Nancy Holt
After witnessing the imposition of oil infrastructure on the Alaskan landscape, Nancy Holt (1938–2014) created Pipeline, 1986, an installation that currently pokes out of the Wexner Center for the Arts like an HVAC project gone haywire. A wide silver pipe climbs up from the ground in front of the complex, entering a glass window before it snakes down an interior atrium wall, where it slowly drips oil into a puddle on a gallery floor. Holt’s other sprawling installations here, such as Heating System, 1984-85, and Electrical System, 1982, similarly expose the often invisible infrastructures that keep modern life up and running. In the former, rushing water loops, arches, and turns through various illogical paths, whizzing by radiators, an adjustable valve, and a meter. In the latter, a grid of lightbulbs connected by a rising and falling electrical conduit transforms into a playful forest as we walk through it.
What makes “Power Systems,” curated by Lisa Le Feuvre, more than an opportunity to experience three of Holt’s important site-responsive works is its celebration of her multifaceted oeuvre. Concrete poems, “meter drawings” (as the museum describes them) capturing temperature and humidity over time, meticulous technical diagrams, and beautiful pencil renderings for the mostly unrealized landfill earthwork Sky Mound demonstrate Holt’s deep interest in drawing and its relationship to language. Enlarged prints from the artist’s 1985 photo book Time Outs, which presents pictures of televised football games captured at different shutter speeds, and Points of View, 1974, a four-channel video installation featuring largely obscured shots of Lower Manhattan with running commentary by Holt’s artist and writer friends guessing what they are looking at, examine the disorienting effects of framing and mediation. The artist reminds us to slow down and pay attention to the humming infrastructures powering the world around us. She asks that we not only appreciate the complexity of such networks, but also take notice of the waste, neglect, and manipulation within them.
