Pine Barrens: Trees

In 1969 Robert Smithson was invited to exhibit in an ICA show, ‘When Attitudes Become Form’, and so he and Nancy Holt took the opportunity to come over and make their own kind of picturesque tour of England and Wales.  In an interview in Tate etc. magazine, Holt talks about their route, taking in Chesil Beach, Old Sarum, Pentre Ifan, Stone Henge and the Cerne Abbas Giant.  But 'besides the books on prehistoric monoliths in Europe and England that we had brought with us, Bob also had a book on Welsh mines. We visited many gravel pits and quarries, often quite out of the way. One place labelled Ash Hill on one of the slides is likely where Bob made a mirror piece called Untitled (Zig-Zag Mirror Displacement), probably on the outskirts of Tredegar. We found these abandoned, edge-of-the-world places intriguing; mines that had at one time railroad tracks and tunnels to transport rock. These structures are now overgrown and broken down. Bob and I both grew up in northern New Jersey, where you could find hidden quarries, forbidden places, scattered throughout the landscape. The coal mines in Wales were like that too. These socalled depressing, forgotten places that fall within the gaps of one’s consciousness are often described negatively. But if you look at them with a neutral eye, you start to see them differently; you begin to see a beauty in their entropic condition.'

Nancy Holt currently has a really nice exhibition of photo works at Haunch of Venison (five minutes' walk away from the Burtynsky show covered in my last post).  You can see in it two works made on her trip with Smithson: Wistman's Wood and Trail Markers.  I've mentioned Wistman's Wood here before - Smithson and Holt were stunned by it and Holt made her first Buried Poem piece there. She says in the interview, 'a site evokes a person, and I bury a poem for that person and later the person a booklet including maps, detailed directions and a list of equipment (such as a compass and shovel) in order to find it. To me, Wistman’s Wood conjured up Bob’s persona in a striking way…' Trail Markers is a set of photographs of Dartmoor rocks, each distinguished by an orange paint spot, used to identify a route across the moor.  As I looked at these I felt a strange sense of recognition, perhaps recalling other trails like this from childhood holidays in the seventies: was this how most such trails were marked out before the spread of wooden sign posts?  Holt says 'I hadn’t seen markers like these before. I didn’t know if they were unique to this place or not, but in any case they lent themselves to my project.'

The exhibition includes other works derived from the trips Holt and Smithson made together: Ruin View (1969), for example, showing the Temple of the Sun at Palenque (Smithson used photographs of the dilapidated Hotel Palenque to illustrate his notion of a 'ruin in reverse').  Her best known work, Sun Tunnels, is represented by photographs of light and shadow, taken at half hour intervals one summer's day in 1976.  These are hung near a very different work about sunlight - California Sun Signs (1972) - eighteen colour shots of garish signs in which the sun is word or symbol signifying some kind of retail opportunity.  The same year, at the other end of the country, she made View Through a Sand Dune, inserting a piece of pipe into the sand of Narragansett Beach, Rhode Island, and photographing the sea through it.  The circular view created by this pipe-frame has a curious distancing effect, like a seascape seen through an old stereoscope.  After seeing this I promised myself I would pack a bit of piping with the bucket and spades next time we head for the seaside... 

Not everything in the exhibition relates to landscape (there is, for example, a beautiful series of Light and Shadow Photo-Drawings), but I'd like to end this post by mentioning Pine Barrens: Trees (1975), a seven by four grid of video stills showing solitary stunted pine trees in a wilderness area of New Jersey.  In the original film local people can be heard describing the area and its local myths, but here the images are stark and silent, their transfer from the original 16mm film giving them a slightly blurred quality that reminded me of Chinese ink paintings.  In her Tate etc. interview Nancy Holt traces the origin of this piece to that 1969 trip with Robert Smithson.  'Looking back, I feel that the Pine Barrens film may have been seeded in our visit to Wistman’s Wood. Walking on that Dartmoor trail was a pivotal experience. Not long before our visit there, we had seen Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill. It all works on the psyche.'