Nancy Holt, Locator (New Museum) (1981)
Steel pipe, mirror, circular aperture aligned with window facing the street
Overall dimensions variable [site responsive]
Overall dimensions variable (site-responsive); Locator: height 60 in. (152.4 cm); length 12 in. (30.5 cm); diameter 2 in. (5.1 cm); mirror: 10 in. (25.4 cm)
Installation view: Alternatives in Retrospect: An Overview 1969-1975, New Museum, New York, US, May 9, 1981 to July 16, 1981
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Nancy Holt, Locator (New Museum) (1981)
Steel pipe, mirror, circular aperture aligned with window facing the street
Overall dimensions variable [site responsive]
Overall dimensions variable (site-responsive); Locator: height 60 in. (152.4 cm); length 12 in. (30.5 cm); diameter 2 in. (5.1 cm); mirror: 10 in. (25.4 cm)
Installation view: Alternatives in Retrospect: An Overview 1969-1975, New Museum, New York, US, May 9, 1981 to July 16, 1981
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Nancy Holt, Locator (New Museum) (1981)
Steel pipe, mirror, circular aperture aligned with window facing the street
Overall dimensions variable [site responsive]
Overall dimensions variable (site-responsive); Locator: height 60 in. (152.4 cm); length 12 in. (30.5 cm); diameter 2 in. (5.1 cm); mirror: 10 in. (25.4 cm)
Installation view: Alternatives in Retrospect: An Overview 1969-1975, New Museum, New York, US, May 9, 1981 to July 16, 1981
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Nancy Holt, Locator (New Museum) (1981)
Steel pipe, mirror, circular aperture aligned with window facing the street
Overall dimensions variable [site responsive]
Overall dimensions variable (site-responsive); Locator: height 60 in. (152.4 cm); length 12 in. (30.5 cm); diameter 2 in. (5.1 cm); mirror: 10 in. (25.4 cm)
Installation view: Alternatives in Retrospect: An Overview 1969-1975, New Museum, New York, US, May 9, 1981 to July 16, 1981
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Nancy Holt, Locator (New Museum) (1981)
Steel pipe, mirror, circular aperture aligned with window facing the street
Overall dimensions variable [site responsive]
Overall dimensions variable (site-responsive); Locator: height 60 in. (152.4 cm); length 12 in. (30.5 cm); diameter 2 in. (5.1 cm); mirror: 10 in. (25.4 cm)
Installation view: Alternatives in Retrospect: An Overview 1969-1975, New Museum, New York, US, May 9, 1981 to July 16, 1981
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Nancy Holt, Locator (New Museum) (1981)
Steel pipe, mirror, circular aperture aligned with window facing the street
Overall dimensions variable [site responsive]
Overall dimensions variable (site-responsive); Locator: height 60 in. (152.4 cm); length 12 in. (30.5 cm); diameter 2 in. (5.1 cm); mirror: 10 in. (25.4 cm)
Installation view: Alternatives in Retrospect: An Overview 1969-1975, New Museum, New York, US, May 9, 1981 to July 16, 1981
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
left: Nancy Holt, Locator (New Museum) (1981)
Steel pipe, mirror, cut circle
Overall dimensions variable [site responsive]
Locator: height 60 in (152 cm); length 12 in. (31 cm); diameter 2 in. (5 cm); mirror: 10 in. (25 cm)
right: Nancy Holt, Crossed Locators (1972)
Photographs, collage, and ink on foam core
20 3/8 x 30 3/8 x 1 3/8 in. (51.8 x 77.2 x 3.5 cm)
Installation view: Alternatives in Retrospect: An Overview 1969-1975, New Museum, New York, US; May 9, 1981 to July 16, 1981
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
left: Nancy Holt, Locator (New Museum) (1981)
Steel pipe, mirror, cut circle
Overall dimensions variable [site responsive]
Locator: height 60 in (152 cm); length 12 in. (31 cm); diameter 2 in. (5 cm); mirror: 10 in. (25 cm)
right: Nancy Holt, Crossed Locators (1972)
Photographs, collage, and ink on foam core
20 3/8 x 30 3/8 x 1 3/8 in. (51.8 x 77.2 x 3.5 cm)
Installation view: Alternatives in Retrospect: An Overview 1969-1975, New Museum, New York, US; May 9, 1981 to July 16, 1981
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Nancy Holt developed this site-responsive sculpture in 1981 for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, then located at 65 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York, where it was based from 1977 to 1983.
Holt’s Locators investigate the processes of looking and the relationship between perception and the surrounding environment. The Locator comprises a T-shaped steel pipe through which viewers can look in two directions. In one direction, the Locator looks towards a mirror; in the other, through a circular aperture in a window facing the street. At the New Museum, Holt used semi-opaque curtains. Looking into the museum from the street, viewers saw the exterior reflected back towards them, encountering both their own image and their surrounding environment in the act of looking.
The first photograph in the carousel shows Nancy Holt photographing the installation from outside the museum, documenting her own view of the work.
I woke up one morning, and I went to a welding place, and I made some of these Locator pieces, and it was like overnight I had produced some physical objects, and yet they weren’t things that you looked at, but they were things you looked through. And this was very satisfying to me. It was like I wasn't creating anything, and yet I was creating something in order to have a void.
Nancy Holt, 1992
Oral History Interview with Nancy Holt, conducted by Scott Gutterman for the Archives of American Art in 1992
In the summer of 1972, Nancy Holt presented Crossed Locators at 10 Bleecker Street in New York. :Crossed Locators: comprises four Locators arranged in two pairs across the room.
In 1971 Holt created her first Locators, simple constructions made from two industrial pipes resembling a telescope or a camera viewfinder. They developed from Holt’s interest in photography—a serial, circular, and visual medium that enabled, as she often said, “vision to be fixed.” Holt first installed the Locators in her New York studio.
