PREVIEW: Nancy Holt-System Works
Nancy Holt was central to the earth, land and conceptual art movements as well as a pioneer of site-specific installation and experimental moving image. She recalibrated the limits of art, expanding the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades, she asked questions about how we might understand our place in the world, consistently investigating the relationships between perception, systems, and place. Holt’s rich artistic output spans concrete poetry, audioworks, film and video, photography, slideworks, ephemeral gestures, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, artists’ books, and public sculpture commissions.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Wexner Center for the Arts Archive
Nancy Holt rethought the possibilities of what art can be and where it can be found. Over five decades, she addressed the ways that often invisible systems around us impact how we think about our place in the world. The exhibition “Power Systems” presents immersive, site-responsive sculptural installations; previously unseen related drawings; and photographic series. Holt’s room-sized “System Works” are created with standard industrial materials that reveal the means devised to move air, heat, light, and energy through the built environment. In 1992 Holt noted how “these technological systems have become necessary for our everyday existence, yet they are usually hidden behind walls or beneath the earth and relegated to the realm of the unconscious. We have trouble owning up to our almost total dependence on them.” The Wexner Center currently offers a prelude to Holt’s gallery exhibition, an installation of her 1986 “System Works” sculpture “Pipeline,” in the center’s lobby and adjacent outdoor areas. calls attention to the physical and economic systems powering buildings and to the impact of fossil fuel extraction. Holt visited Alaska in March of 1986 at the invitation of the Visual Arts Center of Alaska in Anchorage, who hoped she might create a work of art in celebration of the region’s beauty. Holt was instead struck by the infiltration of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System through the Alaskan landscape. “Pipeline” was her response. The presentation in the galleries highlights her consistent attention to literal and metaphorical flows of power. When we’re in a building, we often ignore the systems around us, Nancy Holt observed that the lighting systems light. The heating systems bring warmth into the building. The ventilation system makes the building breathe. The exhibition features the first posthumous presentation of “Heating System” (1984), a room-sized sculpture that exposes heating infrastructure. Steel pipes loop around the exhibition space, punctuated by gauges and radiators, with a valve wheel at the structure’s center. Inside the exhibition space, a device on the wall records changes in temperature and humidity in red and blue ink on a piece of graph paper. In a 2013 interview in Sculpture magazine, Holt observed, “the sculpture produced its own drawing, which I thought was an interesting idea.” The exhibition also includes previously unexhibited works on paper revealing her continuous practice of drawing and showing her ideas for both realized and unrealized “System Works”. Nancy Holt trained as a biologist and made her first artworks in 1966. Her earliest output utilized the written and spoken word, exploring language as a system structuring perception and understanding of place. Holt’s interest in the system of language led her to explore the productive miscommunications that take place when information is imperfectly transferred from one medium to another. The video sculpture “Points of View” (1974) reveals, as she notes in her journal, “the wonder of place through verbal description.” Four monitors show views of Lower Manhattan with each accompanied by a dialogue that literally and conceptually demonstrates different points of view. Two years after making her first artwork, Holt started to explore photography during her travels. In Holt’s photographic series Texas Claims (1969), the earliest work in the exhibition, she charts the marking of private property and nature’s refusal of borders. In “Time Outs” (1985) she presents 32 photographs of football games being broadcast on television. Like all games, football is played within a system of rules and actions marked out in space, and its live action is beamed into homes and public places across the globe. Holt’s artistic practice is rooted in conceptual art, which—like football—is based in distributed systems. The exhibiton also features the film “Sun Tunnels” (1978), a work that shows the making of the landmark earthwork of the same name that locates the celestial system of the sun and the stars on the earth, and the feature length video “Revolve (1977), an evocative meditation on illness biologically possessing the body.
Photo: Nancy Holt, Pipeline (detail), 1986. Steel and oil. Installation view at the Wexner Center for the Arts, 2024. Copyright Holt/Smithson Foundation. Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Info: Curator: Lisa Le Feuvre, Wexner Center for the Arts, 1871 N. High Street, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA, Duration: 7/2-29/2/2025, Days& Hours: Fri 18:30-21:00, Sat 10:00-20:00, Sun 10:00-17:00, https://wexarts.org/
