Locating — Nancy Holt's video-field work

1973

Artists: Nancy Holt · Year: 1973 · Medium: Single-channel video — documented architectural and landscape investigation using video as measurement tool · Substrate: Sony Portapak; outdoor-site documentation; video-as-measurement methodology · Place: New York, USA / Utah · Institution: Independent; Electronic Arts Intermix Nancy Holt's Locating series (1972–74), and specifically the 1973 single-channel video Locating (II), is a work in which Holt points a 16mm camera out her apartment window, uses the lens itself as a sighting device, and carefully verbally describes the objects she is fixing within a stenciled circular target overlaid on the viewfinder. She describes the facade of a building across the street. The pipe of a fire escape. A window frame. The precise angle she is turning through to move from one to the next. The viewer is placed inside her head — inside the instrument of her looking — as she operates it. Holt was a surveyor's daughter, by training a literature student at Tufts, and, from the late 1960s forward, a sculptor working with site, instrument, and language. Her partnership with Robert Smithson, which lasted until his death in a plane crash in 1973 while scouting the Amarillo Ramp site, shaped her vocabulary and in turn shaped his: the rigor of Smithson's sites, and particularly the geographic specificity of Spiral Jetty, owes something to Holt's surveyor's eye. Locating is an argument that the camera is not a transparent eye but a measuring tool — that its framing, its aperture, its zoom, its operator's physical orientation, are all components of the image. She makes the measurement visible. The target overlay is not decorative; it is a reticle, like the cross-hair of a transit. The verbal description is the field notebook. The video is the record of a measurement being taken. This line of work would lead directly to Holt's land-art masterpiece, Sun Tunnels (1973–76), in the Great Basin Desert of Utah: four eighteen-foot concrete cylinders arranged on an X whose axes are aligned to sunrise and sunset of the summer and winter solstices. The tunnels are drilled with holes matching the patterns of four constellations, and at solstice the sun sends a disc of light through the tunnels. It is a planetary measurement executed in concrete. The lineage from the apartment-window video to the Utah desert installation is straight: in both, the artist's work is to construct an instrument and let it read the world back to you. Holt died in 2014. The Sun Tunnels are now administered by the Dia Art Foundation. Lore Holt once described her childhood in New Jersey as defined by "a father who carried a theodolite" — a habit of looking at landscape through instruments that she inherited as a practice and never put down. After Smithson's death in the summer of 1973, she completed several of his unfinished pieces (most importantly Amarillo Ramp, Texas, which she finished in the weeks after the crash with the help of Tony Shafrazi and Richard Serra), and then turned to the Sun Tunnels as her first large-scale solo work. She hauled the concrete to Utah on flatbed trucks, oriented the cylinders by astronomical calculation done on a pocket calculator, and, during the final pours, slept in her car on the dry lake bed to be on site at dawn. She was 36. The tunnels are still there. The 2014 Dia restoration preserved the original concrete, aging honestly. Sources • Williams, Alena J. — Nancy Holt: Sightlines (UC Press, 2011). • Electronic Arts Intermix — Nancy Holt: Locating catalogue entry. • Dia Art Foundation — Sun Tunnels site file.