Viewing page 7 of 7

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Stars in the constellations varied, increasing my options considerably. Each constellation had also to have enough stars, and to encompass the top half of a tunnel with some holes at eye level on each side, so that the viewer could look through the eye-level holes from the outside and see through the holes on the other side of the tunnel. With those criteria there were only a few constellations that I could use, and from them I chose Draco, Perseus, Columbia, and Capricorn. Together, they encompass the globe - Columbia is a Southern Hemisphere constellation which slips over the edge of the horizon for a short time each year, but can't be seen because of the dense atmosphere near the earth. Capricorn is visible in the fall and early winter, and is entered by the sun at the winter solstice. Draco and Perseus are always visible in the sky.

The work was constructed in several stages. From True North in the center of the site, the surveyor and I staked out the solstice angles that the astrophysicist had calculated. But before digging the first hole for the foundations, I wanted actually to "see" a solstice. Delaying the work until the end of December meant delaying the work until the spring, because the ground would be frozen. In the interim before the winter solstice, I hired a road gravelling crew and gravelled a 3/4-mile road out to the site. On December 22nd we watched the sunrise and sunset and the data checked out.

I worked with the engineers in designing the foundations, and began getting estimates from contractors. It was difficult to find good workers who would go 200 miles from Salt Lake City into the middle of the desert to work. But by spring I had found some, and the holes were dug and the foundations poured. It took two weeks finally to convince the owner of the road construction company, 50 miles away in Oasis, Nevada, to send a concrete-mixing truck to my site. A few local people volunteered their help with this work and with the final installation.

I was in the pipe yard every day while the tunnels were being constructed.^6 I made templates to mark the hole positions on the inner and outer pipe forms, so that the steel that goes into the wall of the pipe--the re-bar cage--could be cut wherever there was going to be a hole. Steel rings were welded around the areas where the holes would be cut to increase the strength. The pipe form had to be blocked on one end to make the ends of the tunnels smooth, not recessed. 

The core drilling was done with hollow, cylindrical drill heads ringed with diamonds. As a hole was cut, the edge of the drill head would slice through the wall, taking the core of concrete out with it as the drill was removed. When the core drilling was finished, I hired four large low-boy trucks to haul the tunnels, and a 60-ton crane, which went the 200 miles out too the site at 25 m.p.h., to lift them onto the foundations.

The local people and I differ on one point: if the land isn't too good for grazing, or if it doesn't have water, or minerals, or shade, or interesting vegetation, then they think it's not much good. They think it's very strange when I camp out at my site, although they say they're glad I found a use for that land. Many of the local people who came to my summer solstice camp-out had never been out in that valley before. So by putting Sun Tunnels in the middle of the desert, I have not put it in the middle of their regular surroundings. The work paradoxically makes available, or focuses on, a part of the environment that many local people wouldn't normally have seen. 

The idea for Sun Tunnels became clear to me while I was in the desert watching the sun rising and setting, keeping the time of the earth. Sun Tunnels can exist only in that particular place--the work evolved out of its site.

Words and photographs of the work are memory traces, not art. At best, they are inducements for people to go and see the actually work. 

1. On that first trip West, Smithson and I collected rocks for his Non-Sites, while Heizer was making his initial works in the dry lakes near Las Vegas. Together, the three of us made a film at Mono Lake, a salt lake in the California desert, and I did some still photography of the land. 

2. In 1975 I made a 32-minute, 16mm, color and sound film, Pine Barrens, about, that area.

3. Each "Buried Poem" was made for a specific person, who received a booklet containing maps, descriptions and/or history of the site, and detailed directions for retrieving the poem, which was buried in a vacuum container.

4. Missoula Ranch Locators, 1972, is 22 miles north of Missoula, Montana, on Route 10A-93 on the Waddell Ranch. Eight Locators, made of 2-inch diameter, galvanized steel pipe, welded in a T shape, their ends embedded in the ground, are placed on the points of the compass in a 40 ft. diameter circle. A viewer, looking through a pipe towards the center of the circle, sees the opposing Locator within the diameter of the circle  of vision. Looking outward through the Locators, various aspects of the landscape are seen.

5. Les Fishbone, the astrophysicist, calculated the solstice angles to be 31 98 north and south of east and west. Robert Bliss, Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Utah, allowed me to use the helioscope. Harold Stiles, a surveyor and engineer, did the readings of the sunrises and sunsets, and laid out of the solstice angles at the site.

6. By spring the estimate cost of my pipes had doubled, because the pipe forms that I needed had to be shipped in from Los Angeles. So I decided to go to Los Angeles and meet with Jack McGill, the president of the U.S. Pipe Co., to see if I could interest him in subsidizing a work of art. The outcome was disappointing--they saw no value in getting involved with art; they did however reduce the cost of the pipes about 5 percent and their engineer approved the stability and strength of my design. I met with executives of two other large concrete pipe companies in the Los Angeles area with the same results, but only U.S. Pipe had a plant in Utah. 

[[image]]

[[image]]
Sun Tunnels, details of interiors