The sun at the end of the tunnel
"Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-1976" by Retis is licensed with CC BY 2.0.
The very first coffee hour is the best to contemplate what you’ve missed.
I am home —naturally— making a latte and remember how exciting it was waking up early to travel downtown to watch an exhibition or many more. Strolling around bookshops and have a casual rest in a park. The thrilling of live art, this overwhelming experience that never lost its charm for me and could last for hours. And then the comfort of a late coffee and lunch at the museum’s or gallery cafe, writing about it. I knew well it was a luxury, but now this past luxury seems unreachable.
The daily routine has been shrunk to the basics. I spend more time with my family, and I am so thankful and happy about it, but sometimes I even miss my quiet times at home, silent mornings with only music, coffee and study.
Those endless house hours, certainly, gave me a lot of things. I found time for everyday yoga and literature that I had missed so much the last two years. Listened to many and bizarre playlists on Spotify. I spoke online with friends I haven’t seen for years and years. Cooked recipes I would never dare to. I took seminars and followed exciting online workshops. I found time for research on topics I was always interested in but never available. I wrote a lot.
Some days ago, for example, I discovered by chance a woman artist I (almost) didn’t know at all, and I am feeling bad about it as I certainly should. Of course, not knowing her is not entirely my fault.
As Robert Smithson was one of the artists I have studied a lot through my PhD research, the name Nancy Holt had passed before me several times. But not as an artist. I had found her as Smithson’s wife, collaborator, archivist and keeper of his legacy. Yesterday, searching about women land artists, I ran into her work and was amazed.
Sun Tunnels (1973-1976), one of her most famous artworks, installed in Utah’s Great Basin Desert (one more reason for visiting the peculiar and mysterious state of Utah), is a dream piece consisting of gigantic concrete cylinders (9ft-in-diameter, 18ft-long). They are placed in the desert in a constant conversation with earth and sky, with the sun and the stars. Those magical tunnels, oriented in such a way so as to align to the sun at the winter and summer solstices and drilled with precision to frame the constellations Draco, Perseus, Columba and Capricorn, seem like trying to capture the essence of cosmos through indiscernible earth movements. Like monuments, temples or ruins, they perform their dialogue with time through their weathering and resilience. Besides natural challenges, they had to confront graffiti and bullets (apparently, American people obsession with guns is present everywhere).
(Recently, the Dia Art Foundation bought the piece and decided to clean and conserve it. Sadly, I should say, as I think that works like these should be left to their natural entropy, following the earth flux and destiny and gently compete with the landscape around them. After all, Holt was a Buddhist and entropy was Smithson’s favourite concept —mine also— and Holt’s work never stopped to open conversations with Smithson’s artistic philosophy.)
The tunnel concept is all around us these days, as well as the dark/light metaphor. I feel that life seem every day more and more like a long dark tunnel, us following groaning the light at the far end of it. It is not just the pandemic. It’s this spate of patriarchal demonstrations through abuse of power and violation of human rights of so many kinds, all over the world. I feel it in Brexit and the UK’s awful handling of Covid19 emergency, in the late awful revelations in the sector of culture in Greece that the recent Greek #metoo enabled and the shameless law encroachments that take place regarding Dimitris Koufontinas’ hunger strike, in the uncountable women disappearing and femicides worldly every day —apart from the harassments that are disclosed—, in what is happening in Myanmar, in the major environmental crisis we go through, in racistic, totalitarian and inhuman behaviours that seem to multiply day by day dismantling every sense of utopia, draining hope.
Of course, there are some moments of light. The grand #metoo and #blacklivesmatter movements, Trump’s outvoting, Jacinda Ardent’s politics, Greta Thunberg’s rallies.
This is the light we follow. And maybe that is why I felt so moved by Nancy Holt’s specific work, leading toward sun and life in that vast desert, reminding us that nature is alive even when she seems idle, that the light is waiting for us always out there.
Of course, travelling from Europe to Utah to admire them seems like science fiction at the time (if not at any time) - however, Holt didn’t create only land art. Her meditative and earth-linked creative practice has been manifested in numerous means. She has been a writer, a photographer, a cinematographer, a sound artist. And through all her works, you can feel her wit and humour. Among her concrete poetry, there is a poem like a crossword; among her photographs, a series of photos depicting signs with the word ‘sun’ on. Among her indoor installations, there is a bright pipeline wandering in and out of the gallery space creating shapes.
Until some years ago, a few more great women artists who were lucky/unlucky to be famous men artists’ wives were lost deep into art history’s underground chambers. Lee Krasner and Elaine De Kooning, among others. Fortunately, things have changed a lot during our century.
In 2021 Holt’s work will be exhibited at Lismore Castle Arts in Ireland, and she will also be the subject of a major retrospective at Bildmuseet, Sweden, in 2022. Hopefully, until then, we will have met a part of the sun at the end of the pandemic tunnel and have the opportunity, at least for the small luxury, of revisiting art galleries.