Every time I travel from Strasbourg, where I live and work, to Princeton, where I go for research, I fly from Frankfurt to Newark and then drive to my destination. The landscape is made of highways, parking lots, office buildings, motels, and occasional vegetation, but nothing stands out and invites one to pause. Nancy Holt’s unfinished Sky Mound (1984-1991) was meant to catch the eye, provoke awe and tear the texture of suburban New Jersey by its stunning difference.

In 1963, in the aftermath of her parents’ death, Nancy Holt experienced what she would later recall as a profound and lasting shift in perception: “There was a sudden moment out of time, or a timeless moment within time, when I had tremendous stillness and clarity. My body relaxed and my breathing came from a center which felt endlessly spacious.  With every breath I was aware of sharing air, like an atmospheric bellows, with all the other beings on the planet.”

A defined interior space with white walls contains an arched network of steel pipes that undulates along three walls of the room. Each connection point of the protruding network is marked by twenty standard white ceramic sockets that holds a lightbulb, protected by a metal cage. From the bottom row of ten lightbulbs dangle chains, which can be pulled to turn them on and off. Below the grid is a continuous low bench for sitting.

Nancy Holt’s Sole Source was commissioned by the Independent Artists Group of Dublin as part of the twenty third Independent Artists Exhibition in 1983, which took place across two venues in Dublin: the Douglas Hyde Gallery and Marlay Park in Rathfarnham, at the foothills of the Dublin mountains, around six miles from the city center.

The proposal for the formal ratification of a new epoch of geological time to be known as the Anthropocene, submitted to authorities in 2023, required that a specific location and event be officially used to define a break with the Holocene, the current unit of Earth time since the last major ice age. The Anthropocene concept recognizes a period in which human activity has impacted the planet’s climate and ecosystems to the extent that it is reflected in its rock strata.

First conceived in 1985, Nancy Holt’s Ventilation System is a site-responsive installation in which interconnected industrial-scale stainless steel ducts channel airflow in and out of a gallery space.

Before sunrise on an already soupy Monday in mid-August 2023, scores of white contractor pickups from mainland Florida clogged the causeway bridge onto Sanibel, a narrow, crescent barrier island curving twelve miles along the Sunshine State’s southwestern Gulf Coast. Ten months earlier, Hurricane Ian had thrashed the island, leveling homes and businesses, disemboweling infrastructure, and clobbering complex, verdant ecosystems filled with alligators, marsh rabbits, black racer snakes, river otters, iguanas, gopher tortoises, and legions of bird species.

“Instead of putting something in the landscape I decided it would be interesting to transfer the land indoors, to the Nonsite,” Robert Smithson explained during the Earth Art Symposium at Cornell University in February 1969.

In a moment captured in a photograph at the start of the twentieth century, in the knitting room of the New Bedford Textile School, three students stand at individual machines. Each holds a circular creel from which spooled yarn was drawn up, then down, through a mechanized system that knits a tubular shape. I encountered this image in the archives of the Claire T. Carney Library at UMass Dartmouth, where I worked from 2017 until 2022 in a lecturer position, configured to combine teaching and curatorial work (later with the title Director of Community Engagement Initiatives).

Robert Smithson’s Upside Down Trees (1969) form a circuit with the artist’s parallel series of earth maps, one that materializes and satirizes period visions of the growing informationalization of art and perception.

In 1966, Robert Smithson produced three proposals for monuments in desert settings: Grave Mounds with Object, Proposal for a Monument on the Red Sea, and Proposal for a Monument at Antarctica. These proposals for monuments in Bahrain, Egypt, and Antarctica were made by overlaying illustrations of crystalline forms clipped from science books onto found images.

Robert Smithson’s earthworks Spiral Jetty (1970) and Broken Circle /Spiral Hill (1971) are located in sites ravaged by mineral extractions.

In 1969 and 1970, Robert Smithson created three “pour” sculptures that demonstrated his mastery of a difficult and deadly medium: entropy. In all three, an industrial material was prepared and poured downhill at a remote or neglected site and left to solidify.

We locate ourselves in various ways: phenomenologically we understand our bodies within our surroundings, cartographically we measure our position on the earth, imaginatively we locate ourselves in relation to places we call home as much as those we have never visited. Much of Nancy Holt’s work pays close attention to these interlinked processes of locating. Holt’s 1974 video Underscan brings to the fore the act of imaginative location, and its ties to family and care. This act of locating had a lasting impact on her practice.

It was early in December 1969, while still in negotiations with the government of British Columbia over securing the Miami Islet site for his Island of Broken Glass proposal

Monument wars contesting public space. Controversies arising over renovations of Brutalist landscape design. As the custodian of a world-renowned artist-designed park now in its fourth decade, these recent developments resonate.

“History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors.” If the sardonic analogy sounds like Robert Smithson, you’re close: it was written by his favorite poet, T.S. Eliot. The line could apply to the aged Renaissance and Baroque architecture jumbled on a dusky hillside that Smithson depicted in a gouache, ink and collage painting on paper in 1962.

Inside, we observe nature as if through the wrong end of a telescope: the sky above appears detached; clouds pass as if on film. When occupied, the tower is converted into an observatory from which natural phenomena are contemplated as images, their own representation.

--Craig Owens, “Environmental Art,” Art at the Olympics, 1980

The film opens with a disembodied male voice and a landscape in motion. “Just walk in a straight line,” the man directs, as the camera advances tentatively towards an expanse of tall grasses. “I think, I think I am,” replies an unseen woman, the camera inching forward into the reeds. “Straight in…to that clump,” the man continues. “It’s OK, Nan, you’re on fairly solid ground. Straight in. Just go right in.…”

“This is a major work, I want to have good reproductions in magazines. I want the piece to remain forever. Please help!”

In early December 1970 Robert Smithson traveled to the Dallas-Fort Worth area at the invitation of the Northwood Institute—a private business college located just outside of Cedar Hill, Texas.

It is perhaps appropriate that the work of Robert Smithson I now think amongst the most exemplary is one that wasn’t intended as a work at all.

Robert Smithson prophesied “The true fiction eradicates the false reality.”

In 1975, Nancy Holt created Pine Barrens, an experimental film shot on a tract of land in the dead center of New Jersey known mostly for its cranberry bogs, sand pits, and stumpy pine trees. Pine Barrens is a brilliant rumination on one of modernity’s central dialectical knots: the relationship between center and margin. That it does so not from a metropolis but from a periphery lodged within a periphery makes it prescient indeed. As Holt well recognized, no better place to explore this particular antinomy exists than the Pine Barrens.

Robert Smithson searched for lost islands. He might have found one in Miami Islet, but a telegram from the Canadian government in January of 1970, just two days after the seventieth anniversary of the shipwreck that gave the island its name, stopped the Island of Broken Glass project as it would also halt one hundred tons of green-tinted glass on its way to Vancouver’s coastline.

Nancy Holt strove to provoke the “concretisation of perception” by isolating “limited visions through holes and things” that would cause people to “really focus, really perceive intensely the thing seen.”1  Holt’s 1973 video Zeroing In is a conversation, a game, and an experiment.

In February 1969, Robert Smithson created the Cayuga Salt Mine Project. The impetus for Smithson realizing the work was the landmark exhibition Earth Art at Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art in Ithaca, New York, and marks the only time it was shown in totality.

Rocks and Mirror Square II (1971) is constructed from eight, identically sized mirrors, placed back to back against each other to form a mirrored square shored up with basalt rocks. The granular irregularities of the basalt are juxtaposed against the crisp geometry of the structure as a whole. The mirrors are entirely supported by the rocks.

In 1968, Robert Smithson realized an important group of works he collectively called Nonsites. This series features bin-like structures in which the artist deposited rocks, sand, broken concrete, and other elements he collected  at various sites in New Jersey. Accompanying these sculptures, Smithson hung on gallery walls photographs he’d snapped at the same Garden State locations, as well as fragments of maps that could lead other people to these places.

You are in the middle of an expanse of tall thick dry grass, head height. As you look and move through this, a world unfurls that you become immersed in feeling, hearing, seeing, and experiencing fully in each moment. Expansive. The experience feels vivid and rich despite the difficulties of movement across uneven ground and against a fierce wind. Immersive. You cannot see beyond your immediate surroundings. There is no horizon.

Trail Markers was photographed over a short stretch of publicly accessible footpath on the granite upland in the South-West of England known as Dartmoor. The path stretches between Two Bridges and Wistman’s Wood. The painted orange dots were a means to indicate the direction of the path for walkers and hikers. [Fig.1]

Circles everywhere! Upon entering Nancy Holt’s 2018 solo exhibition at Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea, New York City the observer is engulfed by a network of flat circular line drawings, round cast shadows, and orbicular light pools. Circles also appear dimensionally: as dark voids cut into walls and as mirrored surfaces shaped into orbs. Very tangibly Holt’s circles telescope out, forming lens-less viewfinders. As one stoops to look through cast-iron spyholes, for example in Dual Locators (1972), a tunneling effect occurs: circles become layered onto circles.

Robert Smithson designed and directed the construction of his iconic work the Spiral Jetty in April 1970. The Jetty is a site-specific work, meant to interact with changing conditions of the surrounding water, land, and atmosphere. While located in a relatively barren, unpopulated place, Smithson chose the site not only because of the vast surrounding landscape, but with reference to nearby abandoned oil rigs and the Golden Spike monument marking the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railway.