Holt/Smithson Foundation Presents: Sun Tunnels
Still from Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (1978), Digitized 16 mm film, Color, sound, Duration: 26 minutes 31 seconds, © Holt/Smithson Foundation, licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York. Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Through April and May 2020 Holt/Smithson Foundation is inviting the public to join them for a series of Friday Films.
Between 12 pm on Friday and 12 pm on Saturday (Mountain Time [MST], the time zone of the Foundation’s home base in New Mexico), every Friday in April and May, the foundation will present a moving image work by Nancy Holt and/or Robert Smithson on Vimeo and IGTV.
The third Friday Film is Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1978), introduced by Lisa Le Feuvre, Holt/Smithson Foundation’s Executive Director. Between 12 pm on Friday, April 17, and 12 pm on Saturday, April 18, MST, the film will be accessible here.
© Holt/Smithson Foundation
Sun Tunnels is an approximately twenty-five minute film showing the making of Holt’s eponymous work Sun Tunnels, which is located in the Great Basin Desert, Utah. This earthwork joined Dia Art Foundation’s collection in 2018, with support from Holt/Smithson Foundation.
The work is composed of four concrete cylinders that are 18 feet in length and 9 feet in diameter. Arranged in the landscape in an open cross format, the tunnels are perforated with a constellation of small apertures that allow patterns of light to enter each tube. As Holt describes in a 1977 essay published in Artforum, the tunnels mark “the yearly extreme positions of the sun on the horizon—the tunnels being aligned with the angles of the rising and setting of the sun on the days of the solstices, around June 21st and December 21st.”
The film begins with construction of the tunnels including transportation to and installation of the work in the Great Basin Desert. Holt noted Sun Tunnels involved thirty-two coworkers—two engineers, an astronomer, ten concrete pipe company workers, one road grader, and a helicopter pilot. In the film she demonstrates the skill of, and her great respect for, the labor involved in creating this sculpture. After showing the completion of Sun Tunnels, the film features views of the work from the air and a nearby road, the sounds of construction replaced by rotating helicopter blades and the engine of a moving car. The film closes with near silence, providing stunning footage of the changing sun and light in the tunnels on the solstices. The end titles note “inside the tunnels it is cool during the day and there is an echo.” In its portrait of an earthwork, this film illustrates Holt’s precise process and careful attention to site, place, time, and perception.