Nancy Holt / Inside Outside
The MACBA in Barcelona presents the largest monographic exhibition dedicated to the artist’s work in Europe to date. The exhibition, which presents works made by Holt over the course of almost three decades, is the result of the collaboration between the Holt/Smithson Foundation and the Bildmuseet in Umeå (Sweden), where it was first presented. In Barcelona, it is expanded with six works in addition to the edition of a publication that expands content on the artist’s career.
Nancy Holt (Worcester, Massachusetts, 1938 – New York, 2014), the versatile artist, was a crucial figure in the New York art scene and a pioneer in the field of site-specific installation and moving images.
The exhibition includes various works made between 1966 and 1992 in various formats such as film, video, photography, concrete poetry, sound works, sculpture, and large-scale installations, as well as drawings and documentation of his projects.
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“The space and the sky and the sun made me drunk […]. I felt as if somehow my outside and inside were identical. I had carried that landscape inside me for a long time and all of a sudden I had it there, outside of me. When I returned to New York, I was never the same again.”
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With these words written after his first trip to the desert of the American West in 1968, he went on working and writing towards approaches in his work where interconnectivity is marked, linking both natural, urban, and celestial ecosystems. In his installations, he fixes the gaze and leads it towards incisive poetics of the place and operations of “repetition and duplication”.
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VENTILATION SYSTEM / 1985-1992
With this work from its last stage, the MACBA has set it up as the presentation work, before the access to the rooms where the rest of the works and contents are. Holt wanted to present a ventilation system specific to a building in a closed space, in which a series of tubes interacts with the architecture of the museum and draws attention to the aesthetics and origins of the systems we depend on in built environments. To achieve the fluidity of the air, the help of engineers specializing in ventilation systems. Holt made four installations, the one seen at MACBA is the third.
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WISTMAN’S WOOD – 1969
During a visit to England and Wales in 1969 with Robert Smithson, Holt hid in the forest several poems that he called Buried Poems (buried poems), with the particularity that the poems were dedicated to a person, in this case to Robert, and that he was then to trouble them by giving him a notebook with the map and directions, accompanied by what was needed to find it such as a compass and a spade.
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TRAIL MAKERS – 1969
In 1961 Holt visited Dartmoor National Park in Great Britain. The orange dots used by hikers to orientate themselves, Holt pointed out as a work of art waiting to be noticed. The points stand out as a human creation in the context of a vast natural expanse. The work Trail Makers is made up of twenty photographs.
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WESTERN GRAVEYARDS – 1968 (work collected in 2012)
During his travels along the interstate highways of the USA, Holt turned his gaze to cemeteries, places where the memorial intent and the overflowing presence of sculpture combine. Western Graveyards gathers sixty graves in Lone Pine (California) and Virginia City (Nevada). In this photographic series, he highlights concerns such as place, location, time and human traces in the landscape.
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CALIFORNIA SUN SIGNS – 1972
California Sun Signs (solar signs) is a visual poem for which Holt gathered photographs where the word sun appeared in commercial and infrastructure contexts. These images create a system that records the world around Holt along a given journey.
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SUN TUNNELS – 1975
Located in Utah’s Great Basin Desert, this work consists of four large X-shaped concrete tunnels perfectly aligned with the positions of the sun at the summer and winter solstices, the longest day and the shortest, respectively. When someone stands inside Sun Tunnels, the circular tunnels frame the vastness of the landscape, managing to reduce “the immensity of the American desert to a human scale,” as Holt points out.
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LOCATORS – 1972
Holt created devices that, without any optical element, focus the eye to see more than meets the eye. The so-called Locators with Loci 1972, show us how several elongated ellipses can be simultaneously merged into a single circle.
Being metal tubes placed on a fixed foot, they allow visions to be made inside and outside as he did in the work Missoula Ranch Locators: Vision Encompassed (Localizers del rancho de Missoula. Encompassed Vision, 1972) and placed eight Locators arranged in a circle pointing inwards and outwards.
In this exhibition, you can see for the first time the work: Locator (Cracked Window) from 1971, with the intention that when looking through the Locator our view will focus on a broken window. This vision is experienced by looking through a locator and seeing the broken window of a nearby church.
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ELECTRICAL LIGHTING for READING ROOM – 1985
This installation was made by Nancy Holt for the exhibition Artists as Social Designer: Aspects of Public Urban Today, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In it, Holt created this work, a functional installation built with standard industrial materials that illuminate a space dedicated to reading. The work makes visible the flow of electricity that moves through the building, as well as the systems that provide the electricity.
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ALBERT lOASO
Europea Words 