Art 203
September 23, 2008
Art in relation to your Discipline
Fullfilling the need to observe the sky
Nancy Holt was born in April 5, 1938 in Worcester, Massachusetts, state is which she also gained future education at Tufts University. Three years after graduating she got married to Robert Smithson.
After she gained stability in her marriage, she began her artistic career as a phographer and video artist.
The two optics and her husband are thought to have influence her later work in which are “literally seeing devices, fixed points for tracking the positions of the Sun, Earth and Stars” (Arnason). “Today Holt is most widely known for her large-scale environmental work, Sun Tunnels” (wikipedia).
Sun Tunnels can be found in the Great Basin Desert in Utah. This work is a product of Holt’s interest in the variation of intensity between the sun in the city and the sun in the desert. She wanted to make this work accessible for her followers and get others interested to come up and see.
Her work was meant to highlight everyday extraordinary events that we take for granted like the Sun’s rise and set and the summer and winter solstice. "It is a very desolate area, but it is totally accessible, and it can be easily visited, making Sun Tunnels more accessible really than art in museums … A work like Sun Tunnels is always accessible…(Saad-cook)
This magnificent work consiste of four massice concrete tunnels. The tunnels are arranged in an X configuration. “tunnels with open ends aligned with the points on the horizon where the sun rises and sets at the winter and summer solstices” (Utah Arts Counsil).
Each tunnel is set to react differently depending on the sun whether it is the summer or winter solstice or a regular sunset or a sunrise. Each tunnel highlights the beauty the only star in our gallaxy. What else more important than our source of energy can she have picked?
Even though Holt’s art was brought down to a smaller scale easier for us to see, it still takes up an area of 86 feet and can be seen from as far as one mile and a half away.
Being placed in the middle of the desert, the tunnels not only provide shelter for its viewers but once inside, we are able to see the dazzling effect of the play of light within the tunnerls. Other than highlighting the sun, these four tunnels also highlight four or the main contellations in our sky. Perseus, Columbia, Capricorn and Draco are formed by holes on the top of the tunnels.
The size of the wholes are relative to the magnitud of each and every star in the constellation. The constellation can be seen during the day as the wholes cast spots of the daylight in the inside of the tunnels, which appear almost like stars. "It’s an inversion of the sky/ground relationship-bringing the sky down to the earth" (Saad-Cook).
I was completely amazed how a love to a subject can turn landscape into a theatrical scenery in which the sun creates the casting of the light that performs a scene in the dark shadow of an unsignificant tunnel. Her work not only shrinks the scale of four of our eighty one constellations but make us think of the importance of the sun in our everyday scenes.
This work is not only emphasizing on our main source of energy but making use of it into the forcasting of the stars in the shadow. This also symbolized the brightness of the constellations that we don’t take in account every night. It is as if the artist was telling us to make the light of our sun useful as much as possible and at the same time save natural resources that will endanger our world as time goes by. Let hear her message and do something now.
Work Cited
Arnason, H.H. History of Modern Art. 5th ed. (Upper Sadlle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 2004).
Saad-Cook, Janet, Charles Ross, Nancy Holt, James Turrell. "Touching the Sky: Artworks Using Natural Phenomena, Earth, Sky and Connections to Astronomy" Leonardo 21, no. 2 (1988)
Utah Arts Council: http://arts.utah.gov/experience_arts/collections/public_arts_collection/sun_tunnels
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Holt#Biography
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