Swamp

Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson
Nancy Holt Born in Worcester, USA , in 1938; died in New York City, USA , in 2014.
Robert Smithson Born in Passaic, USA , in 1938; died in Amarillo, USA , in 1973.

Nancy Holt first met the young Robert Smithson in 1958 and two years later completed her bachelor’s degree in biology at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Smithson had already completed his studies in drawing and painting at the Art Students League and the Brooklyn Museum School. After the couple married in 1963, Holt began to develop her own artistic career. She described her first trip to the American West in 1968 as an eye-opener. As Holt and Smithson explored the old desert cemeteries of Nevada and California, she was captivated by the modest scale of the gravestones in relation to the vast open plains of the arid desert. From that trip she produced a series of photographs, Western Graveyards (1968), which was pivotal to her formation as an artist. Another defining work is Sun Tunnels (1973–1976), an installation of four massive concrete cylinders resting on their sides and arranged in a classical “X” formation that suggests the way-finding grids of longitude and latitude that have been used for centuries to calculate exact points on the earth. Although its presence is modest and subdued, this monumental work is resolute in its placement in the remote Great Basin Desert of western Utah. Holt was ingenious in harnessing sunlight itself to complete this work. The top of each cylinder has a series of small holes. As sunlight passes over and through the cylinders, it shines into the holes, projecting the constellations of Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn inside them.
Holt and Smithson developed a collaborative body of work alongside their individual careers, exploring the use of photography and film to locate one another on Earth. Together, they more forcefully challenged the grids of cartography and vanishing points of linear perspective as impediments to their studies of movement in the light and energy fields of inner and outer space. The 56th Biennale di Venezia presents their collaborative work Swamp (1971), a six-minute 16mm film transferred to video that presents a form of relational movement in which the artists pass through a dense, swampy field of dry reeds. Smithson, audible but not visible, is beyond the cinematic frame giving verbal directions while Holt restricts herself to the interior vision of her Bolex camera. He reassures her to go ahead, “Just walk in a straight line… straight into that clump,” while she struggles with the abstraction of mechanical vision and the finite roll of film.
Also on view at the Biennale is their Mono Lake (1968– 2004), a 20-minute compilation of Super 8 film and Instamatic slides that shows Smithson, Holt, and fellow Land artist Michael Heizer circumnavigating the forty-mile rim of Mono Lake in California. The lake’s low-lying hypersaline and alkaline waters form an otherworldly landscape with limestone towers of tufa, located between the dramatic edge of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains and the deserts of Nevada. The footage was originally filmed in 1968, and Holt finished editing the soundtrack in 2004. Voiceover readings by Smithson and Heizer and music by Michel Legrand and Waylon Jennings convey an ethereal but not necessarily nostalgic mood. Here, the artists’ footsteps captured on film are compounded in the infinite and ever-present sediment of the lakebed.