Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Mono Lake [still] (1968/2004). Super 8mm film and Instamatic slides. Color, sound. Duration: 19 minutes, 54 seconds. © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.

In a 1992 interview recorded for the Smithsonian, the artist Nancy Holt recounted her touchdown in Reno in 1968. She sounds agitated, almost ecstatic:

Where you got off the plane it was just this big, flat desert. The space, and the sky, and the sun just knocked me out. I didn’t sleep for three days. And it was a very special experience where I felt that my inside and the outside were identical, somehow. That somehow I had been carrying this landscape within me, and suddenly there it was, without.1 

Holt was then 30, and with her husband, the artist Robert Smithson, was embarking on a two-month tour of the American Southwest. They were scouting locations for land artworks, chief among them the next of Smithson’s Nonsites—a series of abstract sculptures that he described as metaphors for sites “which do not resemble it.”23 Smithson envisioned a new piece that would be a monumental intervention into the largely undeveloped desert land, a project he would realize two years later with Spiral Jetty, which remains the Land Art movement’s most recognizable work. The pair were accompanied by artist Michael Heizer, who was also doing fieldwork. Heizer’s Double Negative, a pair of massive incisions into the Mormon Mesa in Nevada, was completed the following year.4

Holt loved the West on sight. Its austere terrain; its piercing, inescapable sunlight; vast arid plains punctuated by occasional horizon blips of hills and mesas that, rather than disturbing the viewer’s sense of open space, helped to locate their place within it. Her attraction to the desert was instant, but her description of her formative trip there was, in fact, heavily mediated. The Smithsonian interview has antecedents extending back to September 1976, when Holt gave a tour of Sun Tunnels to a young filmmaker named Ardele Lister. As she described to Lister, “I guess it’s the agelessness, primordialness, being in touch with milleniums, feeling connected with people who lived here 20,000 years ago, knowing they saw the same sunset, the sun setting where I’m seeing it.”5The conversation was recorded but never published. Instead, Holt kept its 79-page transcript,6underlining passages and making small typographical notes, revising her responses over the better part of a year. What resulted was the now canonical essay, also titled “Sun Tunnels,” published in Artforum in April, 1977—in which Holt had edited Lister out entirely.7

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Mono Lake [still] (1968/2004). Super 8mm film and Instamatic slides. Color, sound. Duration: 19 minutes, 54 seconds. © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.

Q: 

A: As soon as I got there, I knew that I was really connecting with the place—I was totally involved with that environment. This was the space, the physical environment I needed for whatever was inside of me. I didn’t sleep for the first four days that I was there.8

By the time of their Southwest trip, Holt and Smithson had been married for five years and were deeply embedded in the heady, theory-dense art world of 1960s New York. The couple’s social circle was composed of the kinds of artists given to manifestos and polemics declaring their work’s stakes, which were duly noted in art periodicals. Smithson had befriended the artist Dan Flavin and through Flavin he met Donald Judd, whose 1965 treatise “Specific Objects” was largely considered the opening salvo in a written war between different factions within this sphere. It pitted the Minimalist sculptor and his peers first against the old guard of the American Abstract Expressionists, and then against threats from within the group, in the form of 1966’s “Notes on Sculpture” by fellow Minimalist Robert Morris.9Holt’s gender barred her from entering directly into these discourses; the Holt/Smithson Foundation’s Executive Director Lisa Le Feuvre would describe her during this time as “at the center of this group, yet she was on the outside.”10But as early as 1966 she was experimenting with text in her own work as a means of dictating the viewer’s experience.

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (1973-76). Great Basin Desert, Utah. Concrete, steel, earth. Overall dimensions: 9 ft. 2-1/2 in. x 68 ft. 6in. x 53 ft. (2.8 x 20.8 x 16.2 m); length on the diagonal: 86 ft. (26.2 m). Photograph: Nancy Holt. Collection Dia Art Foundation with support from Holt/Smithson Foundation. © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

In an early series Buried Poems (1969–71), Holt stuffed typed poems into vacuum containers, and beneficiaries received instructions by which to navigate the landscape where the containers had been buried, locate, and unearth their dedications. By contrast her best-known work, Sun Tunnels, 1973–76, is emphatically material, a cruciform of four 22-ton concrete tunnels perforated by holes in the formation of constellations, establishes a physical sightline for the horizon. A permeable monument, it still somehow echoes the stakes of Buried Poems, her desire to frame the viewer’s register of her work within its site, and perhaps also by extension to control the narrative around it.11

The work’s location was chosen for its flatness and the prime visibility of sunrise and sunset from any of the Tunnels’ four outward vantage points. And the Tunnels themselves—tall enough to stand in and welcome shelters from the sun—supported the viewer’s body as she peered out from inside or used the installation from afar as a place marker. Standing alongside the work, Holt observed to Lister, “Some of the order comes from outside of me but my subjectivity interacts with the objectivity of that order. I like keeping that in perfect balance. I always know when it gets out of balance.” 

She might have been alluding to subjectivity in the phenomenological sense—the tension between one’s (anyone’s) body and the objective reality of the Tunnels, in conversation with the world they framed. But in an essay commissioned for Holt’s 2022 retrospective at Bildmuseet, art historian James Nisbet makes a corollary claim. Nisbet suggests that the Tunnels afforded a slippage between subject and object that let Holt operate outside of constraints of 1970s female subjectivity and its attendant identity politics. “Passage,” he writes, “is what allows subjects to break away from fixed positions: Holt from the expectations associated with being a woman artist in the 1970s, from what feminist art was supposed to look like, from what one’s preconceptions might have been, from how one is expected to live one’s life.”12

She wasn’t interested in filling in or gouging out the desert but in making a frame for it. Again, Holt to Lister: 

This work is not… what’s the word for monuments that are more than human scale [sic]? It’s interesting that totalitarian structures always indulge in that… In Madrid they have this huge park with these gigantic structures and everything is more than human. It’s emphasizing this idealism that’s always beyond reach.13

Nancy Holt in Utah’s Great Basin Desert, 1977. Photograph: Ardele Lister. © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.

One is struck by the (likely unintentional) comparison to Heizer’s own magnum opus earthwork City, finished in 2022 and currently the world’s largest contemporary artwork at over a mile long, which was already in production by the time of this conversation. While Sun Tunnels is large, it doesn’t dwarf the human body. The Tunnels look like, and are, fundamentally shelters from the sun. Holt placed her own practice squarely in contrast to structures that seek to physically tower over or implicitly impose on or dominate the viewer—in a sense taking a political stance by affirming what the work was not. 

But what the work was not, apparently, was an explicitly feminist project. The Lister interview becomes heated as Lister pushes Holt to give her opinion on feminist art and Holt insists that the two are mutually exclusive, that one can’t be a truly good artist and good feminist simultaneously. You can hear her excoriating the younger artist through the yellowed typewriter paper. 

You see, you think right now that it’s possible. I mean I think it’s wonderful you think it’s possible to be all these things at once. I think it’s great to be a political feminist and an artist. I don’t know what else, what other goals you have, but, I mean it’s impossible. And I don’t like saying this because I have fought the impossibility of it.14 

That this tangent of what constitutes a valid practice, to which nearly half of the conversation was devoted all told, was completely excised by Holt in subsequent reworkings speaks, rather than to its irrelevance, to feminism’s prickliness as a subject for her, something she hadn’t fully resolved for herself. (Even bearing in mind that the word had different, and perhaps more limiting, connotations in 1976 than they would take on in subsequent decades.) Holt had a vested interest in diverting attention away from her gender, in presenting not as female but neutral. She worked with contractors to realize her large-scale installations, relying on a network of experts (by Holt’s preference always local to the site, and by circumstance always male). She had established a rapport with the men who assisted her on location at Sun Tunnels and had come to see them as integral players in the work.15“Some western men have incredible raunchy senses of humor,” she told Lister. “A gross kind of humor, and it’s not directed at me.”16

Yet what’s interesting to me is her reclamation of feminism 20 years later in the Smithsonian interview. 

GUTTERMAN: Were you interested in the feminist issues? Did you read about feminism, or think about it?

HOLT: Well, I was, once it became a conscious process. But I wasn’t one of the ones that began it. But once it occurred to me that yes, these women were for rent, why hadn’t I thought of that, you know? [Laughs.] Yes, I am a feminist and I had been.

Holt asserts her work as feminist (albeit unconsciously so) as assuredly as she had insisted to Lister that it was not.

A draft of this text was first submitted to East of Borneo in December of 2022, shortly before the birth of my daughter. I revisited it this past spring with help from my editor, Adriana Widdoes, by then also a new mom. Adriana suggested I press the point of feminism; as she pointed out, Holt’s description of her inside and outside being ripped open until they were identical sounded like nothing so much as the experience of childbirth.17My discomfort at the suggestion made me reconsider my own sometimes fraught relationship to the term—as far back as 1998 when I gave an awkward ninth-grade book report on Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique to my Seattle social studies class  during the city’s post-Riot-Girl, pre-tech-bro years, a transitory phase that queasily mirrored my own. In my late teens I would renounce feminism as trite and limiting, before gradually making my way back sometime before graduate school. This was in the late aughts, and so predated my daughter’s birth by almost two decades. It likely hinged more on changes in the culture than personal conviction. At this time I had yet to be subjected to lewd jokes in a job interview, had never tried to get hired as an art handler (although complicating factors, among them my general lack of handiness, may have informed those snubs), and, to my regret, was still blithely unaware of the intersections of race, class, and ability that had given generations of feminism nuance and bite. 

Four decades in, my avowal of feminism is informed by my daughter’s existence in an increasingly antagonistic world, and the term’s own tenousness. It’s currently in vogue to make offhand jokes about incumbency of Gilead, a coming time when women will again need husbands’ permission to own checking accounts or property. Even as the terms by which we qualify our existence remain irritating in their implied constraint, the stakes of disavowing them are as real as ever. For her part, Holt’s initial ambivalence toward her gender, which echoes her regard for the desert as a somewhat mystical, “primordial,” and ultimately abstract entity, was already beginning to give way to the specificity of lived experience.18

In the 2022 draft of this text, I had written that Sun Tunnels was the climax of Holt’s investigation into the limits of abstract space, before the specificity of site and viewer won over. But now I think back to her impulse toward revision and see a different sort of crossroads. I see our shared ambivalence—toward the “feminine,” toward biography, between control and abandon. If the desert had ripped Holt open, Sun Tunnels provided a moment of reprieve, for incongruities to coalesce and gel once more, into a coherent—if contradictory—whole.

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (1973-76). Great Basin Desert, Utah. Concrete, steel, earth. Overall dimensions: 9 ft. 2-1/2 in. x 68 ft. 6in. x 53 ft. (2.8 x 20.8 x 16.2 m); length on the diagonal: 86 ft. (26.2 m). Photograph: Nancy Holt. Collection Dia Art Foundation with support from Holt/Smithson Foundation. © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.