Systems call to mind the grandiose, sweeping, and entrenched, for better or worse. Systems of belief, systems theory, the prison system … By comparison, Nancy Holt’s Systems Works, a body of sculptural installations made between 1981 and 1992, are decidedly humble and pointedly unfixed, mutable. The Systems harness the mechanisms all around us, confronting the viewer with the stuff of ventilation, heating, and electricity: fans and fixtures, steel conduits and wiring, infrastructure filleted from walls and floorboards like pinbones from a salmon. But the American artist, who died in 2014, was never interested in the frisson of the reveal. How we condition our environment has ramifications far beyond our immediate needs and desires, and Holt believed her unmasking of these systems to be a political act. The Systems invite viewers to consider the stakes of these alterations. They presuppose a few things about these viewers—that looking at infrastructure is new to us (because the majority of us don’t directly choose or examine the terms of most of the spaces we move through) and that the chief way in which we do have agency over infrastructure is through the design of our homes. While on first blush the Systems seem to approach the innards of buildings with clinical detachment, Holt’s close attention to them suggests intimacy, one I associate with a domicile rather than a public space. The home is deeply loaded in the American psyche, a vessel through which we signal how we tend to and safeguard what we value. With these works, she hoped to instill an ethos of responsivity and responsibility to inside and outside—a distinction she would increasingly find to be arbitrary.
Nancy Holt, Heating System, 1984–85 (detail). Installation view at the Wexner Center for the Arts, 2025. © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.
Among the earliest of these works is Electrical System (1982), comprising a room-spanning web of steel conduits, electrical fixtures, and light bulbs. Its pipes course across the room in undulating waves that crest nine feet above the floor and are regularly punctuated by Edison bulbs, illuminating the otherwise unlit gallery and underscoring the work’s utility. Along with Heating System (1984–85) and Electrical Lighting for Reading Room (1985), Electrical System is currently on view as part of Holt’s solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Shepherding the viewer through infrastructure that is usually hidden, the latter two works can be tweaked by visitors via (respectively) a twistable valve and on-off pull chains, inviting us to feel at home in the galleries.
Both Electrical System and Heating System were retrofitted to the irregular floor plan of deconstructive architect Peter Eisenman’s brick-and-scaffold pastiche for the Wexner, somewhat improbably set down in the middle of Ohio State University’s sprawling campus. (Reading Room was intended for easy replication and has set dimensions.) The Wexner’s presentation followed on the heels of Ventilation System (1985–92), shown at Holt’s 2022 retrospective at Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden, where it wove sinuously through and around the building’s glass trunk, its minaret spinning ventilators emitting a steady whir against the mute alpine forest. These remountings, as well as others over the past decade, have been orchestrated by the Holt/Smithson Foundation, which was established in 2018 to place Holt’s works in new and existing contexts “within a network of relations,” as the foundation’s director Lisa Le Feuvre put it by phone this past April. Holt was married to the conceptual/land artist Robert Smithson from 1963 until his death in a plane crash in 1973, and she set the groundwork for a trust for their work shortly before her own death from leukemia, forty-one years later. The Foundation will run until 2038 (one hundred years after both artists’ births), at which point it will be dissolved, a timeline whose brevity reflects the limitations of funding—as Le Feuvre noted, neither artist came from money or made particularly lucrative works—and that of an already overtaxed planet.
Nancy Holt, Ventilation System, 1985–92. Courtesy of Bildmuseet. Photograph: Mikael Lundgren. Artwork © Holt/Smithson Foundation.
A charismatic and well-connected artist in life, Smithson would continue to overshadow Holt in the decades between their deaths. She remains best known for her 1973–76 land artwork Sun Tunnels, which tracks the course of the sun and stars above Utah’s Great Basin Desert via holes punched into a cruciform of massive concrete cylinders (and which is frequently lumped with Smithson’s 1970 Spiral Jetty within a sort of general compilation of land art’s greatest hits). But in addition to celestial progress, Holt had always been invested in the spaces humans move through and inhabit. I’ve written before about spending the night inside one of the Sun Tunnels—which is not sanctioned, and you probably shouldn’t do it, but it’s worth noting that these pre-Systems sculptures, which provide respite from the desert sun, also comfortably cradle the body in recline.
Holt’s next series would prove similarly accommodating, giving the sense of inhabiting both a lived-in space and the bowels of a living organism. In keeping with her ethos of flexible design, as evidenced by how she spoke about the Systems in interviews as well as the diverse arrangements in which she showed them, iterations mounted by the Foundation since her death have directly responded to the architectural and environmental idiosyncrasies of their sites. The rapid advance of climate change has hastened what Holt intuited about infrastructure: that our choices about how to either arm ourselves against the elements or work with them expose both our values and our weaknesses, making these works ever more relevant. The Systems court a reevaluation of our relationship with the greater world, inviting us to see ourselves in exchange with the elements rather than needing shelter from them.
Nancy Holt, Pipeline, 1986. Installation view at the Wexner Center for the Arts, 2024. Copyright Holt/Smithson Foundation. Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.
Nancy Holt, installation detail from Locating Perception, Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, October 28, 2022—January 14, 2023.
Like her Minimalist and post-Minimalist peers, Holt had been working with prefabricated industrial materials for more than a decade by the time she made her first System. Installed at John Weber Gallery in Soho, the pipes that comprise Electrical System conjured the snarl of electrical and subway cables, sewage and drainage pipes buried beneath Manhattan, the nation’s densest urban area then as now. Asked in 2012 to describe her vested interest in a site’s location, she returned to this original 1982 staging, articulating the course of the power lines that supplied this electricity and tracing an invisible line back to the land on which they travel:
The entire work—an interconnecting electrical conduit that filled the room—emanated from an electrical outlet box, very visible on the gallery wall. So the work called attention to the electricity coming out of this box, but the question is: just what is the source of the electricity? The light bulbs in Electrical System were lit by the transformation of coal or oil or plutonium into electricity at a utility company, Consolidated Edison, in New York.
Three years later, Ventilation System I would make the corollary of infrastructure to environment explicit, transgressing the hermetic insularity of Tyler School of Art’s Temple Gallery via ducts and tubes that sucked air from the street to circulate indoors—the outside now brought in and its contaminants with it. (At the time, Philadelphia, where Tyler is located, was still trying to shake off the sobriquet of “Filthadelphia,” in reference to, among other things, its status as the only American city without regular street sweeping.)
In a 2019 text, written while she was a fellow at the Foundation, art historian Paige Hirschey described Holt’s project as taking aim at the Western fiction of infrastructure, one belonging “to an intellectual tradition in which nature and culture are seen as binary opposites, one in which nature can be subjugated to human whims without significant consequence.” Holt revisited infrastructure over the eighties and early nineties with works using landfills (the never completed Sky Mound, 1984–), drainage systems (Catch Basin, 1982), and other sites where infrastructure’s environmental impact was keenly felt. These works neither disguised nor transformed their mechanisms but simply laid them bare. Her intent was clear: “With greater awareness of these systems, the channeling of the energy and elements of the earth can be done intelligently with the long-term benefit of the planet in mind,” she wrote in the 1993 statement “Ecological Aspects of My Work.” Hiding our interventions, she believed, was what got us in trouble.
Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1978 (film still). Installation view at the Wexner Center for the Arts, 2025. © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York. Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
You see the deleterious results of the intentional obscuring of infrastructure in our year-round dependence on air conditioners, in Los Angeles where I am based but also throughout the American South and Southwest. Californian AC units run on electricity that is predominantly generated via natural gas, a process that perversely furthers the conditions that have exacerbated our reliance on them. The US, long the global leader on the number of air-conditioner units, was outpaced by China around 2010 per the International Energy Agency’s metrics, and as the planet warms, the rest of the world is catching up. Air-conditioner electricity usage has doubled since 2000, now accounting for 10 percent of electricity used worldwide and 4 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions, with usage steadily rising as heat waves increase in frequency and duration. As with many perversities, this technology exerts power insidiously through the way in which units “condition” lived experience, lulling users into complacency. The entire point, after all, is to temper the air to a condition in which we don’t notice it at all.
The call for greater mindfulness of energy consumption has become ubiquitous in left-leaning circles since the early aughts, when the term carbon footprint entered common parlance, but such mindfulness was a novel artistic premise in the 1980s, when climate change was less a lived reality than a theoretical one. Holt, who loved the Southwest, didn’t live to see its current era of “wildfire season” (an ongoing period of extreme firestorms delineated by the EPA as beginning in 2015, the year after her death), in which wildfires have occurred with such regularity that every pocket of the region is almost assured of a major fire each calendar year. In the days and weeks following the January 2025 Eaton and Palisades Fires, Angelenos were encouraged to run their filtration-equipped air conditioners around the clock to reduce inhalation of toxic smoke.
No amount of awareness can ameliorate the effects of dangerous air quality once there. But in addition to directing our attention to the conditioned world, Holt’s Systems also anticipated a primary strategy now being used to respond to the combustible present. By building the ethos of responsivity, which extends to posthumous iterations, into the framework of the Systems, she also preempted a growing move toward responsive residential design. This can be seen in current efforts to retroactively “harden” existing homes against wildfire and other disasters—remodeling old foundations with sleeker, simpler floor plans free of closed eaves and pop-out entranceways and dormers, all of which can cause fire to catch and spread—and building (and rebuilding) new homes with ignition-resistant exteriors and strategic ventilation systems to help them withstand extreme conditions. Key to this move is an acknowledgment that domestic spaces, considered by many to be the last bastion of traditional, or even nostalgic, design, need to be as nimble and innovative as the rest of the urban landscape. Much of the resistance to climate change–conscious design initiatives stems from a fidelity to past aesthetic models of what the home should look like rather than a prioritizing of how it operates, how it provides respite. The innovation of Holt’s Systems was their privileging of function in such a way that revealed our structures to be dynamic and flexible, while teasing out moments of sanctuary within them.
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