Nancy Holt’s work over the past few years, investigating aspects of perception—light, space, and focus—has grown steadily more complex. Holt’s pieces fall into two general categories: “locators” and “visual sound zones.” The “locators” are short galvanized steel pipes set at angles or perpendicularly on vertical tubes. They focus on particular shapes or visual sites in the way a window frames a space, connecting the originating focal point where one places one’s eye with the circumscribed area in the distance demarcated by the pipe. Several indoor locators were exhibited in a group show at Weber Gallery in 1972, and included black circles or ovals painted on the walls corresponding to the areas seen through the pipes. While this relationship between focal point and object is similar to the focus through the eye of a camera, the literal demarcation of shape as object presents a conceptual mapping of points between two locations—the wall and the pipe, the circular tube and the painted circle, the inside and the outside. This in turn establishes a boundary of vision by selecting two relational points out of the manifold of visual phenomena. The use of tilted pipes and painted oval shapes in some works examines and concretizes visual ambiguity and the necessity of knowing the context in which something is seen; an oval, for example, can be seen literally as an oval or as a circle tilting into space.
While the inclusion in a group show limited the effect of the pieces at Weber, Holt’s following exhibition at 10 Bleecker Street was able to provide a situation of multiple and various foci. Four locators were placed in a square so that one could see the opposite pipe by looking from the outside of the tube in toward the center of the-room, something like a focus within a focus. From the inside of the room looking outward, the image varied—a circular mirror reflecting one’s eye looking through the locator, a circular hole cut into a boarded window revealing bars and a brick wall, a chalk outline of a wall and chipped paint, and outside to the street through the door of the gallery. A comparison of these various objects of attention reveals the relationship between distances, surfaces, and between inside and outside—vision is extended, limited, and deflected in order to demonstrate properties of perception. The eye itself functions as a camera which must adjust its focus to the range of vision presented by each pipe.
Holt’s outdoor locators concern properties of perception in the expanded scale of landscape—the dimensions and proportions of sky, land, and water. Missoula Ranch Locators—Vision Encompassed, 1972, for example, includes eight locators set in the compass directions, N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW, ranging from 150 feet to ten miles in visual extension. The locators can be viewed from the outside in toward the opposite pipes, and outward toward a variety of landscape experiences—foliage, fences, the boards of a house, a mountain range, the sky in relation to a row of trees. This piece demonstrates the relationship of a viewing site to the possibilities of extension in all directions, counterposing the compositions through each tube. The focus on a fence at the foot of a mountain, for example, has a different value in landscape than a similar fence closer in vision. The 16 images, eight looking inward and eight outward, map two circles of visual attention which define the particular position of the viewing site.
Another kind of outdoor locator uses the site itself as the eye of focus. In a piece connected with the University of Rhode Island, Holt placed a cement-asbestos pipe five and a half feet long and eight inches in diameter through a sand dune at Narragansett Beach, circumscribing an almost equal proportion of sky and water. The size and placement of the hole through the dune permits the image to be seen in various ways; from a distance, the circle looks like a mirror reflecting light rather than a hole through the dune, while closer observation reveals the relationship between earth, air, and water. Because the viewing distance is increased in this piece, the eye no longer functions as a camera. A more independent act of centering occurs within the landscape itself, involving natural elements and changes—land and sky, day and night.
The “visual sound zones” parallel the “locators” in mapping out perceptions through an investigation of the relationship between words and visual detail. The pieces are tape-recorded descriptions of rooms, spoken in an unaccentuated tone, with no implication of judgment, that points out ordinary visual phenomena within given situations. The language isolates perceptual structures out of the concatenation of potentially observable events; words assume meaning as they compel attention to visual data, which in turn acquire more particular significations as locations in the spoken map. A recent videotape by Holt furthers this investigation of words and visual data. Two voices, those of the artist and Jerry Clapsaddle, are heard discussing what can be seen through the circumscribed area of one of Holt’s locators. They speculate on the environment around the circle of vision. The locator is then removed in order to show the false connections made from fragmentary evidence.
All these aspects of Holt’s work—focus, light, and the mapping of visual information—are realized in her piece at Lo Giudice Gallery, Holes of Light, perhaps her single most accomplished work. Eight circles on a diagonal axis are cut out of a white polyurethane board dividing the small room of Lo Giudice in half. A quartz light on each side of the room flicks on automatically, alternating from side to side so that the lighted side projects circles of light onto the wall of the dark side where the circles have been outlined in pencil. The light acts as if it were a physical substance. It fills the pencilled circles and spills into penumbral haloes. The circles on each end are so placed that they are bisected by the corner of the room when lit, increasing one’s awareness of the shape of the room and its relative size in respect to the alternating light. Similar to the earlier investigations, this piece patterns visual interest which maps out directions of observation. However, the light itself takes precedence over the function of focusing on the circumscribed areas. Consequently, there is a greater complexity of foci than the locators were able to present; the lighted room, the holes of light, the diagonality of the holes, the distortion of the circles at the corners of the room, and the reversal of these phenomena from side to side. The abruptness of the alternation compels constant attention—reigniting of perceptual interest—unlike the more casual locators which (except for the sand dune) required a willing participant. The effectiveness of Holes of Light makes the earlier locators and tapes seem too explicit in pointing out single aspects of interest. In contrast, the investigation of perceptual phenomena in the later work is more in keeping with the nature of vision—the presentation of a depth and multiplicity of visual events as something experienced rather than as something explained.
—Lizzie Borden
