Currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, are three films by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty (1970), Swamp (1971), and Sun Tunnels (1978). The presentation is located on Floor 4, in collection gallery 411 of the David Geffen Wing.

“It appears that abstraction and nature are merging in art, and the synthesizer is the camera,” Robert Smithson wrote in 1971. Smithson and Nancy Holt, partners in life and art, were among a generation of American artists who expanded art beyond the gallery. Celebrating a recent gift from Holt/Smithson Foundation, this presentation of films from the 1970s conveys the artists’ embrace of the moving image as a natural extension of their engagement with place, perception, and the passage of time.

In filming their earthworks in the American West, the artists explore ways of seeing through the medium’s core properties. Spiral Jetty’s fragmentary editing encapsulates Smithson’s fascination with geological time, while Holt’s long takes in Sun Tunnels deepen her work’s resonance as a viewing device framing a desert landscape. In the collaborative film Swamp, a 16mm camera becomes a proxy for the encounter with a place. The pair’s call-and-response across New Jersey’s grassy wetlands resulted in what Holt called the “concretization of perception.”