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.

 

By ARNIE COOPER

Ends of the Earth:Land Art to 1974
The Geffen Contemporary,
Museum of Contemporary Art
Through Sept. 3

Los Angeles

If you're a detail person, the first thing you'll notice about "Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974," at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is the missing start date in the show's title. Senior curator Philipp Kaiser and co-curator Miwon Kwon insist the omission was intentional. Ms. Kwon, a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that "we chose not to put a beginning date into the title of the show, since Land Art emerges through many different strains of art practices and one could locate multiple moments of its 'beginning.'"

The Noguchi Museum, NY. /Soichi Sunami

Isamu Noguchi's proposed 'Memorial to Man,' aka 'Sculpture to Be Viewed From Mars' (1947). The nose alone was to be a mile long.

You might also wonder why what the accompanying catalog calls the "first large-scale museum exhibition on Land Art" includes work only through 1974. It's not as if the genre, in which the landscape is treated as a giant canvas and the resulting artworks are not only linked to it but express it, dissolved in the mid-1970s; the noted British Land artist Andy Goldsworthy was still in college at that time. But the curators wanted to feature projects created before the Hirshhorn Museum's exhibit "Probing the Earth: Contemporary Land Projects" established the category in 1978. "This show," Ms. Kwon says, "is about early experimentation."

The cutoff date was also an important milestone for the genre. In 1974, New York's Dia Art Foundation was established to support visionary large-scale projects. Consider Robert Smithson's mammoth "Spiral Jetty," constructed in 1970 from basalt rock and earth at the Great Salt Lake's northeastern shore and donated to the Dia by Smithson's estate in 1999. The 1,500-foot-long coil was covered by water soon after its construction but re-emerged after the millennium, allowing visitors to walk between the spirals.

This brings us to the oft-asked question—repeated in an essay written by Mr. Kaiser and Ms. Kwon for the exhibition catalog—"How can you bring monumental artworks that are continuous with the earth in remote locations such as the deserts of Nevada, Utah, or New Mexico into a gallery space?"

The very simple answer: You can't. "We don't even try," Ms. Kwon says, referring to another colossal work, Michael Heizer's 1969-70 "Double Negative," two 250-foot-deep, 30-foot-wide trenches cut into the eastern edge of the Mormon Mesa, northwest of Overton, Nev. Totaling 1,500 feet in length, this immense earthwork is visible by satellite. But you won't see even one image of it at this show. Ms. Kwon says, "We don't want to engage in the common effort made by museums to represent the work with documentary photographs." Her statement is ironic given that "Double Negative" is part of the MOCA collection, a fact that inspired Mr. Kaiser to propose "Ends of the Earth."

However, as Mr. Kaiser is quick to note, every project is different. "For example, 'Double Negative' is out there and we respect the fact that you have to drive to see it," the curator says. "But Robert Smithson took a different approach, establishing the system of the site and the nonsite." Mr. Kaiser is referring to the fact that Smithson conceived of three manifestations of his piece: not only the actual spiral in Utah but a 35-minute film and an essay, both included in the show.

Despite such distinctions, Land Art is frequently equated with larger-than-life endeavors constructed in the American Southwest. But, Ms. Kwon says, "it's not all about monumental, macho guys with bulldozers and dynamite in the desert." The show, which seeks to shatter many misconceptions about the genre, has re-created numerous smaller works: Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison's 5½-by-8-foot "Hog Pasture: Survival Piece #1" (1970-1971) contains live plants—munched on by an actual pig before the opening. And Alice Aycock's "Clay #2" (1971)—another re-creation—contains 16 4-foot squares of cracked clay, inspired by Ms. Aycock's visit to Death Valley in 1969.

Another misconception is that Land Art is antiurban. Robert Morris's "Earthwork" is a 2,000-pound pile of dirt made up of earth, brick, steel and industrial scraps from the New York area. The work originally appeared in 1968 at "Earthworks," the first group exhibition of the genre, which took place at Virginia Dwan's Gallery on 57th Street. The show also presents Swedish pop artist Claes Oldenburg's film "The Hole," depicting his 1967 performance piece "Placid Civil Monument," in protest of the Vietnam War. The 10-minute film shows gravediggers fashioning a 6-foot wide, 3-foot deep hole in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Perhaps more significantly, "Ends of the Earth" aims to shatter the assumption that Land Art is chiefly an American enterprise. The show's 200 works spotlight more than 100 artists from 17 countries in South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia as well as the U.S.

Consider the two international works visible immediately upon entering the gallery. Playing directly in front of you is the Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely's 1962 antinuke film, "Study for an End of the World," a 22-minute piece shot in the desert outside of Las Vegas near an atomic-bomb site. The now grainy film, which appeared on the weekly television news program "David Brinkley's Journal," depicts choreographed explosions of junk found in scrap yards around Las Vegas.

To its left is French artist Yves Klein's "Región de Grenoble (RP10)," a 2-by-3-foot work simulating a relief map of the Earth utilizing his patented "International Klein Blue." It was "the artist's vision," Ms. Kwon says, "to claim a color that exceeds territorial boundaries and divisions." Back in 1957, Klein theorized that the entire planet was blue—an idea confirmed by the first human in space, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who declared, "The Earth is blue. How wonderful. It is amazing." No surprise then that Mr. Kaiser says Klein had declared the entire planet a work of art.

Not that all of these projects could actually be realized. The exhibit includes Jean-Michel Sanejouand's proposal for a cultural park development on top of Mount Vesuvius, as well as the Italian architectural collective Superstudio's plan for a gridded superstructure to wrap around the globe. Mr. Klein wasn't kidding about the planet as artwork, a perspective that is evident in one of the show's most provocative pieces, Isamu Noguchi's 1947 proposal "Memorial to Man." The 15-by-34-foot photograph, which appears to be of a massive earthwork sculpture in the sand, contains a face whose nose was to be one mile long. Mr. Noguchi wanted the image to be visible from space "informing others that an intelligent life form once had existed on our planet."

Ms. Kwon says: "Although we do not assert an origin point for Land Art, Noguchi's works are the earliest in the show. 'Memorial to Man,' also known as 'Sculpture to Be Viewed from Mars,' presages many aspects of Land Art as it will develop in the 1960s—the scale of his vision; using land as material and means to articulate commentary on man's relation to earth and cosmos; the importance of the extra-human viewpoint; the coming together of the primitivistic and the futuristic. Utopic and dystopic at once."

Mr. Cooper is a freelance writer in Santa Barbara, Calif.

via online.wsj.com