Still from For the Time Being, 2021, Deborah Stratman
On Site: Sun, Salt, Spiral
May 8
Doors 6:30, program at 7:00
Free
Sun, Salt, Spiral is a film cycle devoted to the work of artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, who together expanded the material and spatial conditions of artmaking. Consisting of solo and collaborative films as well as adjacent cinematic tributes by moving image artists, these programs collectively engage with their creative legacies in the late anthropogenic moment.
May 8
Spiral Jetty (Robert Smithson, 1970, 36 min, 16mm> digital file)
Swamp (Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, 1971, 9 min, 16mm> digital file)
Sun Tunnels (Nancy Holt, 1978, 26 min, 16mm> digital file)
TRT: 67 minutes
Spiral Jetty
Robert Smithson
1970, 35 min, 16mm > digital file
The film Spiral Jetty is a "portrait" of Smithson's monumental earthwork of the same name at Rozel Point in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. Completed in April 1970, Spiral Jetty is an iconic earthwork and Smithson's most renowned piece. At 1500 feet long and 15 feet wide, Smithson's spiral of basalt rocks, mud, and salt crystals juts out from the shore and coils dramatically into luminous red water. The film documents the making of this earthwork, which has attained near-mythic status as it has disappeared and then re-emerged from the lake over the past decades. A voiceover by Smithson illuminates the ideas and processes that informed the evolution of the work, with allusions to prehistoric relics and radical notions of space, scale and landscape. [EAI]
Swamp
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson
1971, 6 min, 16 mm > digital file
Swamp is a collaborative artwork by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, shot in the swamplands of New Jersey. This 16mm film explores the mechanics of seeing through site, core concerns of both Holt and Smithson. Looking through the viewfinder of a Bolex camera focused in tight close-up, Holt attempts to walk through the landscape—her field of vision through the camera too narrow for steady progress. A visceral, chaotic journey unfolds as the artists confront a dense maze of plant life, struggling with the limitations of their own perception, and for the failure of technology to stand in for vision. [Holt/Smithson Foundation]
Sun Tunnels
Nancy Holt
1978, 26 min, 16mm > digital file
Sun Tunnels is a twenty-six-minute film showing the making of Holt’s eponymous earthwork Sun Tunnels, located in the Great Basin Desert, Utah. Sun Tunnels comprises four concrete cylinders arranged in the landscape in an X formation, each 18 feet long and 9 feet diameter, perforated with a constellation of small apertures emitting patterns of light inside the tube. In its portrait of an earthwork, this film shows Holt’s precise process and careful attention to site, place, time, and perception. [Holt/Smithson Foundation]
Artist Bios -
Nancy Holt (April 5, 1938 – February 8, 2014) was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. An innovator of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades she asked questions about how we might understand our place in the world, investigating perception, systems, and place. Holt’s rich artistic output spans concrete poetry, audioworks, film and video, photography, slideworks, ephemeral gestures, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, artists’ books, and public sculpture commissions.
Born in Worcester in Massachusetts, Holt grew up in New Jersey. She graduated with a degree in biology from Tufts University, Massachusetts in 1960. Later that year she moved to New York City where she met the artist Robert Smithson; the two were married on June 8, 1963. The places Holt lived remained important to her: New Jersey is the site of Stone Ruin Tour (1967), Pine Barrens (1975), and Sky Mound (1984-); and Massachusetts the location of Underscan (1973-74) and Spinwinder (1991). Her earliest exhibitions were in New York: the first group presentation Language III at Dwan Gallery in 1969, and the first solo in 1972 at l0 Bleecker Street. In 1968 Holt made her first journey to the American West. The Great Basin Desert, Utah is where her landmark earthwork Sun Tunnels (1973-76) is located. In 1995 Holt made Galisteo, New Mexico her home.
Born in Passaic in New Jersey, Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938—July 20, 1973) was an artist who expanded what art could be and where it could be found. For over fifty years his work, writings, and ideas have influenced artists and thinkers, building the ground from which contemporary art has grown.
An autodidact, Smithson's interests in travel, cartography, geology, architectural ruins, prehistory, philosophy, science fiction, popular culture, and language spiral through his work. In his short and prolific life, Smithson produced paintings, drawings, sculpture, earthworks, architectural schemes, films and video, photographs and slideworks, writings, and all the stops between. From his landmark earthworks to his “quasi-minimalist” sculptures, Nonsites, writings, proposals, collages, detailed drawings, and radical rethinking of landscape, Smithson's ideas are profoundly urgent for our times. By exploring the conceptual and physical boundaries of knowledge Smithson raised essential questions about our place in the world.