Through Sun Tunnels: radical subjectivity and the radiant drive

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the aesthetic stakes of light in Nancy Holt’s installation Sun Tunnels (1973–1976), emphasising their relation to subjective consciousness and time. Taking into account the question of systems Holt’s oeuvre also developed, the essay meditates on the rupture Holt’s installation in the Basin Desert in Utah provokes today, when the prevalence of social systems of immediate visibility and communication eliminate remoteness and deny unobservable, irreducibly intimate experience, or subjective time. A direct exploration of Sun Tunnels on the summer solstice 2022 grounds the essay’s proposal to seriously engage with the creative potentialities of the drive, and to furthermore consider, beyond Robert Smithson’s notion of the drive’s entropic character, a radiant or anthropic principle.

KEYWORDS:

• Nancy Holt
• Sun Tunnels
• subjectivity
• anthropic principle
• creative drive
• subjective time

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (New York: Electronics Art Intermix, 1978), film.

2 The artist Penelope Umbrico, for instance, has explored the response of taking digital photographs of sunsets in an ongoing visual work that collects, counts, prints, and assembles images of this event posted on social networks.

3 See Pamela M. Lee’s ‘Art as a Social System: Nancy Holt and the Second-Order Observer’, which highlights the role of ‘social norms and forces that construct [the] observer in the first place and that enable us to speak about the work of art as a system’ (p. 41). Lee, ‘Art as a Social System: Nancy Holt and the Second-Order Observer’, in Alena J. Williams (ed.), Nancy Holt: Sightlines (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 39–56.

4 Anne Wagner, ‘Being There: Art and the Politics of Place’, Artforum International (New York: Artforum, 2005), pp. 264–9; p. 267.

5 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone Press, 1993), p. 26.

6 Nancy Holt: Sightlines, pp. 32–3, 35.

7 In various ways, the term ‘land art’ is fraught, in light of political, environmental, and artistic movements, theories, and practices. It raises questions, in postcolonial world regions such as the United States, of indigenous land rights that weren’t widely considered in the late 1960s, at the same time as indigenous worldviews, relationships to the natural elements, and aesthetic production were invoked by Holt and other proponents of the land art movement. Related to these actions, in environmental terms, ‘land’ also evokes the prevalent, territorial relationship of humans to their surroundings after industrialisation, where land is appropriated and exploited without a concern for the consequences for others and the ecosystem. Holt and other artists in the land art movement certainly engage this problem in their art practice. Holt and Smithson, for instance, attempted to negotiate with strip-miners, while making critical statements and proposals where the artist mediated between ecologists and miners. See, for instance Smithson’s ‘Proposal (1972)’ and Holt’s oil-dripping Pipeline (1986) in the Visual Arts Center of Alaska in Anchorage, ‘partly funded by the oil industry’ (Alderson, p. 276). Lippard notes that ‘ironically, some twenty years later, oil and gas exploration was threatening the Galisteo Basin of New Mexico, where [Holt] resides, and the Utah sites of both her masterwork Sun Tunnels and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty’ (‘Tunnel Visions’, p. 68). As for plastic terms, some of the art around the world concerned with the natural expanse – during and after the time when Holt’s Sun Tunnels appeared – engages parts of the planet that aren’t strictly land, but instead bodies of water, or sky. Holt articulated earth to sky, framing the sky and sunlight in the Sun Tunnels, and reflected fragments of sky in Hydra’s Head (1975), a temporal installation by the Niagara River in Artpark, Lewiston, New York, which consisted in a constellation of holes buried in the ground and filled with water that reflected sky and recalled the actual Hydra star constellation. See Julia Alderson, ‘Chronology’, in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, pp. 265–83; Lucy R. Lippard, ‘Tunnel Visions: Nancy Holt’s Art in the Public Eye’, in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, pp. 59–71.

8 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Spring 1979), pp. 30–44.

9 The image of the land art generation as having made ‘infamously intrusive incursions into deserts’, and whose approach was generally one of ‘treating desert lands as potential canvases for creation’ (Nisbet, ‘On the Recalcitrance of the Desert Island’, p. 194) deserves, however, more nuance, for instance in dialogue with the different artworks and with Holt’s and Smithson’s writings. See James Nisbet, ‘On the Recalcitrance of the Desert Island, by Way of Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West’, in Lyle Massey and James Nisbet (eds), The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2021), pp. 185–208.

10 Many ideas were never executed due to various kinds of challenges or complications. There are instances of projects that were unrealisable from the outset, while others were halted by the artist’s death. An archive of these unrealised projects has been established in the Smithsonian for Holt and Smithson, who are both deceased. In other instances of earthworks, the development of projects conceived in the early 1970s continued until the present day. The most notorious of these are perhaps Michael Heizer’s City, which was completed and finally opened to the public in 2022. Coming from the contemporaneous Light and Space movement that emerged in California is James Turrell’s Roden Crater in Arizona, which remains in progress since he acquired the extinct volcano in 1977.

11 Nisbet, ‘Moving/West’, in Nancy Holt/Inside Outside (New York: Monacelli Press, 2022), pp. 46–67; p. 50.

12 Ibid., pp. 53–8.

13 Karen Di Franco, ‘The Horizon of the Text’, in Nancy Holt/Inside Outside, pp. 117–38; pp. 119–20.

14 Ibid., p. 120.

15 Nancy Holt, ‘Self-Interview’, in Nancy Holt/Inside Outside, pp. 80–114; p. 91.

16 Ibid., pp. 94–5, 98.

17 Holt, ‘Notes on Heating System Works’, in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, p. 134.

18 Ibid.

19 Holt, ‘Nancy Holt: Ventilation Series’, in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, p. 144.

20 Ibid.

21 Wagner, ‘Being There’, p. 267.

22 Holt, ‘Ventilation Series’, p. 144.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Willy Apollon, lecture for the École freudienne du Québec, 25 January 2020.

26 See Apollon, ‘The Subject of the Quest’, trans. Daniel Wilson, in Beauty. Penumbr(a) 2, 2022: 1–14.

27 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 19.

28 Ibid., p. 31.

29 Holt evokes Sol Lewitt’s 1969 ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ and especially the artist Ian Wilson, whose art consisted in appearing in galleries to converse and thus ‘offered the viewer a purely mental “object” for contemplation’. Cited in Williams, ‘Concrete Traces: Nancy Holt’s Speaking Media’, in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, p. 184.

30 This multiplication of the viewpoint takes the distinctive form of a split and changes of speed, experience, sensation, and orientation in Holt’s collaborative movement image works, such as Boomerang, with Serra, and Swamp, with Smithson.

31 Holt, cited in Lisa Le Feuvre, ‘Introduction’, in Nancy Holt/Inside Outside, pp. 24–37; p. 28.

32 In an interview with James Meyer, Holt explains that during her college years at Tufts, she sought lectures at MIT because she ‘was trying very hard to bridge the gap between art and science’, and that from the start of her relationship to Smithson, ‘he was central to [her] awareness of art. [They] were sharing ideas, and he was devouring [her] science books’ (p. 219). Meyer, ‘Interview with Nancy Holt. Galisteo, New Mexico, September 7–9, 2007’, in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, pp. 218–33.

33 Robert Smithson, ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’, in Jack Flam and Robert Motherwell (eds), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 100–13; p. 104.

34 Ibid., p. 103.

35 Margaret Iversen, Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), p. 86.

36 Ibid.

37 For example, see Alena Williams, ‘Introduction’, in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, pp. 18–36; p. 34.

38 Willy Apollon’s most recent metapsychology explores this perspective.

39 He mentions flying over Chiapas, from the Bonampak ruins to Agua Azul ‘in a single engine airplane with a broken window’, and driving across the Yucatan peninsula while the car’s rearview-mirrors also become displaced, offering changing images that in Smithson’s writing become, along with the sounds of the air-conditioning and roaring engines, vehicles for the manifestation of Aztec deities. Smithson, ‘Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan’, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, pp. 119–33; p. 126.

40 Michael Carrasco, ‘From Field to Hearth: An Earthly Interpretation of Maya and Other Mesoamerican Creation Myths’, in J. E. Staller and M. D. Carrasco (eds), Precolumbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica (New York: Springer, 2010), pp. 601–34; p. 611.

41 Ibid., p. 607.

42 Nancy Holt, ‘The Time Being (For Robert Smithson)’, in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, p. 254.

43 In The Limit of the Useful, Georges Bataille grapples with scientific and mythical worldviews, particularly Mesoamerican, to meditate on the tension between economic greed and a nostalgia for a lavishing glory proper to radiant bodies such as stars and nebulae. See Bataille, The Limit of the Useful, trans. and ed. Cory Austin Knudson and Tomas Elliott (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023).

44 ‘Our Sun’, NASA Solar System Exploration. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth/ [Date accessed: 5 July 2023].

45 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan III: The Psychoses (1955–56), trans. Russell Grigg, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York and London: Norton, 1997), p. 65.

46 Meyer, ‘Interview with Nancy Holt’, p. 222.

47 Holt, ‘Sun Tunnels 1973–1976’, in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, p. 81.

48 Meyer, ‘Interview with Nancy Holt’, p. 222.

49 Holt, in Lippard, ‘Tunnel Visions’, p. 70.

50 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 23.

51 Holt, ‘Sun Tunnels 1973–1976’, p. 78.

52 Ibid., p. 89.

53 Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, ‘Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson (1970)’, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, pp. 242–52; p. 242.

54 Paul Toner, ‘Interview with Robert Smithson (1970)’, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, pp. 234–41; p. 236.

55 Meyer, ‘Interview with Nancy Holt’, p. 231.

56 See Julian Myers-Szupinska on human existence ‘unraveling under the pressure of greater forces’ at the site. Myers-Szupinska, ‘Everything and Nothing: On Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels” (1973–76)’, Holt/Smithson Foundation, February 2022. https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/everything-and-nothing-nancy-holts-sun-tunnels-1973-76.

57 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964–65), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 164.

58 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 35.

59 Ibid., p. 31.

60 Holt, ‘Sun Tunnels 1973–1976’, p. 78.

61 Deleuze, The Fold, pp. 27–8.

62 Ibid., pp. 34, 35, 19, 20.

63 ‘Chandra X-Ray. New NASA Black Hole Sonifications with a Remix’. May 4, 2022. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/new-nasa-black-hole-sonifications-with-a-remix.html [Date accessed: 5 July 2023].

64 Holt, ‘Holes of Light’, in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, p. 242.