Through Sun Tunnels : radical subjectivity and the radiant drive

This essay considers the aesthetic stakes of light in Nancy Holt's installation Sun Tunnels (1973–1976), emphasising their relation to subjective consciousness and time. Taking into account the question of systems Holt's oeuvre also developed, the essay meditates on the rupture Holt's installation in the Basin Desert in Utah provokes today, when the prevalence of social systems of immediate visibility and communication eliminate remoteness and deny unobservable, irreducibly intimate experience, or subjective time. A direct exploration of Sun Tunnels on the summer solstice 2022 grounds the essay's proposal to seriously engage with the creative potentialities of the drive, and to furthermore consider, beyond Robert Smithson's notion of the drive's entropic character, a radiant or anthropic principle.