It is generally believed that the story of country art is a story of white men in weathered denim descending on what they considered to be the blank canvas of the American west in the 1960s with bulldozers and big ideas to make their work . But what about the women who also make their mark? “Today, land art appears as an almost perfect distillation of the art world’s history of male privilege, with its conviction that man is entitled to space to wander, to make his mark,” writes critic Megan O’Grady in 2018. ‘ This is one of the contemporary art movements that urgently needs to be reconsidered. ”
An upcoming exhibition at Lismore Castle in Waterford County, based on the work of the late Nancy Holt, hopes to correct the balance. The Irish venue launches its programming after concluding with Light and Language, a group show that regards her legacy in contemporary art as a central member of the country art and conceptual movements. It is an unusual opportunity to see a large group of Holt works, many of which have not been exhibited in decades. There is a large-scale installation, various video and audio works, photography, drawing and a distribution of her “concrete poems”. The most recognizable piece of Holt’s is an enchanting earthenware titled Sun Tunnels – four cylindrical, concrete forms, large enough to walk through, installed in the desert of Utah.
Holt himself, however, is largely known as the wife of Robert Smithson, who is credited with founding the land art movement in the late 1960s and made the immediate cover: Spiral Jetty, the giant coil of white rock that extends into the red waters of Utah’s Great Salt Lake.
Holt was also married to Smithson’s legacy. After his death in a plane crash in 1973 at the age of 35, she managed his archive – and ensured his lasting fame – until her death in 2014. In the same year, the Holt Smithson Foundation was established at her behest to look at both artists’ estates. This show is part of the program.
“It’s the classic thing – that female artists were just invisible,” says Lisa Le Feuvre, director of the foundation. “They were there, they did things and they were not seen.”
Holt was born in 1938 in Massachusetts. She studied at Tufts University with a degree in biology, but it was in the early 1960s that she moved to New York and met artists, including Smithson, that really made her think. In 1966 she began making her series of concrete poems and from the following year, as Le Feuvre puts it, ‘his language took over the landscape’.
Stone Ruin Trail I is a kind of hiking tour through a wooded ruin in New Jersey. Holt typed to friends a set of two-page instructions by hand, along with detailed photos, with the things (a rope entrance, a metal beehive, a castle-like structure, a glacier) that caught her attention. The approach – acting, methodical, inclusive – was constant throughout her career.
The Lismore show features a 1969 piece entitled Trail Markers: a series of photographs of the orange dots spray-painted on rocks and trunks to indicate British hiking trails. She was fascinated when she saw them on Dartmoor. She describes them as a ready-made work of art.
Holt was always serious. Her journals show how other artists liked to talk ideas to her. 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 consider her a peer, she replies, “Yes, but.” They appreciate her input. But she did not appear in the same places as them. Similarly, it is not that critics reject her work. They just did not mention her at all.
Smithson’s recognition of her support is beyond doubt. She formed his writing (she was a sub-editor at Harper’s Magazine; he is presumably dyslexic). Some say that she also shaped his ideas. She traveled with him west on location and when her earthworks were visible in Manhattan galleries, thanks to the films she made. “It’s Nancy’s time now,” he said in 1970. “My job is to help her.” You feel that if he did not cut his life short, he would do the same.
This margin of Holt as sub-editor is informative. It is a job that requires precision, curiosity and self-change to an equal degree. You are as invisible as invaluable, and you handle the words and voices of others with great care. So too in Holt’s work. The big names of the movements she has associated with – Heizer, De Maria, Smithson, James Turrell – are known for the impossibly large sculptural imposition on the land that is more about the artists themselves than they are likely to admit. Holt, on the other hand, was focused on the intangibles, structures and systems that bind us on the country.
Boomerang, seen at Lismore, is a video she shot with Richard Serra. You watch her talk for ten minutes as she listens to what she says, and is fed back over her headphones. The shifts and weakening in comprehension caused by the feedback delay seep into her improvised monologue, and if technology – and her diction – gives the age of the work, the experience is all too familiar. It speaks of displacement and decoupling.
The centerpiece of the show is the installation, Electrical System, from 1982. The first of her System Works, it is a flowing series of steel tubes connected to more than 100 light bulbs that fill a room. The aim, according to her, was to externalize and expose the hidden networks (for water, ventilation, electricity) that bind the built environment in the landscape. In 1986, she installed a structure of steel pipes that dripped oil into a gallery in Anchorage, just hours from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The latter has 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, with the entire planet.”
Sun Tunnels, Holt’s masterpiece, connects systems much more broadly. Made between 1973 and 1976, in the Great Basin Desert in Utah, and consists of four concrete tubes on an endless level of scrub and dust. They are arranged on an X to surround the sun at sunset. In between, they filter starlight and moonlight through perforations corresponding to the changing constellations. In the mirage-inducing desert heat, the whole thing disappears almost from afar; up close it provides shelter. In 2018, it became the first groundwork of a woman purchased by the Dia Art Foundation – the custodians of the other great works of the era.
Holt was a feminist, but resisted being associated with her feminist counterparts. She wanted to give recognition to her art, not her politics. If she were invited to make temporary pieces for exhibitions, she would sculpt them so well that it would be impossible to tear them down. And then she would refuse to give it to the institution. In an interview in 1978, she was asked if anyone could own the Sun Tunnels. Yes, she answers, and they will have to buy it. “She will not retire,” says Le Feuvre. Holt makes sure her voice is there to stay.