‘Capturing the feminine, contemplating the future: A look back at Land Art with Nancy Holt

American theorist Fernanda Negrete looks back at the work of Nancy Holt, proposing a reading at the intersection of psychoanalysis, eco-poetics and ecofeminism. As part of the ‘Troubles, alliances and aesthetics’ chair.

A pioneering figure in Land Art through her collaborations with Robert Smithson and Richard Serra, as well as her own installation in the middle of the Utah desert (Sun Tunnels, 1973-1976), Nancy Holt developed her work over some fifty years until her death in 2014. Her work indicates a precise logic of the distant, where contemplation becomes essential, which complicates and even destabilises the gendered and colonial image of the Land-Artist as hero and master who takes over space and makes the Earth his canvas.

The logic of the distant supported by Holt, which we propose to read at the intersection of psychoanalysis, eco-poetics and ecofeminism, thus concerns the articulation not only of the earth to the stars, especially through open-air sculpture and video, but also of the intimate that remains ‘off-language’ to the world, of the human to the non-human, and of a distant past to a real future. Holt poetises these articulations, notably with tunnels. They require a radical space for the feminine, where the so-called ‘death drive’ is nonetheless not murderous, and where aesthetic receptivity serves as the basis for the subtle act of ‘capturing’.

Fernanda Negrete is Associate Professor of French Literature and Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her first book, The Aesthetic Clinic: Feminine Sublimation in Contemporary Writing, Psychoanalysis, and Art, published by SUNY Press in 2020, examines the ‘aesthetic-clinical’ function of certain works by Louise Bourgeois, Lygia Clark, Marguerite Duras, Sophie Calle, Roni Horn and Clarice Lispector. Philosophy with Clarice Lispector (Routledge 2024) and Beckett Beyond Words - Samuel Beckett Today (2018) were published under her editorship. She co-edits the digital journal Penumbr(a): A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Modernity.

In her podcast Penumbr(a)cast - The Other Scene, she interviews psychoanalysts, analysands, and researchers who engage psychoanalysis in their thinking. She is a member of GIFRIC (Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et Interventions Cliniques et Culturelles) in Quebec, and of the Freudian School of Quebec, responsible for its New York Circle.

This meeting is part of a partnership between the ‘Troubles alliances et esthétique’ chair with the Legs, Laboratoire d'études de genre et de sexualité (UMR 8238 CNRS/UPL Paris 8/ Paris Nanterre) and the Melodia E. Jones Chair (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures University of Buffalo, NY).

The ‘Troubles alliances et esthétique’ chair is coordinated by Fabrice Bourlez and Madeleine Planeix-Crocker.