Nancy Holt: Points of View at Parafin, London

This September Nancy Holt: Points of View launches at Parafin, London. The exhibition explores Nancy Holt’s fascination with language and systems of perception. The exhibition will be open from September 25 - November 14, 2020.

Holt’s earliest artworks were concrete poems, and many of her film and video works focus on communication, interpretation, and the subjectivity of language. In the mid 1960s Holt worked as an assistant literary editor at the magazine Harper’s Bazaar, and in 1966 began creating concrete poems and text-based works of art. These works announce the themes of sight, site, systems, place, and geography that would preoccupy her over the following decades. In her 1972 journal Holt noted a fascination with making words “concrete through vision.”

Holt treated words as discrete entities to be deployed in spatial strategies that defy and confound conventional narrative meaning. Seven concrete poems, spanning 1966 to 1986, are presented in Points of View. Alongside, the photowork Wistman’s Wood (1969) shows the site of Holt’s first Buried Poem, an artwork dedicated to Robert Smithson, and the nineteen part photographic series California Sun Signs (1972) charts the use of the word “sun” in signage Holt passed as she drove through the state of California to the Mojave Desert.

In the 1970s Holt’s interest in framing vision and making words material led her to explore the productive miscommunications that take place when information is imperfectly transferred from one medium to another. The four-screen video installation Points of View (1974) reveals, as she notes in her journal, “the wonder of place through verbal description.” Points of View was made for the Clocktower Gallery in New York. Four monitors show views of Lower Manhattan through the circular windows of the iconic New York exhibition space. Each is accompanied by a dialogue that, literally and conceptually, demonstrates different points of view. Lucy Lippard talks with Richard Serra, Liza Béar with Klaus Kertess, Carl Andre with Ruth Kligman, and Bruce Boice with Tina Girouard about what can be seen through the north, south, east, and west facing windows.

Learn more and see images of the works in the exhibition here.

Nancy Holt, Points of View (detail) (1974)

Clocktower Gallery, New York

Four-monitor video installation, black-and-white, sound

Duration: 44 minutes

Video unit: 6 ft. x 4 ft. 6 in. x 4 ft. 6 in. (1.83 x 1.37 x 1.37 m)

Photograph: Gwenn Thomas

©Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York

Archived News

Nancy Holt: Circles of Light at Gropius Bau, Berlin

Holt/Smithson Foundation and Gropius Bau are pleased to announce the most comprehensive presentation of Nancy Holt in Germany to date. Taking a journey through Holt’s output, starting with her first artwork made in 1966, Circles of Light expands over the Gropius Bau’s ground floor and atrium. Paying attention to Holt’s experimental approach to the interplay between the immaterial and the material, this exhibition underscores the singularity of Holt’s oeuvre.

Chapter Six of Tuesday Texts

We are happy to announce that throughout January we will be publishing a sixth chapter of our Tuesday Text Series as part of our ongoing Scholarly Text Program, which invites thinkers to focus on a single artwork by Holt and/or Smithson. This chapter of Tuesday Texts will focus on artworks by Robert Smithson.

Every Tuesday we will publish a text to our website that includes images selected by the author, a short bibliography, citation reference, and endnotes pointing to the author’s references.