Tunnel visionary: why was land artist Nancy Holt never given her due? This article is more than 3 years old Holt made mesmerising works that filtered stars and vanished in the desert heat. But land art was seen as a male preserve. A new exhibition redresses the balance
Dale Berning Sawa Dale Berning Sawa Tue 13 Apr 2021 10.14 EDT Share The story of land art is generally believed to be a tale of white men in weathered denim descending on what they thought of as the empty canvas of the American west in the 1960s with bulldozers and big ideas to make their work. But what of the women who were also making 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 roam, to make his mark,” critic Megan O’Grady wrote in 2018. “It is one of the contemporary art movements most urgently in need of reconsideration.”
A forthcoming exhibition at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, centred on the work of the late Nancy Holt, hopes to redress that balance. The Irish venue launches its post-lockdown programming with Light and Language, a group show looking at her legacy in contemporary art as a central member of the land art and conceptual movements. It is an uncommon opportunity to see a sizeable group of Holt works, many of which haven’t been exhibited in decades. There is a large-scale installation, several video and sound works, photography, drawing and a scattering of her “concrete poems”. The most recognisable piece of Holt’s is a mesmerising earthwork entitled Sun Tunnels – four cylindrical, concrete forms, large enough to walk through, installed in the desert in Utah.
Holt herself though is largely known as the wife of Robert Smithson, who is credited with founding the land art movement in the late 1960s and making its instant cover star: Spiral Jetty, that giant coil of white rock extending into the red waters of Utah’s Great Salt Lake.
Nancy Holt at Mono Lake, California, in 1968. View image in fullscreen Nancy Holt at Mono Lake, California, in 1968. Photograph: Michael Heizer Holt was wedded to Smithson’s legacy, too. After his death in a plane crash in 1973 at the age of 35, she stewarded his archive – and ensured his enduring fame – until she died in 2014. That same year, and at her behest, the Holt Smithson Foundation was set up to look after both artists’ estates. This show is part of that programme.
“It’s that classic thing – that female artists were just invisible,” says director of the foundation, Lisa Le Feuvre. “They were there, they were doing things, and they weren’t seen.”
Holt was born in Massachussets in 1938. She graduated from Tufts University with a degree in biology but it was moving to New York in the early 1960s and meeting artists, including Smithson, that really got her thinking. In 1966 she started making her series of concrete poems, and from the following year, as Le Feuvre puts, “she took language out into the landscape”.
Stone Ruin Trail I is a kind of custom-scored walking tour of a wooded ruin in New Jersey. Holt gave friends a two-page set of hand-typed instructions along with detailed photographs, noting the things (a roped entrance, a metal beehive, a castle-like structure, a glacial boulder) that caught her eye. That approach – observational, methodical, inclusive – was a constant throughout her career.
Our life indoors is intertwined with life outside, with the whole planet, actually Nancy Holt The Lismore show includes a 1969 piece entitled Trail Markers: a series of photographs of the orange dots spray-painted on rocks and trunks to mark British rambling pathways. She was fascinated when she saw them on Dartmoor. She described them as a ready-made artwork.
Holt was always serious. Her journals show how other artists loved talking through ideas with her. She was very close to Michael Heizer, Richard Serra and Joan Jonas. She exchanged concrete poetry by post with Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. But when I ask Le Feuvre if the men saw her as a peer, she answers: “Yes, but.” They valued her input . But she wasn’t exhibiting in the same places they were. Similarly, it’s not that critics were dismissive of her work. They just didn’t mention her at all.
Smithson’s recognition of her support is without question. She shaped his writing (she was a subeditor at Harper’s Magazine; he is thought to have been dyslexic). Some say she shaped his ideas, too. She travelled west on location recces with him and if his earthworks were visible in Manhattan galleries, 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 sense that if his life had not been cut short, he would have as well.
