Circles of Light, a new exhibition at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, offers Germany’s most comprehensive exploration to date of the artistry of American artist Nancy Holt. Knitting together two decades of Holt’s pieces, Circles of Light is as integrated across space and time as the art itself — an echoing, transcendent mix of sound, image, sculpture, and language. The exhibition is a perfect complement, in timing and content, to the total solar eclipse passing across North America.
Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was an American multimedia artist and Guggenheim Fellow known for her land art, sculptures, and installations. Originally a literary assistant for Harper’s Bazaar, she also played with perception, light and nature, through poetry, photography, and film.
The main ground floor atrium of Gropius Bau houses Holt’s System Works (1982), an expansive set of bending conduits lit by electric bulbs. These thin, glowing conduits evoke sinusoidal functions, aliens, exoskeletons, electrocardiograms, stalagmites – all forms that sit at the boundary between organic and inorganic, internal and external. Visitors can step down onto the ornately embossed atrium floor – reminiscent of an emptied Roman bath – and walk beneath the taller-than-human metal peaks.
Holt called the work a ‘Fountain of Light’; she sought to bring the electrical system so essential to modernity out of the ‘realm of the unconscious’ – a framing that connects the built environment and energy to individual psychology. System Works acts as a skeleton key to her more paradoxical, opaque pieces: She makes tangible, personal, and beautiful the invisible, ubiquitous and banal, exposing ‘fragments of vast hidden… open-ended systems, part of the world.’
Much of the exhibit is dedicated to Holt’s landmark Sun Tunnels (1973-1976) – a set of four massive concrete cylinders that she constructed and arranged in the Great Basin Desert in Utah to frame solstice sunrises and sunsets. A minimalist, modern Stonehenge, the actual piece of land art remains in Utah, but Circles of Light presents her preparatory drawings, maps, photos, and film.
That the actual sculpture exists elsewhere is thematically resonant, as the exhibit repeatedly asks visitors to reflect on the transience and pliability of place. In the audio work Tour of the John Weber Gallery (1972), for example, Holt narrates a meticulous spatial guide to the eponymous New York City gallery; she points out cracks and stains on the floor, the furniture, and how listeners should turn and walk. Obviously the listener is not in that gallery — she is in fact across the world, half a century forward in time — but through received language and imagination conjures a place atop the one she inhabits.
At slightly under half an hour, Holt’s film Sun Tunnels (1978) facilitates a similar time travel. It documents the construction and placement of her cylinders in the Utah desert, transporting viewers there as well. Small piles of snow and shrubbery dot the landscape. The horizon line is a harsh slash. Construction noises – dirt scraped by hand, then shovel, then bulldozer – roar. Workers fit comfortably inside the cement cylinders that they measure out and drill. A crane lowers the finished tubes into place; for a few seconds they dangle perilously. The final sunrise is silent; the white hole of the sun comes into the cylinder like a pupil ascending into an eye.
The immense scale of the project registers first with the drama of a Space Shuttle launch. People are mostly relegated to silence: workers talk to one another but we can’t hear them, and Holt herself doesn’t appear until more than halfway through. Quiet, striking images abound: a wide shot of a road snaking across the desert like a silver river; crisp rectangular shadows cast by the tubes at dusk.
Holt drilled smaller circular cutouts into the cylinder walls to create ‘constellations’. These are most visible in the time-lapse photo series Sunlight in Sun Tunnels (1976): on 14th July, 1976, Holt took a photograph through the cylinder in the exact same position every half an hour from 6:30 to 21:00, capturing an entire day. Waxing and waning like moons, the constellation holes scatter changing ellipses of light across the cylinder’s interior throughout the day. Their shadows rotate around the bright hole at the cylinder’s end, together resembling a solar system. The specificity of space and time – a kind of attention, but also a kind of smallness – gives way to astronomical fluidity, revolution, and expansion.
With the actual cylinders elsewhere, visitors can only imagine the echo of standing and speaking inside one, what Holt described as a moment when ‘your human voice gets thrown back to you so there is a self-reference.’ Echo as a concept thus connects her use of space and sculpture with her interest in language: through echo, a renegotiation of presence and empty space, one perceives one’s own emitted speech, thereby perceiving how one is perceived.
Some of the pieces speak to this meta-perception with childlike optical illusions. Locators (1977-1980), for instance, acts as a trick telescope: Holt has viewers look at black ellipses painted on the wall, which resolve into perfect circles when viewed through her Locator. ‘It was once believed that sight emanated from the eyes and was cast out onto the world; that it somehow touched the things seen,’ Holt wrote. ‘Eye sockets were holes in the head for the emanation of light.’ Locators renders perception bidirectional, and places Holt at a recursive, triple remove: she perceives our elastic perceptions of perception.
This is taken to its most abstract in Light and Shadow Photo-Drawings (1978), a series of large black-and-white photographs of light shone through circular cut-outs onto blank walls. These act as photographic Rorschach tests; without context we might be looking at the origins of the universe, an ophthalmologist’s diagrams, desert planets, or the concept of sight itself.
I found these photo-drawings to be so open and abstract that they risked vacuity. Conversely, Holt is most compelling when she’s specific, especially when she’s tying language and space to psychology and relationships, best accomplished in her collaborations. In Points of View (1974), a highlight of the exhibition, Holt presents four monitors that each show a view of Lower Manhattan from a different direction. The four-screen installation is accompanied by four pairs of dialogues; for each screen, two artists discuss what they see (and of course the visitor, by watching and listening, adds another layer of perspective.) It’s ingenious, a literal and figurative demonstration of point-of-view. In the Gropius Bau, each monitor is positioned on a different wall of a box, preserving the original cubic effect even as the piece is transposed into a different place. Like with Tour of the John Weber Gallery, viewers reimagine themselves in new places, times, and minds.
Holt’s work with language isn’t universally profound. California Sun Signs (1972), a photo collection of the word ‘sun’ appearing on various signs, is almost kitschy, like inoffensive restaurant décor. But her pieces are playful and cohesive. Electrical Lightning for Reading Room (1985)—another set of conduits and bulbs built with standard industrial materials — gives visitors a chance to sit, read books, and turn off lights at whim. Monitors surround the room, playing films like Bob with Books (1971). The titular Bob (Holt’s partner Robert Smithson) skims books, tosses them aside, knocks a stack over, then lazily reassembles it. Holt zooms in and out, playing with perspective. Smithson wrote that his chaotic book pile is a way of comparing the accumulation of knowledge to earth history, the accumulation of geologic strata. And the books he is reading in the film are the actual books scattered around the reading room, so visitors can read them with him, again collapsing the distance between Holt’s art and the present, others’ perspectives and our own.
The whole exhibit, consistent with Holt’s interest in circles, forms a ring around the atrium. Pieces in the last few rooms take us back to earth, in Holt’s nature-focused, less conceptual art. Garden of Nets (1971) is filmed as gauzily as its subject, a canopy of netting atop a garden. It’s dreamy and antediluvian, redolent of the divine separation between earth and heaven. Sunspots shimmer on the camera lens, though, a constant reminder of mediation by technology and human perception.
Two pieces from 1969, also in the last wing of the exhibit, are further love letters to the natural world, and offer a subtle rebuttal to the rest of the gallery’s suggestion that space is malleable. Trailmakers (1969), a series of photographs from a walk Holt took in England, is direct, even didactic: the camera consistently points down towards a path indicated by orange dots: closed circles of light that define a single person’s trajectory. And Wistman’s Wood (1969), close-up colour photographs of ferns, tree bark, and soil, is exquisite in its localisation: the textures of etiolated leaves, the golden hues of sunlight on dirt. Wistman’s Wood documents the site of Holt’s first Buried Poem, a ‘private artwork… made for a particular person.’ Her simpler, representational appreciation of nature echoes in the poem’s limited reception: it’s intended for only one person and one place.
Circles of Light lets Holt hover above her work. We catch her only in glimpses — her floral bandana, her voice in an audio tour — and almost nothing of her biography or politics. One of the last pieces in the exhibit, a journal excerpt titled Light (1971), offers a welcome window into her mind. She considers a number of ways language can describe light. She includes ‘vigil’, ‘altar’, ‘eye witness’ and ‘glowing’. ‘Enlightenment’ is written and then crossed out.
The exhibit also leaves us with a lingering memory of Holt’s 1968 desert visit to Nevada. ‘I had an overwhelming experience’, she wrote, ‘of my inner landscape and outer landscape being identical.’
With thanks to Talia Blatt for this review.
