By ANN LANDI

Lucin, Utah

The first key to understanding "Sun Tunnels," Nancy Holt's 1976 landmark of the Land Art movement, is to find her work from that heroic and grandiose period in American art. Recently, I joined two friends at the end of their tour of Land Art monuments—an itinerary that included Michael Heizer's "Double Negative," Walter De Maria's "Lightning Field" and Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty"—and we headed north from Salt Lake City, past the dreamy blue expanse of the Great Salt Lake and miles and miles of blindingly white salt flats. Then our rather primitive directions to "Sun Tunnels" took us east on a two-lane highway through scruffy desert terrain, distantly rimmed by pale violet mountains. The only serious sign of human habitation was the town of Montello, Nev., (population 193), where the ancient postmistress gave us vague directions to the ghost town of Lucin and the TL Bar Ranch. We never did find the ghost town, but spotted signs for the ranch and discovered a small sanctuary for migratory birds. Then, alternately squinting and peering through binoculars, I spied something that looked a bit like a pair of manmade semicircular humps in the distance.

We turned left onto a dirt road and after a mile or so along a route that looked not to have seen much traffic since covered-wagon days, we arrived at four massive concrete pipes that could pass for the construction site of some alien life form. We had arrived.

Barbara Rachko

Nancy Holt's 'Sun Tunnels' (1976) sought to bring a human scale to the vast Utah desert.

Each of Ms. Holt's four tunnels is about 18 feet long and 9 feet in diameter, and as we scrambled inside, my first impulse was to pose as Vitruvian woman—arms and legs outstretched to approximate the Leonardo drawing—inside one of the apertures. The tunnels were raw-looking against the parched landscape and achingly beautiful sky, and our initial reaction was a shrug of the shoulders: "What's the big deal?" They're lined up in an open X-construction and, according to my background notes, each weighs 22 tons and rests on a buried concrete foundation; a rectangle drawn around the perimeter of the monument would measure about 68 feet by 53 feet, and the wall thickness of each tunnel is 7 inches.

So much for the dry facts. As we explored the interiors, magical things happened. The tunnels were about 20 degrees cooler inside than the midafternoon desert, and each has a different configuration of holes, from seven to 10 inches in diameter, corresponding to four different constellations—Draco, Perseus, Columba and Capricorn. The holes cast ellipses of light on the interiors, which change positions as the sun moves throughout the day (one wonders what the effect would be by moonlight). Each hole also acts like a kind of oculus—framing bits of the landscape—so that through one you might see a snatch of blue sky and scudding clouds; through another, a roundel of purplish mountains. (In intense heat, I had read in Ms. Holt's descriptions of the work, mirages can make these appear to be reflected upside down.) The larger openings at the ends also act like framing devices, so that from the interior you might have the illusion of standing inside a giant telescope. In all, the experience could prove both disorienting and intimate, affirming Ms. Holt's stated desire to "bring the vast space of the desert back to human scale."

Ms. Holt, now 74, is one of a group of artists who, in the late 1960s and early '70s, brought outsize ambitions to carving up, embellishing and taming large expanses of Mother Nature, whether tunneling into an extinct volcano (James Turrell), orchestrating celestial extravaganzas out of lightning (Mr. De Maria), or building a phantasmic city in the desert (Mr. Heizer). She is the widow of Smithson, who died in a plane crash in 1973, and arguably the only woman to have achieved prominence in the Land Art movement. She began her career as a photographer and video artist, and has long been fascinated by constellations and nature's light (for example, a work called "Dark Star Park" in a bleak stretch of Rosslyn, Va., just across the river from Washington, D.C., emerged from her musings about the deaths of stars, including our own sun).

I talked with Ms. Holt a few weeks after my "Sun Tunnels" visit to ask some questions about her monument, one of which was why she—born and raised on the East Coast—became so enamored of this particular site that she bought a 40-acre parcel in 1973. She has written about first visiting the desert in 1968, with Smithson and Mr. Heizer, and connecting with that kind of "Western spaciousness." When she found the terrain for "Sun Tunnels," she says, "I had the sense that I was perhaps walking on a piece of land that nobody had ever walked on before—the natives who lived there hundreds of years ago, I'm sure they didn't step on every piece of my 40 acres—and that was thrilling to me."

I also did not quite understand the positioning of the tunnels, and I'm still not sure Ms. Holt's explanation makes sense, but I throw it out there for the more astronomically sophisticated: The work, she says, "marks the yearly extreme positions of the sun. On the equinox, the sun sets and rises due east and due west, and then for the rest of the year, the sun is a little bit to the north or south." According to Ms. Holt, "Sun Tunnels" will yield a different experience according to the time of day. "If you get there at noon, you won't see any of the golden glow that comes through in some of my photographs, because that only happens when the sun is setting," she explains. "It's wonderful to sleep out there. Even with no moonlight, just under the stars, it's great."

And lastly, I wanted to know about some strange markings we found inside the tunnels—repeated striations, dark staccato lines. "No one's been able to give me a good explanation," she says, "but we think it may be guys shooting guns in such a way that the bullet spins around inside. You cannot keep a Western male from shooting a gun. It seems to be an impossibility." But she's rather pleased that the source of the markings remains unknown. "I kind of like the mystery."

And that's all of a piece with "Sun Tunnels" itself, which leaves one wondering what visitors hundreds of years hence will think of the work, as we wondered about the origins of the Pueblo ruins in Mesa Verde National Park a couple of days later.

But first they will have to find it.

Ms. Landi writes on culture and the arts.

 

May 29, 2012, 1:41 pm

By CAROL VOGEL

The Tate in London has received a gift of nine artworks by major 20th-century British artists, including a David Hockney, a Lucian Freud and a Rachel Whiteread.

The banker and philanthropist Ian Stoutzker and his wife, Mercedes, of Salzburg, Austria, who have been generous supporters of the arts in Britain, selected the artworks from their holdings because they fill gaps in the Tate’s collection, the couple said.

“The gift was an initiative from the Stoutzkers,’’ Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, said at a news conference on Tuesday. “They don’t receive any tax benefit from this gift but in the current climate they were very keen to make it public because they wanted to encourage others to give works to the national collection.’’

The works will go on display together at Tate Britain in October.

May 22, 2012, 4:47 PM
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has received a bonanza from one of its longtime trustees, according to a report in The Boston Globe.

Saundra Lane has given the museum 6,000 photographs, 100 works-on-paper and 25 paintings. Included in the donation is the entire photographic estate of Charles Sheeler, which amounts to some 2,500 photographs, along with the same number of images by Edward Weston. There are also 500 photographs by Ansel Adams.

The works-on-paper are primarily by American masters, including 20 drawings and watercolors by Arthur Dove, 20 by Sheeler and seven by Stuart Davis.

The gift comes more than 20 years after Ms. Lane and her husband, William, who died in 1995, gave the institution 90 American paintings and works-on-paper by artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley and Jacob Lawrence. Many of these canvases hang in galleries named after the couple in the museum’s American wing.

Cloud City, this summer’s commission for the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: May 25, 2012

Participatory art is all the rage these days, an ever-expanding category and, increasingly, a means for museums to signal their hipness to the younger, broader audiences they so desperately want to attract. Nothing says accessible like something you interact with physically.

Such art comes in many guises. It can range from relatively domestic tasks, like cooking a meal, to intricate trompe l’oeil environments that replicate or exaggerate huge chunks of reality. Somewhere in between are essentially abstract structures that sometimes involve the use of lights or mirrors, or sometimes jungle-gym-like arrangements that you navigate one way or another, walking under or through, or climbing over, perhaps pausing to sit or lie down.

Often borrowing from science, design or architecture, they might be described as fun-house formalism. It’s not all bad, but a lot of it is fairly mindless.

You could probably trace its origins partly to Richard Serra’s disorienting torqued ellipses of steel of the ’90s. Among the most extreme and certainly the least time-consuming recent iterations are Carsten Höller’s slide-through tubes. One of the most successful is Anish Kapoor’s giant, extravagantly reflective, biomorphic stainless-steel sculpture, nicknamed “The Bean,” in Millennium Park in Chicago.

Tomás Saraceno’s “Cloud City” is a particularly prominent example of fun-house formalism by virtue of its being the latest summertime commission for the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It consists of a 28-foot-high aggregate of 16 interconnected 12- and 14-sided polyhedrons the size of small rooms that are made of polished steel and clear plexiglass. By being reflective or see-through, they greatly complicate and even discombobulate the experience of the structure and everything around it.

The Met is calling the piece site-specific, and it certainly benefits from having great views to reflect, but really it is just a big, climbable piece of plop art, amenable to most any rooftop or plaza. Clearly the museum was hoping to repeat the triumph of Mike and Doug Starn’s “Big Bambú,” a looming, walk-on, bamboo-and-bungee-cord scaffoldinglike structure that enveloped the roof two summers ago like an architectural growth.

The Saraceno lacks such an organic feel, even though it resembles an enlarged model of molecules or a cluster of shiny if quite heavy soap bubbles. Walk up and through it (15 visitors at a time, with timed tickets), and it becomes adamantly Piranesian. You find yourself sorting through the elaborate, often dizzying, interpenetrating reflections of its structure, the sky, the Met, the city, Central Park. Up becomes down; the towers and facades of Central Park West seem to change places with Fifth Avenue’s.

You see yourself, or your fellow visitors, everywhere. Sometimes the modules close in on you, like little boat cabins; sometimes they resemble open cockpits, like the one Stuart Little strapped to the back of his trusty pigeon.

It is fun up to a point, like a perception-testing science experiment or a bit of walk-in Cubism expanded to the scale of an architectural folly, but it’s not very original. Futuristic architectural complexity has been better conjured by a host of other artists, including Franz Ackermann and Sarah Sze. Olafur Eliasson has orchestrated far more effective perception-twisting, walk-in environments.

But from certain points, especially in a prowlike dead-end module near the top, you’ll also enjoy some of the best views of Central Park’s green ocean of treetops ever, or at least since “Big Bambú.” They come as an immense, calming relief from the forced and busy artifice of the piece.

Richard Perry/The New York Times
Tomás Saraceno's sculpture is open to the public on the roof of the Met.

Mr. Saraceno, 39, who was born in Argentina and lives in Frankfurt, has an exhibition career barely a decade long, and a résumé that bristles with interdisciplinary collaborations. Perhaps with reason, he is widely admired as a visionary. On paper, at least, much of his work optimistically predicts a future when people will live above the earth in mutating, cloudlike cities, free of the tensions of nationalism.

In exhibitions, he often gives viewers a further taste of this vision with a variety of immense, ingeniously engineered, suspended spheres. Made of clear plastic, anchored by black elastic cords or flexible geodesic networks of cables, they can often be (gingerly) inhabited — walked through, sat in or lain on. They look astounding, hovering above the big halls that museums increasingly design to house such spectacles, and suggest a playful generosity of spirit, but they also resemble big, pillowy, transparent trampolines.

Even so, his best efforts may fit more easily into the realm of scientific or technical feats than into that of art. In 2010, with the help of a sizable team of scientists, specialized photographers and computer programmers, he built “14 Billions,” supposedly the first three-dimensional model of a black widow spider’s web — a greatly enlarged, walk-in version made with black elastic cord that was exhibited in Sweden and Britain. In photographs it looks for all the world like a crazed piece of fiber art; learning its inspiration makes it seem more appropriate to a natural history museum.

The previous year Mr. Saraceno filled the premier gallery of the 2009 Venice Biennale with an immersive installation of lacy, tethered polygonal orbs of black elastic that suggested transparent brains, exploding stars and dandelion puffballs. Its very title — “Galaxy Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web” — pinpoints the seamless slide from macro- to microcosmic that characterizes many of Mr. Saraceno’s efforts. It also evokes the view among some physicists that the structures of spider webs hold clues to the origins of the universe, further evidence of the interdisciplinary usefulness of his pieces.

It can be interesting to read about Mr. Saraceno’s art, especially the incredible effort involved in realizing it, but as you read quotations from his highly knowledgeable, skilled, enthusiastic collaborators, the works also assume a too-big-to-fail aspect. Too many people enjoy working on, bouncing on and navigating these things. They must be good.

But the cloud of admiring discussion is largely tangential to the congenial, rather ordinary structure on the Met’s roof, which is there to be considered as a work of environmental sculpture, not a hypothesis about the future or the nature of the universe.

Buzzy, kaleidoscopic effects aside, “Cloud City” is weak in the here and now: slightly creaky, devoid of any feeling for materials or sense of craft. To be fair, it departs from  Mr. Saraceno’s prevailing use of pliable plastic and the cocoonlike softness this material permits; he doesn’t seem as adept, yet, with rigidity and metal.

He has tried to soften the brittleness of “Cloud City” and to complicate its optics by stringing some of the modules with black-cord polygons similar to those that figured in his Venice piece. But these seem little more than decorative afterthoughts, Darth Vader versions of the big white snowflake that hangs every Christmas above Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.

The recurring mantra about Mr. Saraceno’s work is that it combines architecture, art and science. It does, but unequally: Art is the loser, the part he has thought through and connected to the least.

The natural world is implicitly, elaborately, endlessly interesting as is, without one iota of human intervention. Nature and the built environment affect and shape everyday life in myriad, unavoidable ways. His work underscores these truisms: nature as an endless source of inspiration, human need as a constant prod to innovation. But on the roof of the Met, at least, it largely skirts the challenges of transformation and originality that might make it of more lasting interest as art.

“Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City” is on view through Nov. 4 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.

 

• By KIMBERLY CHOU

  May 25, 2012, 8:36 p.m. ET

(Philip Montgomery for The Wall Street Journal

Ellsworth Kelly with two of his plant drawings earlier this week in New York. 'Shape and color are my two strong things,' he says.

Throughout his career, American abstract painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly—famed for panels of saturated color, grids of varying shades like organized confetti and shapes layered upon each other—has nurtured a second occupation: closely observed drawings of plants.

On June 5, 74 of these works—six decades' worth—will go on view at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw," Mr. Kelly said. "And drawing for me is the beginning of everything."

"Plant Drawings" includes his first of the genre, made in Boston and Paris in the late 1940s, as well as others made as recently as last year in upstate New York. Mr. Kelly describes his earliest attempts as "a little brutal," and his later work, refined to contour lines and "voluptuous" shapes, as more sophisticated. "When I finish, when I compare it to what I looked at, it's never as good. Nature wins," he said. "But now, 40 years, 30 years, 20 years later, I see that I was pretty good."

Mr. Kelly, 89 years old this month, spoke to The Wall Street Journal this week. Below, an edited transcript.

Wall Street Journal: When did you begin to draw plants?

Ellsworth Kelly: "Ailanthus" [1948] is the first plant drawing that I did, in Boston. Later on you'll see a drawing of just the branch that I made, 40 years later. "Hyacinth" [1949] was the first one I did when I was in Paris. It was cold and the hotels were not very well heated, so I bought a flower in the flower market and brought it into the hotel room to think about spring.

In Paris, I continued drawing constantly, people, and then when I got back to New York, I drew plants, rather. In my studio down in Coenties Slip, I had a loft with a roof. I planted sunflowers and all kinds of things on the roof. From then on, in the summers, I would continue to draw.

“'Drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.'”

Why and how do you draw?

My ideas come, and I draw. And I draw because I have to note down my ideas. Not so much in the plant drawings. I have to see my plants.

© Ellsworth Kelly/Metropolitan Museum of Art

Detail of 'Apples,' by Ellsworth Kelly

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation. And I think artists all work that way really. I'm not special. But I like plants, and I don't think anyone else draws like this, today. I'm special in that way.

How do the plant drawings speak to your relationship to shapes?

The negative space is like one of my shapes, and when you look at a drawing of mine you can call off the number [of shapes]. Matisse draws what I call the essence of the plants. He leaves a shape open. He'll do a leaf and not close it. Everybody used to say, oh, I got it all from Matisse, and I said, "Not really."

[Mine] is a different kind of spirituality. It's more a portrait of a plant. I do the contours, and I make space by overlapping. I don't want to put shading in because they're about drawing, not about shading.

Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.

Write to Kimberly Chou at kimberly.chou@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 26, 2012, on page C20 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: An Abstract Master Puts On a Plant Show.