imaginary outfit: sun tunnels

It does not sound particularly sublime: four massive concrete pipes, parked on a crusty desert in rural Utah. They sit at the end of miles of scruffy gravel roads, looking from a distance like abandoned infrastructure left to bake in the sun. But I had traveled nearly 2,000 miles to see them. Two years ago, I was on the edge of the Great Salt Lake visiting Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson's much photographed work of land art. It is sited in a sublime landscape. The day I was there, the sky was full of fleecy clouds and the land was dotted with clumps of foam blown off the salty water, a band of toxic pearly pink against the horizon. Between the clouds and the foam and the heat shimmering above the exposed lake bed, I felt like I was walking in the sky. I read later that Spiral Jetty's "impressive size and deliberate shape command the surrounding landscape" but I did not find that at all. When I was there, it felt comparatively puny, a thumbprint smudge on the sublime.Driving away, I knew…

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