It pays to think big if you’re an artist. You know, zoom out and try to get away from the minutiae of life, the tedium of the everyday, and think on a bit more of a universal scale instead. Land artist Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was a master at it; at using her work to place the body, and wider humanity, in a global, cosmic context. Holt and the other land artists of her generation – people like Michael Heizer, Richard Long and her partner, Robert Smithson – wanted to break out of the restrictions of paint and canvas, stone and chisel, gallery and museum. Land, nature, the world itself, was the medium.
Goodwood is a fine setting for the biggest UK exhibition of her work to date – an expansive, lush estate in the middle of the rolling West Sussex countryside. There are two big sculptural installations placed around the grounds, Ventilation System and Hydra’s Head. In the first, a huge metallic mechanism pokes out of the vegetation around the main gallery; big tubular aluminium pipes, all interconnected, snaking their way around the place and back into the building.
Holt wanted to expose the hidden structures of our built environment, but the work feels more bodily than that. It’s like the building’s lungs, like a set of pulmonary ducts that bring in life and expel harmful gases. Ventilation is often hidden away in architecture because it vents out the noxious fumes of septic tanks or sewage systems, but here it’s brought right out into the open. The building belches and breathes just like we do. There should be no shame in that. It’s natural, it’s the stuff of living.
Then you walk outside, head through the idyllic meadow, stumble down into the gleaming white chalk quarry and find six little concrete pools filled with water, arranged like the head of the Hydra constellation. Seen from a viewing area above, they’re darkened abysses, black holes that suck up the light, chasms that threaten to drag you in. But up close, suddenly, you see the trees reflecting back at you, birds flying past, the sky, your own face. It’s outer space, distant stars, planet Earth, the birds and bees and trees all right here, in this exact moment. It’s a portrait of you in the universe, a picture of its vastness and your own little place in it. Pretty good for some fetid, stagnant water.
The rest of the works are in the main gallery space. There are photographs, diagrams and poems, and as is so often the case with land artists, they struggle to match up to the imposing power of the big outdoor works. One series of photos documents waymarkers on stones and gates in the countryside – little coloured dots on rocks, like tiny minimalist paintings in nature. Another series depicts an English forest where Holt buried a poem she wrote for Smithson, with instructions on how to find it. Except we don’t get the poem, or the instructions. Just some photos of wet ferns.
Other photos see Holt “drawing” with light and shadow, making black and white curves and lines with slits in paper. They’re pretty, but a little dull. A light installation shines a spotlight on mirrors, tracing elliptical reflections across the opposite wall. Her Sun Tunnels – massive concrete cylinders installed in the Utah desert, channelling and corralling sunlight – is documented in a series of photos. They’re all nice enough works, but they don’t communicate her ideas of universal vastness and endless interconnectedness all that well.
Which is a shame, because if they could have been bolder and somehow filled the grounds with Holt works on the same scale as Hydra’s Head or Ventilation System, this would be a stunning show. But as it is, it just doesn’t think big enough.