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)
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
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)
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
This collage uses photographs from the first presentation of Nancy Holt's Crossed Locators in the group exhibition Recent Work at 10 Bleecker Street in New York. Combing the images with text, here she sets the protocols for the artwork, enabling the sculpture to be exhibited in other locations. Crossed Locators comprises four Locators arranged in two pairs across the room.
Looking inward, each pair focuses on the Locator opposite it. Looking outward, they frame a series of focal points: a circular hole cut into a boarded-up window exposing bars and a brick wall; a wall of peeling paint with a circle outlined in chalk; a circular mirror; and a view of people walking on the street outside. Holt also presented the audio work Visual Sound Zone: A Corner of 10 Bleecker Street in this exhibition.
Crossed Locators was probably my best Locator piece. […]
Through one you see a mirror. Through another you see a chalk outline of a circle, but it's irregular because it's going around a corner. When you look through [the Locator] it became a perfect circle. [Another one] looked at a boarded-up window which I cut a circle out, and then beyond [you could see] some steel bars. […] If you look through the other one, it looked outside the door and you could see traffic and people walking.
[…] They were set at that perfect distance apart so that you could encompass one through the other. […] [Each Locator] looked at each other, and then when you looked through one [of them] you saw a mirror, so your eye looking back at yourself, people would jump. They would look through and almost everybody would jump - the mirror was the size of their vision against the wall and they could see their eye looking back at them.
Nancy Holt, 2007
Nancy Holt interviewed by James Meyer, 2007
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.
Nancy Holt’s Visual Sound Zones are of a series of audio works that are sonic analogs to her Locators. They take the form of annotated scores and audio recordings.
