More than a formal practice of using earth as material, Land art has from the beginning been concerned with social, political, and cultural issues that cannot be separated from the land we inhabit. We know that “landscape” is an ideologically invested term, and artists dealing with their relationship to the land are by no means unique to contemporary art. However, Nancy Holt: Sightlines demonstrates that in the 1960s and 1970s the expansion of media in art played a central role in how Nancy Holt (b. 1938) interpreted the landscape. This exhibition comes at an opportune moment, building on current interest in revising the history of Land art as a multimedia endeavor created for viewers both onsite and in the gallery. Kirsten Swenson aptly described the recent survey exhibition Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (organized by Philip Kaiser and Miwon Kwon and presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, May 27–September 3, 2012, and Haus der Kunst, Munich, October 11, 2012–January 20, 2013) as aimed at “overturning established notions of Land art as massive displacements of the earth’s surface” (Kirsten Swenson, “Land Art for the Media Age,” Art in America 100, no. 9 [October 2012]: 148). Instead, Nancy Holt: Sightlines engaged with the complexities of Land art as it developed into a category in its own right, highlighting the use of time-based media and performance, and the central role of the museum or gallery in Land art’s production. The survey included examples of Holt’s early work in the mediums of text, photography, and film.

With Nancy Holt: Sightlines, a retrospective exhibition and publication, curator and editor Alena J. Williams succeeds in providing an excellent source for future scholars of Holt’s work and demonstrating her significant contribution to Land art, a category too often defined by a history of male progenitors. While the catalogue examines Holt’s career to date, the exhibition limits its overview to the years 1966 to 1980, and focuses on Holt’s “ability to transform our perception of landscape through different observational modes in her site-specific installations, photographs, films, and public sculpture” (exhibition text).

Due to the challenge of exhibiting Land art in a gallery space, viewers are introduced to Holt’s outdoor installations through documentation, an unavoidable situation that perhaps overstresses the conceptual nature of her work and leaves the viewer to imagine the experience of seeing it firsthand. The exhibition begins with photographs, drawings, texts, and announcements related to a number of site-specific works including Sun Tunnels (1973–76) and Hydra’s Head (1974), her early and perhaps best-known “earthworks.” Situated in the Great Basin Desert, Utah, on a forty-acre tract of land Holt purchased as a site for the work, Sun Tunnels is made up of four eighteen-foot-long concrete cylinders that have a diameter of nine feet, two-and-a-half inches laid out in an X configuration. Holes ranging from seven to ten inches in diameter puncture the massive tunnel walls; in each tunnel these apertures reflect the pattern of a different constellation and cast moving circles of light throughout the day and night. With an interior diameter of eight feet, the tunnels create large passageways, viewing scopes, and shelters for visitors to the site. Stunning photographs of the installation capture the dramatic effects of light, particularly during the solstices for which it was designed, as well as the beauty of the expansive Utah desert, while Holt’s preparatory drawings and photographs hint at the intricacies of her creative process. In her essay “Sun Tunnels,” Holt writes of her intention to “bring the vast space of the desert back to human scale.” She explains, “The panoramic view of the landscape is too overwhelming to take in without visual reference points. . . . Through the tunnels, parts of the landscape are framed and come into focus” (84, originally published in Artforum 15, no. 8 [April 1977]: 32–37). In the museum gallery, connections are made between Sun Tunnels and other works that incorporate viewing devices designed to reframe the landscape and create unusual perceptions, often evoking a sense of seeing a place for the first time. Missoula Ranch Locators: Vision Encompassed (1972), for example, which is represented through reprinted installation photographs, construction photographs, and an exhibition poster, employs instruments of her creation called “Locators,” steel pipes (twelve inches long and two inches in diameter mounted sixty inches high) carefully situated in a set of eight according to compass points in a forty-foot diameter circle in a level field of grass surrounded by mountains in the distance. Through these devices one would find isolated views of the wide landscape, disorienting the viewer’s senses of distance and scale.

The exhibition also puts documentation of Holt’s Land art in conversation with her lesser-known pieces of concrete poetry, serial photography, and works that employ strategies of marking and mapping including Buried Poems (1969–71), a series that consists of visual and textual ephemera, clues leading to sites where poems were buried for specific personal friends. These juxtapositions show that Holt’s practice undoubtedly developed through negotiations with conceptual idioms of the time. Yet, as both exhibition and catalogue communicate, to consider Holt strictly a conceptual artist would be to deny the perceptual aspects of her work, not to mention her ongoing fascination with the cyclical systems of nature. The exhibition catalogue provides the scholarship needed to further elucidate the relationship between Holt’s more familiar Land art and her text- and time-based practices which are suggested through their proximity in the gallery space. In the catalogue, Williams draws a connection between the placement of words on the page in Holt’s early concrete poetry and her earthworks, arguing that Holt’s work “was tied from the beginning to place and context” (184). The theme of Williams’s essay is Holt’s use of language and the “diverse modes of communicative address” that Holt created with various media and technology (183). This inclusive strategy allows for these interests to be identified as early as the 1960s, before Holt was showing her work publically and before her first large-scale outdoor installations.

The films and videos included in the exhibition counterbalance the didactic effect of the photos and texts in the first gallery and provide the opportunity for visitors to experience Holt’s work in its original, albeit mediated, state. The twenty-six-minute film Sun Tunnels (1978) documents the immense scope of the project, from the initial surveys of the open desert, to construction of concrete tunnels with large holes corresponding to constellations, to images of the light effects as seen through the finished installation. Situated directly outside the viewing room for the film, five concrete cylinders, portions removed from the tunnels in order to create the holes indicating constellations, sit underneath a map showing the four-hour driving route from the Utah Museum of Fine Arts to the Sun Tunnels location in a virtually unpopulated part of the state. Capitalizing on the relative proximity of Holt’s well-known work to this particular venue of the traveling exhibition, this presentation of Sightlines, organized by Whitney Tassie, Utah Museum of Fine Arts Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, included this additional material along with a self-guide pamphlet for visitors who might take on the ambitious excursion to experience Sun Tunnels for themselves.

Records of Holt’s exploration of particular landscapes in the films Swamp (with Robert Smithson) (1971), Mono Lake (with Robert Smithson) (1968/2004), and Pine Barrens (1975) “integrate aspects of diaristic, documentary cinema with immediate, phenomenological experience” (22). Furthermore, they establish a keen sense of Holt’s close relationships and collaborations with other artists. Mono Lake, a film completed by Holt in 2004 from footage and photographs taken during a 1968 trip to California with Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, brings the audience on a journey with the young artists as they tour the site of Mono Lake in the Sierra Mountains of California. The film begins on the road, documenting the car ride during which they engage in road trip activities such as viewing maps, reading about the place they are headed, and listening to country music. Trespassing to reach the lake, they meander around the landscape, investigating the terrain, insects, and wildlife. Smithson collects rocks; Heizer improvises a tumble down a hill; Holt takes photographs. Nonetheless, the desire to be swept up in a romantic response to the film as a portrayal of artists gathering inspiration through their sensory experience of a landscape far removed from civilization is tempered by the film’s attention to cameras, maps, and manuals—devices for recording, systematizing, and classifying that landscape. The hand-held camera coupled with audio recordings of locals’ descriptions of the landscape in Pine Barrens or Holt hearing her own voice echoed back to her through headphones in the video Boomerang (with Richard Serra) (1974) show that she was keenly interested in investigating the properties of the mediums she used.

The final room of the exhibition features pieces from gallery shows and studio installations of the early 1970s to 1980, including photographs and preparatory drawings for Holes of Light (1973), presented at the LoGiudice Gallery, New York. With the deceptively simple use of a large board dividing the room and pierced by round holes through which light was projected, Holt’s installation transformed the gallery into a space for exploring the construction of altered perceptions. Such installations again call attention to Holt’s use of the circle as a framing device and continue the poetic associations of the circle of light—from the Earth’s sun, to the transitions of birth and death, to the projector’s lens. As Williams observes, “In their exploitation of the indeterminacy of light and variable viewing positions, these works expanded the dispositif of cinema into contextual relations with real space” (193). Pamela M. Lee’s essay, “Art as a Social System: Nancy Holt and the Second-Order Observer,” is also concerned with the relativity of perception in Holt’s work. Lee draws on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of the “second-order observer” who is “essentially engaged in the ‘observation of observations’” as a tool for understanding the multiplicity and relativity of perspectives created by the systems in Holt’s work, from the earliest Locators to later installations connecting interior and exterior through the use of industrial ventilation materials (Ventilation IV: Hampton Air, 1992) (42). Again, the catalogue provides the space for additional explanation and theorization of this work, which leads to a deeper appreciation of Holt’s complex practice as a whole.

Through curatorial choices, the exhibition convincingly connects Holt’s work to widespread interests in contemporary art of 1960–1980s, including expanding media, interrogation of the gallery and other systems, and resistance to commercialism, without losing sight of Holt’s interest in investigating our relationship as human beings to the Earth. The catalogue explores this last aspect further by providing documentation of selected site-specific sculptures dating from 1974 to 1998, bookended by Sun Tunnels and Up and Under (1987–98), both of which bring viewers to places they would otherwise not likely go—an uninhabited desert and a retired sand quarry. In her essay, “Tunnel Visions: Nancy Holt’s Art in the Public Eye,” Lucy Lippard surveys Holt’s public art projects and discusses her talent for transforming a site into not only a place for individual observation and contemplation but also a public space for gathering and conversation—aspects that are fundamental to her collaborative process as well. Matthew Coolidge’s essay focuses on Sky Mound (1984–), the ambitious and unfinished project to turn a landfill in the New Jersey Meadowlands into a self-contained purification system, wildlife refuge, and “naked-eye sky observatory” (Holt, “Sky Mound, Proposal: Final Draft, 1986,” 214). These authors emphasize the social and concrete (“real”) dimension of Holt’s public projects as reclaimed gathering spaces. The catalogue thus provides a broader overview of Holt’s career, including not only the essays discussed above, but also a biographical timeline prepared by Julia Alderson, a new interview with the artist conducted by James Meyer, an essay on Holt’s archive by Ines Schaber, selected writings by Holt, and extensive photographic documentation. With its combination of scholarly assessments of portions of Holt’s oeuvre, a plethora of textual and visual information about her work, and the participation of the artist, the exhibition and catalogue are a valuable contribution not only to our understanding of Holt’s work but also to the ongoing project of revising the history of Land art.