Dia Art Foundation<\/a> acquired\u00a0Sun Tunnels<\/i>\u00a0with support from the Holt-Smithson\u00a0Foundation. Raisa Rexer spoke with curator Kelly Kivland in December 2018 about the acquisition, its place in the Dia collections, and the foundation\u2019s approach to the stewardship of its land art sites.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nHow did the idea for this come about? Tell me about the process of deciding to acquire it.
\n<\/b><\/span>Our relationship with Nancy began in 1999, when she gifted Robert Smithson\u2019s Spiral Jetty<\/em> to Dia. That helped cement an ongoing relationship with Nancy thereafter. When her exhibition \u201cSightlines\u201d opened at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, a group of us went out to celebrate that occasion. I had a chance to meet her then, and to visit Sun Tunnels<\/i> with her, and we remained in communication with each other.\u00a0 <\/span>I was fairly new to Dia at the time, but there was already some interest in other land art works that Dia might be able to become the owner of, given that we are so poised as stewards of other sites. When she passed away in 2014 we then began thinking quite seriously about the idea of acquiring the work, and decided it was a priority. It took a few years, mainly because of the pace of moving things from her estate to the Holt-Smithson Foundation. That was finalized in summer of 2017 and then thereafter we sped into high gear to acquire the work from the Holt-Smithson Foundation. We acquired Sun Tunnels<\/i> as well as the room installation currently on view in Chelsea [through March 2019] called Holes of Light<\/i>. Holes of Light<\/i> was realized around the time that Holt was starting to think about Sun Tunnels<\/i>, so they have real resonance with each other; one is an interior installation utilizing light and shadow and directionality, and the other an exterior iteration.<\/p>\nWhat is it about Nancy\u2019s work that speaks to you, personally and in your role as a curator? What makes her work timely?
\n<\/b><\/span>My interest in Nancy\u2019s work really started for me with meeting her and realizing the breadth of her work through \u201cSightlines.\u201d I had known a bit about her from some of her video work but had never had really a chance to see her work\u2014I don\u2019t think many people did\u2014until \u201cSightlines.\u201d In the 1960s, Nancy worked in audio, video, photography and concrete poetry. All of this work was exploring space and location, the idea of interior and exterior and her own place in and movement through these sites and how she remembers them and documents them, and that for me was quite interesting. Then, in 1971, she moved to sculpture with her \u201cLocator\u201d works, sculptures made from plumbing pipes. And shortly thereafter she began making room installations and then right after that she started work on Sun Tunnels<\/i>.<\/p>\nLike other artists of her generation, she was preoccupied with landscape and sight and the nuances of observation, but her approach was very different. Many people, of course, have written about the viewer and the agency of the viewer in minimalist work and post minimalist work, but for Nancy it was imperative to the experience of her art. Her work is very rigorous\u2014she was a biology major at Tufts, and she\u2019s thinking with that background\u2014but then there\u2019s a sense of play and agency and freedom that she allows with these works. With the \u201cLocators,\u201d for example, you look through them but each and every person will see something slightly differently. In the room installations, the same is true. People will walk around them and really have their own experiences, and their own time with them, their own duration within them.<\/span><\/p>\nShe\u2019s so timely right now not only because she\u2019s was a woman working prolifically in the later twentieth century but because of the combination of the scale of her work and the subtleties of her approach. Her room size installations in 1973 and 1974 are huge. They take over an entire room, create a room within a room. It\u2019s such a bold move for an artist in the early 1970s, a woman artist, to decide at that time on the occasion of her gallery show in New York to create a large room that essentially is playing with emptiness, with light and mirrors and reflection and shadow, instead of filling it with objects. For the current generation of artists who are working this way, who are really thinking about how both interior and exterior sites influence the artist or how the artist responds to a site in making work, she is of real value, because she strips this conceptual basis of its object thinking and instead thinks about how to create an experience. She does so in the simplest terms, but with great rigor.<\/span><\/p>\nTo what extent do you think her unique approach is conditioned by her gender and the context of working in a very male-dominated field at the time?
\n<\/b><\/span>There are so many female artists [of the period] who were somewhat under-recognized, and were making work that may well have been a response to the dominance of male artists.<\/p>\nTo be frank, I do see this as a counter to the Mesolithic structures being built by men. That\u2019s not to say that Sun Tunnels<\/i> is not that; she creates huge structures in the desert and orchestrates the whole endeavor with a whole team of men\u2014engineers, astronomers, construction workers. But although her structures are large, they envelop a body, they are very much about paying attention to the natural rhythms of the day and the light that passes through them and the landscape that they frame. There\u2019s an element of the mythical in the way in which she looks above and thinks about the greater powers, both in terms of how they guide our experience of time and how they influence our perception of our environment. The light, the passing of time, the motion of the sun and the moon and the position of the stars\u2014she\u2019s always thinking about tying our personal experience on earth to these greater processes above. The Sun Tunnels<\/i> are more or less life-size \u201cLocators,\u201d but experienced with your body instead of your eye. They take the viewer\u2019s perspective from the interior of the tunnel outward. In many ways, she\u2019s asking you to look beyond the object. <\/span><\/p>\nHow does Dia understand its stewardship for this piece, practically and philosophically?
\n<\/b><\/span>As stewards and owners Dia\u2019s primary responsibility is securing access to the site and understanding how we can be involved in the sustainability of the work and the greater environment. That doesn\u2019t just mean the physical site and object, it\u2019s also about local community efforts and partnerships. We work with the State of Utah, the road commissioner, the department of natural resources. We\u2019re in contact with a lot of people regularly to protect these works. We also have local community partners in Utah who help with the promotion of cultural and artistic legacy of the work \u2013The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and CLUI (Center for Land Use Interpretation), which has a complex about an hour from the Sun Tunnels<\/i> in Wendover. But our primary approach is to avoid over-mediating. The only site with fulltime caretakers is the Lightening Field<\/i>s. Sun Tunnels<\/i> doesn\u2019t have any form of monitoring. We put a lot of the onus on the visitor. A lot of our work as stewards is to promote the idea of protecting these works long term. We make sure that we ensure access to the site and we are mindful of the greater environment and ways that we can protect it.<\/p>\nWhat kind of environmental role have you taken on as caretakers?
\n<\/b><\/span>As stewards and owners of Sun Tunnels,<\/i> we down the land it sits on. We\u2019ve been owners less than a year. During that time, we\u2019ve already begun thinking through conservation efforts of the actual tunnels themselves, and we also have to take into consideration the work\u2019s sightlines. We are hoping to put forth in the coming years a broader plan of sustainability, not only with regards to the site but the environment around it, and how we can be involved in preserving it.<\/p>\nPart of what we already do as stewards is to document our works a minimum of twice a year in overhead photography, and we can see the change in the environment just tracing that history over the years. At Spiral Jetty<\/i>, which we have owned for twenty years, <\/b>you can see dry spells, and times when it had more water around it. Right now, it has been dry for the last four or five years, due to the super drought in the American West; you can see the effect of the super drought on the finite site of Spiral Jetty<\/i> in our photographs. The scientists we work with use Spiral Jetty<\/i> as a source of investigation, a micro site, a static space where you can watch this change happen. And in fact, that was very much what Smithson was thinking of, the idea of tracking and being an agent of change alongside environmental change, although I don\u2019t know if he imagined it would be as accelerated as it has been over the last ten to twenty years.<\/span><\/p>\nWhat can this kind of land art installation contribute to debates about environmental stewardship and climate change that we can\u2019t get in other contexts?
\n<\/b><\/span>We don\u2019t want to instrumentalize climate change for the benefit of a conversation around artworks that we own. But having been the owner of many of these art sites and these land artworks, we understand that we need to be mindful of the changing environment. Spiral Jetty<\/i> and Sun Tunnels<\/i> bring people out to incredible spaces. They spread awareness that, as visitors to this artwork you are part of that environment and looking at art in the landscape. Visitors want to protect that landscape. We are thinking through the most responsible way to contribute to conversations about environmental issues based on our role as stewards of these sites for four or five decades.<\/p>\nOne of the events we are organizing around Sun Tunnels <\/i>is a symposium in February. In addition to three art historians, we\u2019ve invited an astronomer speaking about Mesolithic structures that track celestial change, an architect who works in environmental design and a geologist specializing in the Bonneville region who will speak about geologic change and why the site\u2019s history is so important to the experience of Sun Tunnels<\/i>. We are hoping it provides a greater context for Sun Tunnels<\/i> as a land artwork, thinking about how Holt approached the land and how we can view this environment alongside this fantastic artwork. It\u2019s part of how we approach the conversation about sustainability and land protection in terms of all of our land art sites. We want to shed light on all the ways of thinking about how a structure acts on and responds to a site\u2014the geologic, the astronomic, the architectural\u2014alongside the science of climate change. It\u2019s maybe more of a subtle approach, but I think it\u2019s actually incredibly important\u2014not just to say, \u201cShe thought about this environment, she chose the site for these attributes,\u201d but to really understand what those attributes are and how important they are not only to this artwork but to the history of the region, and in turn the importance of that region and that history, both for Americans and the rest of the world.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From 1973-1976, the American artist Nancy Holt (b. 1938 d. 2014) produced a large-scale land art installation in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[918,920,571,921,919,655,917,922],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sculpture-nature_local.test\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6805"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sculpture-nature_local.test\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sculpture-nature_local.test\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sculpture-nature_local.test\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sculpture-nature_local.test\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6805"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/sculpture-nature_local.test\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6884,"href":"http:\/\/sculpture-nature_local.test\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6805\/revisions\/6884"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sculpture-nature_local.test\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sculpture-nature_local.test\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sculpture-nature_local.test\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sculpture-nature_local.test\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}