Nancy Holt, Electrical System (1982)
Installation view: Nancy Holt: Power Systems, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 2025
Steel conduit, lighting and electrical fixtures, light bulbs, electrical wire
60 x 54 x 9 ft. (18.3 x 16.5 x 2.7 m)

Nancy Holt's Electrical System installed at the Wexner Center

Nancy Holt, Electrical System (1982)
Installation view: Nancy Holt: Circles of Light, Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany, 2024
Steel conduit, lighting and electrical fixtures, light bulbs, electrical wire
85 ft. 4 in. x 39 ft. 5 in. x 12 ft. 2 in. (26 x 12 x 3.72 cm)
Photograph: Luca Girardini

Nancy Holt's Electrical System made of conduit and lightbulbs installed in Gropius Bau

Nancy Holt, Electrical System (1982)
Installation view: Nancy Holt: Locating Perception, Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, 2022
Steel conduit, lighting and electrical fixtures, light bulbs, electrical wire
45 ft. x 40 ft. x 9 ft. 2 in. (13.7 x 12.2 x 2.8 m)
Photograph: Robert Wedemeyer

Nancy Holt's sculpture Electrical System, made of metal conduit and lightbulbs, in an exhibition

Nancy Holt, Electrical System (1982)
Installation view: Nancy Holt: Massachusetts, UMass Dartmouth, Massachusetts, 2021
Steel conduit, lighting and electrical fixtures, light bulbs, electrical wire, light switch
40 ft. x 30 ft. 6 in. x 9 ft. 6 in. (12.2 x 9.3 x 2.9 m)
Photograph: Chris Diani

Nancy Holt's Electrical system is a network of arching conduit and lightbulbs

Nancy Holt, Electrical System (1982)
Installation view: Nancy Holt: Light and Language, Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland, 2021
Steel conduit, lighting and electrical fixtures, light bulbs, electrical wire
55 ft. x 16 ft. x 9 ft. 6 in. (16.7 x 4.9 x 2.9 m)
Photograph: Ros Kavanagh

gallery space filled with arches of conduit with glowing yellow lightbulbs

Nancy Holt, Electrical System (for Thomas Edison) (1982)
Installation view: John Weber Gallery, New York City, New York
3/4 in. steel conduit, lighting and electrical fixtures, light bulbs, electrical wire, light switch
30 ft. x 22 ft. x 11 ft. 6 in. (9.1 x 6.7 x 3.4 m)

Nancy Holt's Electrical System (for Thomas Edison)

Nancy Holt, Electrical System II: Bellman Circuit (1982)
Installation view: David Bellman Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 1982
Steel conduit, lighting and electrical fixtures, light bulbs, electrical wire
55 ft. x 24 ft. x 9 ft. 6 in. (6.7 x 7.3 x 2.9 m)

Nancy Holt's Electrical System made of conduit and lightbulbs installed in an exhibition space

1981—1983

Electrical System

Nancy Holt

1982

Steel conduit, lighting and electrical fixtures, light bulbs, electrical wire

Overall dimensions variable; site responsive

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, with support from Holt/Smithson Foundation in honor of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary, 2025

Electrical System exposes a resource so common to modern life that its visual, tangible existence often goes forgotten. The work consists of numerous lightbulbs connected by metal conduit that curves and winds around the gallery, allowing viewers to meander amongst the arches of light. Holt noted that the Greek root “technic” literally means “art.” Here we see a rudiment of modern technology, contextualized as art, inviting us to examine our relationship to that which we so effortlessly utilize—and so readily fail to see.

Writing

Scholarly Text

Nancy Holt’s System Works: A Reflection on Research

Julia L. Alderson

Nancy Holt began producing her System Works in the early 1980s. These installation and site-responsive projects referenced resource delivery—specifically heating, electrical, drainage, plumbing, and ventilation systems. Though aesthetically the works vary greatly, based on the specific parts and mechanics needed for the variety of systems involved, they are intimately related in their thematic intentions. Through them, Holt attempts to focus attention on devices that are considered critical for modern-day life, but that we tend to ignore, take for granted, and even disown.

Writing by the Artist

large steel duct coming out of the ground and spanning large gaps with a person standing underneath

Ventilation Series

Nancy Holt

Made of the standard materials of each system – plumbing, electricity, drainage, heating, gas, and ventilation – the sculpture are functional; the electrical systems light, the heating systems heat, the drainage systems drain, the ventilation systems circulate the air, and so on.

Writing by the Artist

Notes on Heating System Works

Nancy Holt

Both Hot Water Heat (1984), exhibited at the John Weber Gallery in New York, and Flow Ace Heating (1985), shown at the Flow Ace Gallery (now Ace Gallery), Los Angeles, are room-size networks of pipes, gauges, and radiators, which function as the only hot-water heating systems for their spaces. The pipes loop around, and at the Flow Ace Gallery, the network of pipes extends in and out of three gallery rooms. As soon as people enter the gallery, they become enveloped in the structure of the work, the channeled water flowing all around them.

Scholarly Text

a room with wood floors and white walls filled with sculptural arches of conduit and lightbulbs

Electrical System: An Archaeology of an Artwork

William T. Carson

How do you present a site-responsive installation in a new location when the artist who created the work cannot be consulted? For Nancy Holt’s Electrical System, this was the exact question that had to be asked.

Since the sculptures are exposed fragments of vast, hidden networks, they are part of open-ended systems, part of the world. Over the years 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.

—Nancy Holt

Holt, Nancy. “Ventilation Series.” In Nancy Holt: Sightlines, edited by Alena J. Williams, University of California Press, 2011, pg 144. Originally published as “Nancy Holt: Ventilation Series” in Christina M. Strassfield, Volume 6 Contemporary Sculptors, exhibition catalogue, unpaginated (East Hampton, N.Y.: Guild Hall Museum, 1992).

Electrical System

Writing

Nancy Holt’s System Works: A Reflection on Research

Ventilation Series

Notes on Heating System Works

Electrical System: An Archaeology of an Artwork

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