Transcript
Speaker: Okay, this is maybe an embarrassing thing to admit on a podcast devoted to aesthetic experiences, but if I'm really being honest, I'm not entirely sure I've ever had one. An aesthetic experience, I mean, that's kind of an exaggeration. But I do think it's interesting that despite the fact that I've more or less organized my life around talking about books and art and music, I would still feel a little cagey if you asked me to point to an example of something that was straightforwardly beautiful or straightforwardly sublime.
Speaker: The trouble with those kinds of aesthetic judgments to me is that they're often treated like matters of such self-evident conviction. It doesn't make sense to hammer-haw about beauty, at least according to a lot of the philosophers who think about these things. For Immanuel Kant, for instance, who for better or worse has set the terms that people use to understand the aesthetic for the past several centuries, to judge something beautiful is necessarily to insist that other people will agree with you.
Speaker: I've thought about this a lot, and at the end of the day, i just kind of don't get it. There's just no way I can ever let go of the worry that I only think something is beautiful because I'm supposed to think it's beautiful, or maybe because I want someone else to think that I think it's beautiful.
Speaker: When philosophers talk about what it means to have an experience of beauty or to have a meaningful encounter with a work of art, they tend to take for granted that you're able to know in a clear and immediate way what it is that you're feeling in your mind, in your body, in both.
Speaker: When really, that can often be such a deeply confusing question, at least to me. I think that's partly why I've spent so much of my own work thinking about other more oddball kinds of aesthetic terms. Like I just finished this book on relatability, for instance, which I'm contractually obligated to remind you to pre-order. um And I'm also ah thinking recently a lot about the word satisfying, which seems to be everywhere, and thinking about maybe writing about it as a way to talk about what autism might teach us about aesthetics. Yeah.
Speaker: There are intellectual reasons for this work, of course, but on a certain level, I also think that at the end of the day, I just happen to be a lot more comfortable calling something oddly satisfying than I am calling it beautiful.
Speaker: At any rate, it just occurred to me that that's one reason why I was drawn to the title of this show, Some Marvelous Experience. On some level, I'm more interested in marveling, which is to say wondering, than I am in judging,
Speaker: I guess I should introduce myself. This is me, Brian Glavey, and you are indeed listening to Some Marvelous Experience, a show about friendship and art. For each episode, I'll be talking with a pair of friends about an aesthetic experience that they've shared together, a painting that they both fell in love with, a movie they've argued about for years, a record they bonded over in middle school.
Speaker: I'm sure some of these experiences will be beautiful, some of them sublime, but I'm confident that they'll all be marvelous. I'm telling you all of this because, unrelatedly, my conversation with today's guests, David Hobbs and Josh Schneiderman, actually helped me understand a little bit more how the beautiful and the sublime work for Kant, but also out in the world.
Speaker: I was really excited for this conversation because I think of both David and Josh as the kinds of friends who always seem like an inexhaustible source of knowledge and recommendations about art, music, poetry, etc. I'm especially drawn to people like that. I think I really need them in order to help me stay interested in the world.
Speaker: They're the kind of friends that help me remember, to paraphrase Frank O'Hara, that people do not totally regret life. Josh and David came on to talk about a cross-country trip they took in 2024 to see two icons of 20th century land art, Spiral Jetty, which Robert Smithson completed in 1970, and Sun Tunnels, which Nancy Holt finished in 1976 or so. Although they didn't use these terms, part of what I took away from listening to them was a clearer understanding of the relationship between beauty, sublimity, and scale Scale, as it happens, is a term that was important to both Holt and Smithson, who were a married couple as well as intellectual and artistic collaborators.
Speaker: For instance, here's what Robert Smithson had to say in his essay about the jetty. And then he goes on.
Speaker: a crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale not size could be called the grand canyon and then he goes on Scale depends on one's capacity to be aware of the actualities of perception. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with an object or language that appears to be certain.
Speaker: For me, scale operates by uncertainty. Anyway, so here's my thought. I think that even for Kant, there's something about aesthetic judgment that crucially has to do with scale.
Speaker: To find something beautiful, for example, is to experience a pleasure that comes from a sense that our representations of the world happen to fit the aperture through which we receive them, even though there's no real reason why they should.
Speaker: I think of it as feeling fundamentally at home in the world, even if just for a moment, as if the world were built precisely on your own scale. It's like waking in the morning to find that the sunrise is framed exactly in the center of your window.
Speaker: But then sometimes something about that view might make you really feel in your bones that the sun is 93 million miles away. That's the sublime. It's a feeling that comes from feeling time and space on a scale completely inhospitable to our own.
Speaker: The beautiful is an experience of feeling when you're in the presence of a work of art, say, like you are at the center of the world. The sublime is an experience of realizing you're at the end of the world.
Speaker: Part of what strikes me as powerful about the work of Smithson and Holt is that they underscore the way these two experiences can toggle back and forth. Sometimes a work of art can make everything snap into place. You suddenly realize that you exist at one unique intersection of space and time, standing precisely where you are standing on the surface of the earth, spiraling around the sun for a moment of time so brief that it's already over.
Speaker: But what that realization feels like, whether it's reassuring, say, or whether it's terrifying, well, there's always a lot of uncertainty about that. Anyway, the cheesy thesis at the center of this podcast is that both of these experiences can be more powerful when we experience them with other people.
Speaker: I think what David and Josh are saying about their own time seeing sun tunnels and spiral jetty is that to experience our lives on a cosmic or geologic scale can also snap into place the profundity of our relations to other people, to the friends who share our impossibly unlikely cross-section of the universe, and, as Holt makes clear, to those who no longer do. It's no doubt true that earthworks like these, by creating art out of the earth itself, want us to experience something that's larger than our day-to-day lives.
Speaker: But that doesn't change the fact that the earth remains the place where we find our friends and lose them and hold on to them in between. So please join me for my conversation with Josh Schneiderman and David Hobbs as we discuss Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
Speaker: Yeah, I actually went back through my email and I know the exact date that David and I met, which was April 23rd, 2013. So we've known each other for just over 13 And I was organizing an event at the CUNY Graduate Center where when I was at grad school and I was a co-chair of the Poetics group there.
Speaker: And um David came, I believe he had to come. Is that right, David? He was compulsory because... and know this is So my memory was that it was compulsory, but if it happened in April, it couldn't have been. this is like, a yeah, this is my you know missing of the sum, like you know my misremembered. Finish the the sentence and I'll fill in. Well, yeah, I was i was organizing Lytle Shaw's book on site-specific work, artwork, and poetry just come out. And David came ah to this talk um along with other people that was, I think, were in the class. We stayed in touch after. we we hung out a few times, um but mostly knew each other over social media.
Speaker: And then I'd say, and David, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but we really started becoming friends around 2015, 2016, especially after the election. like I remember you coming over to my house right after the election.
Speaker: um and then I went through a terrible breakup right at the end of 2016. And David volunteered to help me move apartments. So if you find a friend who helped you move in New York in January, you you hang on to him. that's That's a true friend. And since then, I think we've talked to each other every single day since.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. I think we talk every day. So you really met at an event that was kind of about Nancy Holt or of Smithson at any rate, right? A smith about landard smithson i went back to about Landark. I went back to the book before this and there's only one reference to Nancy Holt in the whole chapter. and It's just that she was like holding a camera at some point, which I think really underserves, like but this is sort of getting ahead. But but yeah, that Smithson was part of our our first meeting.
Speaker: Tell me about when you went when you made this trek then to see the sun tunnels. Yeah, this was – Was it two years ago? Was it 20? It must've been 2024, right? Um, March.
Speaker: Um, and we went to see with our best, with our, another, our other very close friends, Stu Watson, uh, who we're in a group chat with and that's, you know, David and I and Stu talk every day. And, um, I would be remiss. Does the group chat have a name?
Speaker: it It changes constantly. I don't know what it's called right now. Right now it's called Ahura Mazda Fair Dinkum Society. Yeah, that's, that's good. We would have to take an hour to explain how we got there. And I think I have to mention Stu's podcast, The End of the World with Michael and Stu. So please tune into that podcast. But yeah, we, we I mean, I think we we wanted to see Spiral Jetty.
Speaker: um That was an impetus, but um Sun Tunnels, was on our radar. And so, yeah, we all met up in Salt Lake City, got an Airbnb there and saw both Sun Tunnels and Spiral Jetty. We saw so Spiral Jetty first and then we saw Sun Tunnels. And I think all of us, i well, at least I did. I ended up being much more moved by Sun Tunnels, which we can get into.
Speaker: Absolutely. Yeah, it it was a fun trip. Stu is still in New York. And in a way, Salt Lake City was like equally inconvenient for the three of us, which felt like a good place for us to all meet up.
Speaker: So I drove down from Calgary and Stu and Josh flew in. So we had my car as well. um Because that just like the drives to get to these things are kind of like harrowing. um And yeah, that was like, you know, I but to plug Salt Lake City as a city to hang out in for four days, if you have a car, had really good time. Yeah, that's great. We had a marvelous trip. Yeah.
Speaker: yeah Yeah. um yeah Yeah, I Sorry, go ahead. No, you ahead. Yeah, so we had certainly known about... or like, i You know, there are, like, scraps of, like, real art and literature that I knew about before I started the PhD, but basically nothing. And I think I probably found out about Spiral Jetty the same day that I found out about Josh. Yeah.
Speaker: um And then it it loomed in the background as like one of these cool art pilgrimages that you can do that really like honor this connection between these, you know, conceptual coteries on the coasts and these sort of extreme, and insane, you know, durable interventions into the landscape elsewhere that are probably more engaged with the concept of America than it often feels like life in New York is.
Speaker: um And in fact, one of those summers of rivalrous fellowship competition in which I did not receive one of the summer fellowships, two members of my cohort did the spiral jetty to Marfa trip. And so I think it also always lingered as like something on the like ah grad student bucket list that I failed to to accomplish.
Speaker: Yeah. If you want to see a lot of funny a lot of funny photos, check the geotag on Instagram for Spiral Jetty. And there's, like, people, like, in, like, women in bikinis, like, posing. And if you've been there, you'll understand why that's very strange because it's such a stark landscape. um But...
Speaker: umm I don't know. One of the things I'm curious about is like why people, a lot a lot of people went out there during the pandemic and my friend, Sean Patrick Carney wrote an article about this, about like sort of a pandemic draw.
Speaker: But yeah, so we went and we all got there at different times. And then the first full day that we were there, we went out to see Spiral Jetty, um which is near Golden Spike National Monument, which is where the Transcontinental Railroad was completed. So we stopped in there and talked with some very nice people Park Rangers.
Speaker: And Sproutl Jetty itself is near Roselle Point, which is on a remote shore of the Great Salt Lake. So I'd say it's a two-hour drive from Salt Lake City, and a lot of that is just sort of like dirt roads. It used to be unmarked, but there are now signs where you can find it.
Speaker: And Smithson completed it in 1970. And that that was an absolutely mind-blowing experience in that first day because the landscape there really does make you feel like you're in like another geological age.
Speaker: Like you look out and the lake just seems to stretch on forever. So it's got this kind of like end-of-the-world, edge-of-the-world feel to it. But... ah The Great Salt Lake is drying off ah drying up because of climate change. It's fed by snow melt and also because people in Salt Lake City can't stop watering their lawns.
Speaker: um So this is it's like there's actually this like slow motion ecological disaster that you're aware of that's unfolding in front of you because when the lake continues to dry up, the... I think it's not a theory. I think it's ah it's a it's a you know statistical probability that all these like toxins are going to be released into the air. ah So yeah, Spiral Jetty, ah you know when went when Smithson made it, was was made to sit up out of the water like a jetty.
Speaker: um But now it's completely dry. like I'd say the actual shore of the lake is maybe, what would you say, like half a mile from where Spiral Jetty hits the land? Yeah, we walked out to it and it felt like we were in like an Alex Cox movie or something like that. Like it it really felt like we were these like, you know, um, kind of desiccated hipsters, uh, pursuing, you know, some sort of purgatory on the horizon. It really feels quite evil it as a place. We we were, yeah we absolutely were. Um,
Speaker: And so when you were there, the the what once was above water is still yeah raised. its still visually visually yeah recognizable.
Speaker: Yeah. So, I mean, you can can contrast our experience with, so in 2002, Nico Israel, who was a teacher of mine at the Graduate Center, wrote an article for Artform about driving out with a friend and trying to find it. And they couldn't find it because it was fully submerged.
Speaker: And there were no markings at that point. So they it's a very funny article that I'd recommend. Going back And that's three years Yeah, yeah. And so they just could not find it. But now, because it is dried up, Sprout Jetty kind of just looks like, the thing that kept coming to mind for me is it looks like a partially excavated dinosaur fossil.
Speaker: You know, they like sort of dig down and like dust off. so But it's literally receding into the earths earth as the silt from the lake blows over it And I have pictures and stuff, and you can, I'm sure, find pictures of it too. um but so it was great because i was i was there with my friends, and i was I was seeing this thing that I'd wanted to see for years. But it was also unsettling because you really get a tangible like feel for like what climate change is doing. I just...
Speaker: This is not exactly what Smithson had in mind, but like it's it's a work that has do with entropy, and um you know it's supposed to change with the environment. But it had a real end-of-the-world of vibe for me, and um it was great and beautiful, but also deeply unsettling.
Speaker: It sounds like one of those experiences where you, it's like you encounter a barometer of apocalypse that you sort of hadn't, that enables you to like physically register what's happening in a way that like everyday life kind of makes ah like less, less possible. Yeah, it's like different from a heat wave in the sense that it's like you can see it, you know, and you can see it kind of like where the shore used to be and where it was before. And now like, yeah, I owns it. And I don't know. i think they're always trying to figure out how exactly to preserve it. But it literally is disappearing.
Speaker: And it's very interesting. Well, smith and Smithson and intended for it to change, yeah um but he didn't imagine that it would dry up, did he? or Or was that part of his... I don't think he imagined it would dry up. In fact, what happened was he built it, he finished it in 1970. And then I think within a year or two, the water level rose.
Speaker: And he had to go back and put more... rocks down to bring it back up out of the water. So I don't think he i don't think he anticipated that it would be the way it is now.
Speaker: Yeah, I was just thinking about that. Josh, you're totally right about that feeling of of collapse. And I guess at least living in the prairies in Canada, so often the way that that awareness of ecological crisis sort of enters the everyday is ah yeah through your nose. Like we just...
Speaker: Wind conditions mean that like the smell of these like thousands of hectares large forest fires will blow into the city here and there. And so you never see them, except you kind of see the haze around the sun. But you'll step out of the building, you'll step out of your house, and just sort of smell that awareness. But...
Speaker: With Spiral Jetty, it was it was like it was like being overtaken by a scent, but by the horizon, but by like the whiteness. of Because as the Great Salt Lake recedes, it leaves behind, yeah, these like salty silt, these white traces.
Speaker: And it coats the skeletons of the birds that you see in the shoreline. And it it coats just like the the bare few things that that you know are left behind. And so it's this like this almost Melvillian experience of like being oppressed by the whiteness of the landscape. in a way that feels very unnerving. Yeah, um and the the landscape itself is also terrifying. And you can see, I mean, aside from what happened to Spiral Jetty and what looks like now, you can really see why Smithson...
Speaker: picked it, it's it's just this terrifying openness, emptiness, you know? And um he he said, so when he was scouting a location in a helicopter, he apparently said, you know, it, et in Utah, ego, right? Ego, or like like like the Poisson painting, right? So sort of like the opposite of the pastoral. And that's, I think, sums it up.
Speaker: Totally. And even, not to get too far ahead, but in Nancy Holt's essay about the sun tunnel, she talks about how one of the things that she was very attracted to by these basins that were left behind by the recession of, um you know, the the millennia's old version of the body of water that covered much of that... um Salt Lake City area was called Lake Bonneville. um And that it these sort of smooth, salty recession plains give rise to really miraculous mirages. And so very often, because the horizon is sort ringed by these low mountains that used to be the shoreline, you get these mirages that look like inverted mountains sort of floating above the ground. And that that sense of unreality was really important to both of them.
Speaker: You went, how long do you think you stayed... We were there for like, oh, we were at the jetty for about two or three hours, right? And then we had lunch there. We brought a picnic lunch. and then Is that what people do? Like, wear you in bikinis? ah No, no. Yeah, no nobody wants to see me in a bikini. It's just interesting because it is a, so, you know...
Speaker: ah It's ah a work that it seems like part of the experience of it is the onerous task of getting there. yes um And so it's sort of interesting. I hadn't really thought about, oh, so because I have not been there. hadn't really thought about, oh, so when you get there, what do you do? What do you do? I guess you walk out on the jetty itself. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, there's a little parking area and the i think like an Eagle Scout or something put up a plaque. So there now is a plaque where there didn't used to be one.
Speaker: But yeah, you drive out on dirt roads and i you know I think once you get off the highway, it's maybe another 45 minutes to an hour on these dirt roads, which again, you know didn't used to be marked. And now thankfully there's little signs that say spiral jetty this way. And actually just a a memory that came back to me is on our way in um these horses just roamed across the road. These like, I don't think they were wild horses or, but they just sort of roamed in front of us. And we asked the park ranger at Golden Spike on our way back, like, are there wild horses? And he said, no. And i so I guess there's sort of like, Like, yeah, Mirage, or or there's just sort of these escaped horses wandering around, which is, we're going to connect to sun tunnels because there are other animals at sun tunnels. that Interesting. um yeah you get One other question about the, like did you do did you use Google Maps to get there? or
Speaker: think so. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, although you don't have service for a whole bunch of it. This is and this this becomes this was like um particularly weird getting to the sun tunnels because the sort of winding dirt roads to get there, you're crossing in and out of, um I think it's Nevada, ah as you sort of wind your way through this bit of like blasted rural Utah. And so the Utah and Nevada were in different time zones the part of March that we were there. And so like everything would kind of like scramble and reset. You'd be like, wait, what time is it? Yeah. yeah yeah to You have to drive into Nevada to get to the ranch road that takes you to Sun Tons. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. spiral jety You get there, there's like a little parking area. We were with, there weren't a lot of people there. We got there relatively early and then more people showed up and yeah, we walked the spiral, you know, you have to kind of climb down a little bit, um, off what used to be the shore,
Speaker: um And um we walked the spiral, you know, kind of like Smithson does while he's running in the in the film. But we walked it in and then walked it out. And then we walked to the edge of the Salt Lake, which again is like, I don't know. I'm not a good gauge of distance, but I'm going to say conservatively half a mile, maybe more from the original shore.
Speaker: um And then we kind of climbed up. There's like steep hill. So we sort of climbed up to get a better look at it from high. And i I took photos from there and stuff. And then you headed back to Sun Tunnels the next day. Is that the... Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, we did Sun Tunnels. We actually squeezed in a couple other things on that day, which I was very pleased. You know, there's there's like a... As I've entered my late 30s childless, I feel like I'm like dad maxing in a very strange and kind of unpredictable set of directions. One of them is that i i bought a way too fancy cooler that we use for the picnic on this drive. And the other is that like, I love to know what's on the route. And so my my memory, Josh, is that we went from the Spiral Jetty to that hot spring that we found that apparently Teddy Roosevelt had gone to. it was just like a hot spring in the sort of Utah mountains. And then we had dinner at this like amazing weird roadhouse called the Shooting Star Saloon um that I think has been operating since the 1880s. And their signature burger is like a cheeseburger that also has fried kielbasa on it. Yeah.
Speaker: ah That's right. Yeah, that was great. Yeah, I mean, it's it's such a crazy drive. And like even living in California where you take the, I mean, it it's so remote and you go through so many different landscapes. it's It's, I mean, the driving is half the fun. And actually on the way out, we read in the car together the Spiral Jetty essay, which is, know, also sort of the script for the film, but we had that together.
Speaker: So who did the driving? David. Is that kind of your thing or? i guess it's become kind of my thing. Although Josh can attest, I think my wife is the better wheel man than I am.
Speaker: um But... It was my car, and I feel like, you know, on weird rural... Like, there were a couple of moments where, like, I just wasn't paying super close attention or, like, was really into... We were also listening to the Neil Young album, Trans. Got really into it. And, like, a sharp hairpin turn would happen, and I would just kind of, like, run the car aground into the dirt. So um I feel like I was happy that no one else had to take that on board emotionally. Yeah, that's yeah that's generous of you.
Speaker: And so Sun Tunnel's next, is that right? Yeah, that was the next day. um And to get there, you have to drive through the Bonneville Salt Flats, which was amazing. It's it's it's one of the few places on Earth where you can actually see the curvature of the Earth.
Speaker: And that's part of the reason why holt picked it. Holt wrote an essay for for Art Forum that explains all this. And um that was amazing. I mean, the the the Bonneville Salt Flats. So both um Spiral Jetty and sun Tunnels are, as David mentioned, part of...
Speaker: what was once like but Lake Bonneville, which is this late Pleistocene Lake that was once the size of Lake Michigan and receded over thousands of years. And um the Great Salt Lake is a remnant of of Lake Bonneville. And Bonneville Salt Flats are are part of that, you know, left the remnants of that lake. And so we had to drive out through that, as David mentioned. And then Sun Tunnel is even more remote than Spiral Jetty. um And yeah know we can get into why, but but Holt picked this spot for for various reasons in the same way that Smithson did. But um yeah, that was the second day.
Speaker: Yeah, that was really cool. Because i think the the initial highway out through the Bonneville Salt Flats, there's like quite a large mountain form or an old shoreline on the left-hand side.
Speaker: And then my memory of our time in the Salt Flats was that it was actually, like, was it raining really, like, strangely? there was there was yeah it was it was raining off and on. So, you know, usually you can drive out.
Speaker: onto the salt and they do like speed tests on the salt flats because it's so flat but it was muddy you know and we sort of walked we took walked out a little bit into it and took pictures but it was sort of raining on the phone Well, probably would have, yeah. yeah and then And then from there, we sort of yeah you you go up over the westernmost shoreline that you can see from Salt Lake City itself and into Utah-Nevada scrubland, which was so beautiful. Yeah.
Speaker: Like just like the drive to spiral jetty, you're like half the time on a freeway and the other half of the time you're, on you know, you're on smaller road and then the dirt road entry. But like the road to the sun tunnels was just like some of the most like spectacular, like Chevy commercial driving I've ever done in my life. It was like really, really amazing. um And um among the things that we, there was a moment where we had been on this dirt road for so long that I think we all just sort of like agreed that we needed to like stop and do a pee before we kept going. um
Speaker: And was that, Josh, or was it later in the drive that we we like came around the side of like a very a high but like shallow sloping hill? And as we came around it, realized that like the entire side of the hill was just like covered in sheep.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. And the sheep were being, you know, organized or coordinated by, like, a group of, ah like, Blackford dogs that were clearly, like, working dogs. Because when we stopped the car, all the dogs, like, eyes right on us. And they kind of, like, form... Josh got great photos of us. um But it was just, like...
Speaker: There were no people organizing this group of sheep. There was just this, like, don't know. My memory is that there were, like, a thousand head of sheep. Josh, is that crazy? It was it was a lot, yeah. I was trying to figure out. I'm not good with estimates like that. You're not good at estimating sheep. Yeah, I mean, another Mirage sort of thing that was funny about it was that Um, you know, yeah, we were off to the side of the road and we got out to look at them, but that if you took 10 steps towards them, they would move 20 steps away. yeah so they kept proceeding into the distance and like, I did get a picture of it, ended up having to like crop it way and to even see that they were sheep. But yeah, a lot of the land that, you know, um, surrounding, sun tunnels is, uh,
Speaker: now like or was or still is used as ranch land. And Sun Tunnels itself is about four miles southeast of Lucene, Utah, ah which which was an old railroad town. It's now a ghost town. I looked and apparently four people technically live there. And it's about nine miles from the Nevada border. But as David mentioned, you have to cross and in Nevada to get on this road.
Speaker: which and there are actually no markings on this road to get to Sun Tunnels, unlike Spiral Jetty, which I think... you know tells you something about... There's not an Eagle Scout who's... no yeah Yeah, the Eagle Scouts haven't gotten to that one yet. um Yeah, and it's it's it was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.
Speaker: the The ghost town is also like... um I don't know whether I was just feeling like sensitive or unsafe, but like it looks scary. like I didn't want to stop and and explore the ghost town. ah um Yeah, and then and then you come in...
Speaker: you realize that you've entered the basin and the road suddenly becomes quite straight after having been very windy for some time. Um, and then do you, I feel like we, we could see where we were headed probably like 10 minutes before we got there, Josh, is that right?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, I think so. um And we can talk about why she chose this particular... So she bought the land, and we can talk about why she chose that particular spot.
Speaker: um but Well, maybe we can actually just take a second and say what Sun Tunnels is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we should probably back up and say who Nancy Hold is because I kind of skipped over with that part. 1938 in Worcester, Massachusetts. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So she's she's best known as ah a conceptual artist and for her earthworks.
Speaker: So she was involved in the land art movement, as it's known with. with Robert Smithson, who she married in 1963, and Michael Heiser. um And she's known for these absolutely brilliant site-specific works like Sun Tunnels, Dark Park, and Starcrossed. She's also a very talented filmmaker and photographer, so she shot she shot the accompanying film for Smithson's Spiral Jetty, which is amazing.
Speaker: um which And you can find a lot of her films on UbuWeb and the complete Spiral Jetty film on UbuWeb. You can't find it by searching. you have to go in and actually find it and i don't know if you put links in the description of this podcast. We can, we can hand them out, but, um,
Speaker: She was a so photographer, and that that influenced Sun Tunnels, which which I can talk a little bit about. But she was also a concrete poet and considered um some of her photography her photography to be visual poems. And she did so much work in so many different mediums that it's kind of hard to define her. But she is best known for these sort of big mon monumental works. and And like Smithson's, a lot of her work was designed to be temporary, to be to be ephemeral.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think, you know, it's... her name often comes up as having been Smithson's wife and then, and then. But I think that intro is, i mean, it's annoying in terms of recognizing her distinctive contributions and herself as a distinct artist, much of which was created after Smithson's death during the construction of the Amarillo ramp.
Speaker: But I think it's also important to talk about how much it seems in retrospect that that much of the great artworks that we think of as being Smithson's were really s Smithson's and Holt's together. um She was responsible for much of the sort of the video installation work that accompanied, but also a lot of the conceptualization.
Speaker: um She and Smithson seemed to really like have a shared groove together. um Many of the same preoccupations, not just in terms of art and art history, but literary history, ah weird geological history. Holt had studied, um, to be a biologist at Tufts and so came to, this work and this background with a pretty keen sense of, you know, evolutionary biology and the, the idea that like, you know, what feels solid under our feet is moving just as much as the air above our heads and to try to sort of attune us to that, um
Speaker: And even, i was very affected by this detail, Josh. i don't know if you were going to get there, but like, um so Holt died and in 2014 from leukemia. um She was diagnosed ah in October of 2013 and passed away by February of 2014. And she spent her last months editing together the video that she had shot of the Amarillo ramp construction into an installation video. So it it seems clear that Holt you know, the loss of Smithson, the the grief surrounding that work and that project was was too acute for her for most of her life to actually get to that video footage. But that that was, you know, the last work that she created was the completion of that video and the recognition of that work. Knowing that that she didn't have much time. Yeah. She never remar she never remarried after he died
Speaker: um And, um yeah, ah you know, I think just to go back for a second, but, you know, the Spiral Jetty film was the way that most people saw it that That was what was exhibited. i actually have a poster of Ace Gallery's for showing of it. And that was the way that most people experienced it. And she, like, he wrote the script, but she is 100% responsible for the cinematography and the editing. And I think, you know, it's a a brilliant brilliant art film. And so, yeah, I think you can't underestimate her influence on him. But you asked us what Sun Tunnels is.
Speaker: um And it's it's an earthwork that's in the Great Basin Desert, and it's composed of four... huge concrete cylinders that are um installed in an X-shaped configuration. She completed it between 1973 and 1976. Again, I really recommend the film she made to accompany it, which is on UbuWeb.
Speaker: um And the... The tunnels are aligned to frame the rising and setting sun during the so summer and winter solstices.
Speaker: um So they pass directly through it at those two points in the air. The sun passes directly through it at those two points in the air. And then each tunnel is perforated with patterns corresponding to the constellations Draco, Perseus, Columbia, Capricorn.
Speaker: um And as the sun and the moon move across the sky, light passes through these openings. So a lot of people visit it at the solstice. I think that, you know, the big crowds go and visit it at the solstice.
Speaker: um But um even we weren't anywhere near the solstice, and um it was still really cool. yeah The sun comes through and then creates these patterns on the inside.
Speaker: um of the tunnels. And the tunnels are huge. um They're these huge concrete cylinders. I'm around 6'3", and I could almost stand up straight in them.
Speaker: um Interestingly, when we when we went there, it looked like people had ridden dirt bikes through them. There were like tire tracks through them. And the marker that identifies it looked like somebody had smashed it with a sledgehammer. So I think that mean like maybe some drunk teenagers hang out there or something, which is funny to think about.
Speaker: Yeah, there's an article on Freeze that suggests that those striations on the insides of the tunnels actually come from kids trying to like, shoot bullets alongside the insiders of the tunnels, which um I don't totally believe because those look like bike treads to me, but maybe.
Speaker: Bullets ricochet. I don't know. Yeah, exactly. It feels to me like, a you know.
Speaker: I'm not going to finish that sentence. but um And yeah, so driving in, the the land around it is is free grazing land. so holt I should say probably also, she self-financed this project. um She had grants that made up, ah she says, about a third of the cost, but she basically like like cleared out credit cards ah to do this work. and one of the reasons she selected this piece of land was simply because it was former railway land that was being sold in much smaller increments than typically the Bureau of Land Management sells land for. And so she, as an individual without tremendous resources, was able to acquire this, this particular piece. Um,
Speaker: It is in like the dead center of this basin. And so no matter where you look out from this installation, you see this sort of rising up to the horizon lines of rims of this um basin around you. It is obviously still used for free grazing because when we got on the straight road that leads ah to the tunnels, there were cows.
Speaker: And there were also cows surrounding sun tunnels. So, like, it's it's dead quiet. i mean, you're you're you're surrounded by mountains and it's incredibly, it's just total silence except for you could hear the cows mooing, which I thought was kind of interesting.
Speaker: think both works are located where they are precisely to be in an inhuman landscape or yeah to be, you know, as as far away as possible. Yeah, yeah, and I can actually read from, um I excerpted this bit from Holt's art form essay that came out around the time she completed it.
Speaker: And she said, by marking the yearly extreme positions of the sun, sun tunnels indicates the cyclical time of the solar year. The center of the work becomes the center of the world.
Speaker: The changing pattern of light pattern of late from our sun star marks the days and hours as it passes through the tunnel's sun holes. The positioning of the work is also based on star study. The surveyor and I were able to find true north by taking our bearings on the North Star, Polaris, as it ovals around the North Pole because of the Earth's movement.
Speaker: I wanted to bring the vast space of the desert back to human scale. I had no desire to make a megalithic monument. The panoramic view of the landscape is too overwhelming to take in without visual reference points. The view blurs out rather than sharpens.
Speaker: Through the tunnels, parts of the landscape are framed and come into focus. I chose the diameter, length, and distance between the tunnels based on the proportions of what could be seen of the sky and land and how long the sun could be seen rising and setting on the solstices.
Speaker: In the desert, scale is hard to discern from a distance. Mountains that are five or ten miles away look deceptively close. When the sun tunnels is seen from four miles away, it seems very large. Closer in a mile or away or so, the relational balance changes and it's hard to read.
Speaker: The work is seen from several angles on the road in At times, two of the tunnels line up exactly head on and seem to disappear. Seen from a side angle, the two tunnels in front can totally overlap and cancel out the ones in the back. And this is where I mentioned like her her work as a photographer is really interesting because i as you you crawl inside the sun tunnels, like they do frame specific...
Speaker: ah parts of the landscape. So I got this picture from inside of one of the sun tunnels where it sort of perfectly frames a mountain and creates this sort of visual effect where it looks like the mountain is closer than it is. So like, aside from it lining up with the sun during the summer and winter solstices, it does all these other, you know, innumerable things that are really cool.
Speaker: but It sounds like it's a ah work that's organized around framing things and lots of different like on lots of different levels and about what framing does to your perception.
Speaker: don't know, just hearing you ask, again, I haven't been to either, but hearing you talk about it, it sounds like experiencing Spiral Jetty is clearly about being in a very specific place on Earth, right?
Speaker: But there's a way in which it sounds like Sun Tunnels is even more intensely calling attention to being in a very specific place in the universe. Absolutely. also in time.
Speaker: Yeah. And it's able to do that. you know, basically just with a couple of tubes yeah ah because of the way that organizing, framing your perception suddenly like locks you into a specific place.
Speaker: I mean, it's like a kind of geolocation before that was possible, you know, to sort of, you are in in the exact place that you are in at the exact moment you are in, in a way that's like really easy to ignore for the rest of your life.
Speaker: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that there's a an important affective dimension to that sense of presence, which is that, to me at least, and you know Josh, feel free to push back on this, but like i really I read the work inexorably as about grief.
Speaker: um You know, she she acquires the piece of land immediately after Smithson's death. um She says in that art form essay, she got the idea for this work while I was in Amarillo, Texas. Doesn't name what happened in Amarillo, Texas.
Speaker: um But... Can we say, maybe we should say what Amarillo, Texas. Right, course. That Smithson died during the construction of his artwork, Amarillo Rand. Yeah. on a pin crash he He was scouting the location and and was in a small aircraft and it crashed and he died.
Speaker: But also the thinking about the spiral jetty video where Nancy Holt is the one who's in the helicopter filming him on the jetty. There's also, I think, a sense of like, you know... he was in the the helicopter, but, but, um, you know, there's just this sense that like the world is moving around this artwork. The sky is moving around this artwork, but this focus on this absence, this focus on what is happening, you know, this aperture, but perhaps the thing that is not in the aperture, you know, is not there. um And it's a way, I think, of taking Smithson's obsession with the Carl Andre phrase, a thing is a hole in a thing it is not, and redirecting it to something um more affirmational that is still about absence. um So 73, Holt debuted an installation called Holes of Light,
Speaker: that was perforations in a gallery wall. And then Sun Tunnels, the installation is completed in 76, but her accompanying video artwork for Sun Tunnels is completed 78. And in 78 as well, Holt writes this,
Speaker: um and in seventy eight as well holt writes this ah very brief prose poem um that is dedicated to Robert Smithson ah called The Time Being. And I think that this this functions as close to a kind of elegy um as I think that she would ever write directly, but it it feels to me like it's also linked to the Sun Tunnels video. and The Time Being goes like this.
Speaker: For the time being, in the interim, in the course of time, from day to day, from hour to hour, until in due time and in the fullness of time, time endures, goes on, remains, persists, lasts, goes by, elapses, passes, flows, rolls on, flies, slips, slides, and glides by.
Speaker: um No, I completely agree with David. i think it's really hard, seeing them back to back, it's really hard not to think about Sun Tunnels as a response to Smithson's death, but also Spiral Jetty specifically.
Speaker: Because, you know, Spiral Jetty is all about entropy and decay. and But Holt seems to be saying um with sun tunnels that there are some things that persist, even in their ephemerality, right? That there's a cycle to earthly existence that we can rely on even as things change. And I think about that in the context of my friendship with David as I was as i was thinking about these two works. Like, we both changed a lot over the last 13 years, but our friendship remains a constant. And it has really kept me anchored through some difficult times.
Speaker: And, um yeah, I totally think about sun tunnels, as a yeah as David said, as as about grief, but also about kind of a a rebuttal almost to Spiral Jetty. Like, some things do last, even as we, you know, have a very short earthly existence.
Speaker: There are things that persist. Yeah. And this is put really well by, i'm going to read, I promise, one last quote. My my friend, Sean Patrick Carney, during the pandemic, um visited both of these and and wrote for art form, also an art form about them. And I think contrast them really well.
Speaker: And he writes, Spiral Jetty's entropy is steroidal. Dropping an artwork into a lake is the land art equivalent of blood doping. Natural bodies of water, especially ones in the middle of deserts, are volatile. The dramatic changes Smithson's work has undergone contribute to its spectacular position in the cultural imaginary.
Speaker: It all seems, I keep thinking, like a bit of a polar trick. Holt's sun tunnels measure time as I, a human, experience it, and yet functionally they engage entropy on an elongated geological trajectory that requires no sleight of hand.
Speaker: Smithson built a monumental sandcastle. Holt built one the stone.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: I love that. That's so wonderful.
Speaker: It's interesting because I think the, if you hear someone describe sun tunnels or talk about land art in general, it seems like the point is something about the scale being so, ah I don't know, just cosmic, I guess, ah monumental, ah but There are also works that are irrresuced irreducibly relational in the way that they were made. i mean, i was thinking about that, like it's part of what's interesting about this kind of work is it's hard to know where the boundaries are of like what actually counts as creating the work.
Speaker: Like, obviously, so much of it is conceptual, but then a lot of it is also, like, dealing with the dump truck drivers and, like, negotiating land. ah Like, even before you get to the question of how much of the work is actually constituted by the act of making a movie about it or writing an essay about it.
Speaker: So the sort of boundaries are kind of open-ended in a way that makes space for a kind of ah relationality that is... as much a part of the work as the the kind of rootedness in rock and concrete and a specific place.
Speaker: Yeah. A specific place in time. And I think that, I don't know, we mentioned you mentioned, yeah, the... the the people going to these places as as a kind of pandemic specific activity.
Speaker: And it seems like the point for a lot of people is that it's a place you go with someone else and you experience together and that something about being with other people frames whatever experience you might have of entropy or constancy, that there's something relational about that too.
Speaker: Totally. This is, um, Lucy Lippard, who I should have said earlier as in addition to being a marvelous artist in her own right, was a close friend of Nancy Holt's and I think is probably the the best of the like capital AC art critics on her work. Um, and then in her, uh,
Speaker: Catalog contribution for Holt's Sightlines retrospective a couple years ago, she kind of joked that the basin that the sun tunnels are in are like Nancy Holt's parlor, and that whereas most public art tends to have a conceptualization of the public that is quite extroverted, that is imagining like the plaza, you know, people in the midst of all their various days, that Nancy Holt's conception of the public is quite introverted, quite quiet, um that it's it's very intimate. It's about inviting you into this space of a very close relationship
Speaker: a very gentle connection in the midst of something that is quite enormous and best measured on geological time. And I think, you know, for me, this trip, like the experience of the sun tunnels for me begins the moment we pull off the highway. And it's inextricable from the conversation and the grapefruit seltzers and the like pretty bad sandwiches is my memory. We we went, we stopped at like a ah very healthy kind of deli.
Speaker: and got, you know, kind of shitty hummus sandwiches. But this is all a part of the experience for me of, like, going to see this artwork and and spending time with it. I was really um thrilled, too, that, like, for both the jetty and the sun tunnels, I think we spent, you know, yeah, like, over probably about two hours at each place and really, like, felt like we got to, you know, share the atmosphere with them. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: yeah Yeah, I mean, i my my memory of both of these works of art is more vivid than almost anything else i've ever seen. i think it had to do with being there with my friends. You know, also, I think one thing that was really interesting about, know, David mentioned was a bringing in the Salt Flats, and then when we got out to...
Speaker: um sun tunnels, the clouds were so low in the sky. And there's another thing is like not only like, not only is there this like immense distance, but the clouds are very low.
Speaker: And then you're sort of like, there were these cows that were, you know, a few hundred yards away from it, I guess, encroaching on Nancy Holt's land that she owned um some rancher, you know. um But Yeah, I mean, and I think I remember both of these works of art, but Sun Tunnels especially because I was there with my friends and it was such a shared experience.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. I was just, so I rewatched the Holt video for Sun Tunnels before we got on to do this. And on the one hand, it too is quite affecting in that its um its structure and its visual moves are very similar to the Spiral Jetty video, but it has no voiceover, whereas the Spiral Jetty video has Smithson's voiceover. And so it too, on the sort of... the aesthetic texture of it seems like it registers in absence as well. But there's a clip and most of the sun tunnels video is like, uh, silently observing the construction of the tunnels and getting all of the like sounds of the pouring concrete and stuff. There's this great moment.
Speaker: probably about three or four minutes in, where we suddenly cut to the back of a dump truck ah as it, and it's sort of smothered by fog, and it starts, pulls away, opens the back, and dumps a bunch of gravel out to contribute to the like long straight road that we took.
Speaker: And watching it now, I both felt like intense gratitude to the truck because that was such a necessary step for me getting to see the artwork. But the way that it was like bathed in fog was so real to the way that the atmosphere was behaving in our time there. And I think for an artwork that is um so much about it, you know whenever you see photos it on Google, it's almost always going to be one of those solstice photos with like the sun shining.
Speaker: ah grabbing at you through the tunnel. What we got was this like sort of low sky foggy day. And it it felt more miraculous in a sense because in the middle of nowhere, it felt like we had like encountered the edge of something and stepped through a door. It was really cool.
Speaker: I mean, part of what it must do is if you're not there on the solstice, it's kind of about that, you know, that like you're having an experience that is in part defined by the persistence of this thing at the moment that in some sense it wasn't designed for, you know, yeah totally and it's still there.
Speaker: Yeah, and unlike Spiral Jetty, which we you know we saw plenty of people come and go during our time there, ah we didn't see another car after we pulled off the highway. like It was just Josh, Sue, and I, and it seems perfectly reasonable to say that on that day of March 2024, we were the only people who saw Sun Tunnels.
Speaker: I don't think I'd want to go there on the solstice, to be honest. I don't think anything could match the experience that I had, you know, other than like wanting to avoid the crowds. I mean, it was just such a specific day. And like, again, like these storm clouds felt like they were like a hundred feet above our head. And it was really, really mind blowing.
Speaker: You've been listening to Some Marvelous Experience. I want to once again thank my guests, David Hobbs and Josh Schneiderman, for this really helpful conversation. I'd also like to thank Kristen Grogan, who came up with the idea for this podcast, and Greg Stewart, who came up with the music that you're hearing.
Speaker: Be sure to tune in next time when we'll have more friendship and more art.
