"Tenuous yet utterly convincing": Gloriana Riggioni on Nancy Holt's first UK solo show, at Haunch of Venison.
Photographs never were the extrovert type. They don’t bat their eyelids at you, flashing pictorial virtuosities, or stand in the middle of a room yelling, “here I am, love me!” They don’t leap out and grab your wrist to lead you on a full-on sensory experience. No, you walk into a photography exhibition and everything hangs quietly on the walls, well behaved inside its frame; it's always down to you to make the first move. Photographs love playing hard to get, and Nancy Holt, whose first UK solo show has just opened at Haunch of Venison, certainly knows how to work this to full advantage.
A key figure in the Land Art movement of the 1960s and '70s, Holt is best known for site specific installations such as Sun Tunnels (1976). Her photography, however, is central to her oeuvre, not just as a means of documenting the land work but as an expressive form in its own right. A sense of understatement clings about her images, and implies a passive, yet finely calibrated creative vision. The subtlety of her touch as she interacts with nature makes the effects of her pieces all the more sublime once you unmask this relationship: her gaze through the camera is a marker, a finger pointing towards the vast universe which we inhabit, but seldom really see. To attempt to represent such grandeur would be futile, so she employs a medium which allows time and space to do it for themselves.
Faced with the impossibility of direct representation, what Holt captures in her series of images is the indexical sign of the sublime; the trace left by the visible world as it passes by in all its glory. As it defines both solid form and the passing of time, a preoccupation with the sun and the movement of natural light is central to her work. Capulin Volcano (2007) is a series of five photographs which capture the complete transformation of the same landscape under the light of different days. In a similar vein, Sunlight in Sun Tunnels (1976) employs Holt’s own installation as a backdrop for a catalogue, in 30 frames, of the light effects between the hours of 6:30am and 9:00pm on a single concrete tunnel. In contrast to this direct documentation, a self-conscious, light-hearted twist on this conceptual framework comes in the form of California Sun Signs (1972): eighteen images of sun-kissed billboards, each featuring a sun motif.
Present to varying degrees, the element of human intervention in the landscape appears to be an existential statement; the ontological awareness of the artist’s (and reflexively the viewer’s) presence in the world. In Over the Hill and Down Hill (1968), the progression of the artist through the landscape is captured in third person perspective, allowing for an omniscient perception of presence. In contrast, Wistman’s Wood (1969) documents the artist’s forward movement in the first person, relying on awareness of the space beyond the captured image to convey the notion of presence. Somewhere between the two lie pieces like Trail Markers (1969) and the various Pine Barrens series (1975), in which the first person perspective is combined with indexical signs of human presence, such as painted orange spots and footprints, to deliver something of a metaphorical version of the same concept.
Tenuous yet utterly convincing, each one of Holt’s series is a trajectory through time and space, which demands of the viewer a willingness to travel, picking up on a trail of nature which the artist captures and displays through a self-aware use of the photographic medium.
Nancy Holt - Photoworks is at Haunch of Venison, New Bond Street until 25th August 2012.
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Image credit: Nancy Holt Sun Tunnels (detail), 1973-76. Great Basin Desert, Utah at sunrise. © Nancy Holt/ DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2012
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