Description

This is the first retrospective study of Nancy Holt [1938-2014], the visionary American artist—a landmark companion book to the “Nancy Holt: Sightlines” exhibition. Holt’s wide-ranging body of work since the late 1960s includes Land art—particularly the monumental Sun Tunnels (1973-1976), major works of sculpture, installations, film, and video. A comprehensive representation of her working process in both word and image, this book illuminates Holt’s interest in physical space and reveals how the geographic variety and boundlessness of the American landscape afforded the artist numerous opportunities to develop large-scale projects beyond the confines of New York City’s gallery walls. Essays by a diverse and distinguished group of contributors—including Pamela M. Lee, Lucy R. Lippard, Ines Schaber, and Matthew Coolidge—chart Holt’s fascinating trajectory from her initial experiments with sound, light, and industrial materials to major site interventions and environmental sculpture. James Meyer’s valuable interview with Holt and Julia Alderson’s illustrated chronology expand our knowledge of this groundbreaking artist and the crucial contexts in which she worked. More than twenty original writings by the artist and a rare selection of her concrete poetry, documentary photographs, and preparatory drawings reveal Holt’s revolutionary concepts of space, time, optics, and scale.

Published in hardcover in 2011 to coinside with the traveling exhibition on observational modes in Nancy Holt's early films, videos, and related works from 1966-1980. Held at: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York, September 22-December 11, 2010; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlesruhe, Germany, January 28-March 27, 2011; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts, Chicago, October 6-December 17, 2011; Tufts University Art Gallery at the Aidekman Arts Center, Medford, Massachusetts, January 19-April 1, 2012; Santa Fe Arts Institute, Santa Fe, May 5-June 29, 2012; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, October 18, 2012-January 20, 2013

University of California Press

About The Author

Alena J. Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, where she teaches modern and contemporary art history and film and media studies. She received her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her research areas include film and media history and theory; modern and contemporary art; rhetoric of visual culture; theories of modernity; and the epistemology of the image.

Williams is currently preparing a book-length study, The Total Experiment: Cinema and the Modernist Work of Art, on astronomy and experimental cinema’s intertwined aesthetic imaginary. Focusing on a contiguous set of objects from multimedia installations and “expanded cinema” practices of the 1960s and 70s to the dynamic kinetic and light experiments of early modernism, this project examines the “experimental” film as a genre while undoing its logic. It addresses the production of artistic and scientific knowledge in the early twentieth century, the evidentiary status of reproducible media, and the political and institutional framing of works of art. She has forthcoming contributions in the edited volume Anton Pannekoek’s View on Science and Society. Modernism in Science, Radical Politics, and Art on the Dutch astronomer and socialist theorist and his legacy in contemporary art with the University of Chicago/University of Amsterdam Press, and in a retrospective publication of contemporary artist Lothar Baumgarten with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.

From 2010-2013, Williams curated Nancy Holt: Sightlines, an international traveling exhibition on American artist Nancy Holt’s Land art, films, videos, and related works from 1966–80 for the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. The retrospective companion volume published with the University of California Press (2011; 2015) addresses the artist’s engagement with landscape across a critical spectrum—visual modes of perception and observation, photography and authorship, the politics of land-use, to the interrelation of media and language-based practices. Williams has also organized a number of film programs, including Zwischenakte: Three Passages in Cinema at the Arsenal Cinema in collaboration with the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, and Rutgers University (2011), Site Recordings: Land Art on Film and Video at the Anthology Film Archives, New York (2010), and Light Is a Kind of Rhythm, a film program and book, at the Institut im Glaspavillon am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin (2007–2009).

Since 2016, Williams has organized the campus-based research initiative, The Visual Cultures of Work, which focuses on working practices: affective relations governing artistic and intellectual labor; the “commons,” and the common good; and the range of drives and investments that inhabit one’s production. Past speakers include: Giovanna Zapperi, Sabeth Buchmann, Joseph Masco, Laura Smith, Kaucyila Brooke, and Rachel O’Reilly. Williams is also a member of the UCSD Chancellor’s Interdisciplinary Collaboratory, Interrogating the Archive: Shared Research Methodologies at the Intersection of Aesthetics and Authenticity, with a collective of faculty and graduate students from the Departments of Visual Arts, Communication, and Ethnic Studies. Her undergraduate courses include: History of Experimental Cinema; History of Art and Technology; History of Film; Twentieth-Century Art; Video Art; Land Art, Environmentalism, and Media; and graduate courses: Special Topics in Art Practice/Theory: Creative Life; Film and Science: Rethinking Experimental Cinema; and Communities and Subcultures.

Her research and projects have been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG); the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte in Paris; the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Lannan Foundation. In 2017, Williams was a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. In 2018, she was DAAD Fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Design at the University of Arts in Berlin.

University of California, San Diego

Related Books

Details

Paperback ISBN: 9780520282360
Paperback ISBN-10: 0520282361
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication Date: July 21st, 2015
Pages: 296
Illustrations: 100 color, 80 bw
Dimensions: 9.50 x 11.00 inches

Hardcover ISBN: 9780520268562
Hardcover ISBN-10: 0520268563
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication Date: April 5th, 2011
Pages: 296

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