subject and object. In fact, we are the art, 'the field upon which patterns of the universe revolve.'
I can't wait to go back.
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I hope to get back to Sun Tunnels sooner than later, and maybe time my next visit for a sunrise. Some things I'd bring: Hyperlite Stuff Pack 30, possibly crammed with a Honcho Poncho, because desert mornings are chilly / Lenka bars (so good, b/c basically a cookie) / Freaks of Nature sun stick (kept me well-protected on both salt flats and cinder cones) / Vintage Olympus camera / Yeti 18 oz Rambler with Chug cap (my ride-or-die water bottle) / Windquester ultralight folding camping chair (on the quest for an ultralight camp chair of these that does not cost a small fortune, and this is a strong contender) / Outdoor Research Sunbriolet sun hat (big fan of OR hats) / Anntian unisex sweatshirt in print A layered over a Patagonia Capilene Cool Sun hoody (handy to strip down to as temperatures rise) / Gramicci mini check nylon pants / Quince Maldives polarized sunglasses / Vintage Taxco earrings, a la Spiral Jetty / Vintage silver bracelet, a la Sun Tunnels / Grödo organic wool socks / Norda 001A trail shoes in Cinder (spotted these on my travels; covetable).