It is generally believed that the story of land art is one of white men in distressed denim descending on what they saw in the 1960s as the empty canvas of the American West with bulldozers and big ideas for making their work. But what about the women who have also left their mark? Today, land art appears as a near-perfect distillation of the history of male privilege in the art world, with the belief that man has the right to roam, to make his mark, critic Megan O’Grady wrote in 2018. one of the contemporary art movements most urgently in need of reconsideration. “
An upcoming exhibition at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, focusing on the work of the late Nancy Holt, hopes to restore that balance. The Irish venue is launching its post-lockdown programming with Light and Language, a group exhibition that looks at her legacy in contemporary art as a central member of land art and conceptual movements. It is an unusual opportunity to see a significant group of Holt’s works, many of which have not been on display for decades. There is a large-scale installation, various video and sound works, photography, drawing and a scattering of her “concrete poems”. Holt’s most recognizable piece is an enchanting pottery entitled Sun Tunnels – four cylindrical, concrete shapes, large enough to walk through, installed in the Utah desert.
Holt himself, however, is largely known as the wife of Robert Smithson, who founded the land art movement in the late 1960s and immediately made the cover star: Spiral Jetty, that giant spiral of white rock that stretches into the red waters of Utah’s Great Salt Lake.
Holt was also married to Smithson’s inheritance. After his death in a plane crash in 1973 at the age of 35, she managed his archive – and ensured his enduring fame – until she died in 2014. That same year, and on her orders, the Holt Smithson Foundation was created to look into the estates of both artists. This show is part of that program.
“It’s that classic thing – that female artists were just invisible,” says the foundation’s director, Lisa Le Feuvre. “They were there, they were doing things, and they weren’t seen.”
Holt was born in Massachusetts in 1938. She graduated from Tufts University with a degree in biology, but moved to New York in the early 1960s and met artists, including Smithson, who really got her thinking. In 1966 she started making her series of concrete poems, and from the following year, as Le Feuvre puts it, “she took language into the landscape”.
Stone Ruin Trail I is a kind of tailor-made walking tour of a wooded ruin in New Jersey. Holt gave friends a two-page set of hand-typed instructions, along with detailed photos, and jotted down the things (a constricted entrance, a metal beehive, a castle-like structure, an icy rock) that she noticed. That approach – observational, methodical, inclusive – has been a constant throughout her career.
The Lismore show features a 1969 piece entitled Trail Markers: a series of photos of the orange dots sprayed on rocks and logs to mark British hiking trails. She was fascinated when she saw them on Dartmoor. She described them as a ready-made work of art.
Holt was always serious. Her diaries show how other artists liked to talk to her about ideas. She was very close to Michael Heizer, Richard Serra and Joan Jonas. She exchanged concrete poetry by mail with Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. But when I ask Le Feuvre if the men saw her as a pear, she replies: “Yes, but.” They appreciated her input. But she didn’t exhibit in the same places where they were. Likewise, it was not that critics disapproved of her work. They just didn’t mention her at all.
Smithson’s acknowledgment of her support is indisputable. She shaped his writing (she was an under-editor at Harper’s Magazine; he is believed to have been dyslexic). Some say she also shaped his ideas. She traveled west with him on location recesses, and if his earthworks were visible in galleries in Manhattan, it’s because of the films she made. “It’s Nancy’s time now,” he said in 1970. “My job is to help her.” You get the feeling that if his life hadn’t been shortened, he would have.
This sideline of Holt as a sub-editor is educational. It’s a job that requires precision, curiosity and self-destruction in equal measure. You are as invisible as you are priceless, and you handle words and the voices of others with great care. This is also the case in Holt’s work. The big names of the movements with which she is associated – Heizer, De Maria, Smithson, James Turrell – are known for impossibly large sculptural impositions on land that are more about the artists themselves than they are likely to admit. Holt, on the other hand, was attuned to the intangible assets, the structures and systems that connect us to the country.
Boomerang, on view at Lismore, is a video she made with Richard Serra. You see her talking for 10 minutes while listening to what she is saying, fed back to her through headphones. The shifts and shifts in understanding caused by that feedback delay trickle down into her improvised monologue, and when technology – and its diction – give away the age of the work, the experience is all too familiar. It speaks of displacement and disconnection.
The centerpiece of the show is the 1982 installation, Electrical System. The first of her System Works, it’s a flowing series of steel tubes connected to more than 100 lit incandescent bulbs, filling a room. The goal, she said, was to bring out and expose the hidden networks (for water, ventilation, electricity) that connect the built environment with the landscape. In 1986, she installed a steel pipe structure dripping oil in a gallery in Anchorage just hours from the Trans-Alaska pipeline. The latter had also been leaking oil for years. “These works are all political,” she told an interviewer shortly before she died. “Our indoor life is intertwined with life outside, in fact with the entire planet.”
Sun Tunnels, Holt’s masterpiece, connects much more to systems. Created between 1973 and 1976, in the Great Basin Desert in Utah, it consists of four concrete tubes on an endless expanse of scrub and dust. They are arranged in an X so that they frame the sun during the solstices. In between, they filter starlight and moonlight through perforations that correspond to the changing constellations. In the mirage-inducing heat of the desert, the whole thing almost disappears from afar; up close it offers shelter. In 2018, it became the first earthwork to be purchased by a woman by the Dia Art Foundation – the custodians of the era’s other great works.
Holt was a feminist, but opposed its association with her feminist peers. She wanted recognition for her art, not her politics. When invited to create temporary pieces for exhibitions, she sculpted them so well that they were impossible to dismantle. And then she refused to give them to the institution. In a 1978 interview, she was asked if anyone could own the Sun Tunnels. Yes, she replied, and they should buy them. “She wouldn’t flinch”, says Le Feuvre. Holt made sure her voice was there to stay.