Fernanda Negrete

Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at SUNY Buffalo

Nancy Holt’s conceptual work in the late 1960s sought a way to sustain an experience that no object or preexistent space in the world could adequately represent. At the same time, she accompanied and supported her husband, Robert Smithson, in his Land Art projects and earthworks, which involved traveling and visually documenting these endeavors. Holt’s process of gradually materializing her ideas and of introducing them into physical spaces preserved, I argue, the principle of a singular experience as an essential part of the artwork. Since Holt also insisted, particularly through her works on systems, that the artist and the artwork were part of the world, I focus on the revelatory role she ascribes to the artwork, which consists of exposing, in her words, “vast hidden networks” and the fact that systems are “open-ended,” to open perspectives that are typically excluded from reality and consciousness. Taking as my central example Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-1976), a sculptural installation in the Great Basin Desert, Utah, I propose that whereas Smithson’s projects insisted on the energy of the death drive as “entropic,” that is, oriented toward randomness and disorder, Holt’s sensibility, akin to that of Leibniz, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Apollon engages with the drive as “anthropic,” where its excess takes shape in a fine-tuned universe and in a correlatively creative, aesthetic expression of subjective singularity.

Reception to follow

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies, French Studies, and the Psychoanalysis Reading Group.