Jenny Holzer
Encyclopedia : J : JE : JEN : Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio) is an American conceptual artist. She attended Ohio University (in Athens, OH), Rhode Island School of Design, and the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Holzer was originally an abstract artist, focusing on painting and printmaking, but after moving to New York City in 1977, she began working with text as art.
The main focus of Jenny Holzer's work is on the use of ideas in public space. Street posters are her favorite medium, but she also makes use of a variety of other media, including LED signs, plaques, benches, stickers, T-shirts and the World Wide Web.
Understanding Jenny Holzer
In a 1980 essay called The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe accused modern artists of departing from the western tradition of representational art, with its supposed humanism of celebrating or criticizing the outside world in plastic form, and turning into self-reflexive and ironic commentators whose works were less art than a "statement".
Wolfe, a former Gonzo journalist later turned conservative, was sounding a common theme: that some time before, the West had celebrated the world but was through a variety of movements, from deconstruction to conceptual art, degenerating into scholasticism, or the Mandarin tradition of the "eight legged essay" of ancient China.
But precisely at the same time, Holzer was more or less beginning to act precisely as charged and indeed take the venture seriously, for the content of her works is pure text.
In China, words as art, both instantiated in a particular style of calligraphy and independent of that style, are a highly conservative and traditional visual art, but Holzer took Western art back to the illuminated manuscript, presented in a public space.
The arresting quality of her billboards, and the way they make many viewers stop short, is an exploitation of the urban space which took its modern form, as a space explicitly for commerce in which "public" is granted by grace and favor of corporations, occurs because the viewer is ordinarily prepared to see yet another commercial message and is instead confronted with something like "it is in your self-interest to be very tender", a dialectical reversal of the way in which the advertisement has to take "self-interest" as something timeless and a given, as seen in microeconomics.
As in the case of the more popular Christo and his large, public, and less confrontational installations, Holzer had to deal with retaking an urban space that by 1980 was being regentrified primarily by private interests. The city of New York, which had prior to the 1970s provided public space and public access with tax dollars, had famously gne bankrupt in 1976 and by 1980, the turnaround from an initimidating and crime-ridden public space was already occurring but courtesy of corporate investment, and in this matrix, Holzer had to negotiate space for an art with no real commercial prospects.
Since the 1990 Gulf War, which inspired Holzer to make art that was more distinctly political, she has de-emphasized her participation in the American artistic scene.
In an urban space where words have been so operationalized as to create silence most of the time, Holzer's gnomic statements remain shocking and arresting, but today, and in her native USA, it is unlikely that the reaction to them would be friendly or neutral.
By taking an interest, not in any one style of electronic or engraved calligraphy, but in the necessary appearance of text in some specific font", some specific weight, some specific place and time, Holzer draws the viewer's attention that the pure text, such as ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE, is never neutral.
It's always in some specific place, and this reminds the viewer that any text, including an advertising message or government announcement, is never pure in the sense of without a material existence, a place and time, and an author.
To Wolfe, the Painted Word was Scholastic and Mandarin; Wolfe created an opposition between the very idea of an intellectual elite, painting admonishments to lesser beings, and American popular culture which despite its private ownership, Wolfe re-presented as a res publica. However, Holzer started painting/writing at a time when the tools, of presenting the disembodied and thence unreal thought as thing, were available to anyone at Radio Shack, and this means that Wolfe's categories may be insufficient as an analysis of what conceptual art is about.
Works
- Truisms (1977-) [link] is probably her most well-known work. Holzer has compiled a series of statements and aphorisms ("truisms") and has publicized them in a variety of ways: listed on street posters, in telephone booths and even, in 1982, on one of Times Square's gigantic LED billboards, or in 1999 on a BMW V12 race car for the 24 Hours of Le Mans
- Inflammatory Essays (1978-79), in which she brought texts by Trotsky, Hitler, Mao, Lenin and Emma Goldman onto the streets.
- Living Series (early 1980s), using more monumental media such as bronze plaques and billboards.
- Survival Series (1983-1985), with more militant aphorisms, including "Men Don't Protect You Anymore," a phrase reproduced on condoms and street billboards alike.
- Under a Rock
- Lament
- Child Text, a piece on motherhood for the 1990 Venice Biennale.
- Green Table (1992), a large granite picnic table with inscriptions, part of the Stuart Collection of public art on the campus of the University of California, San Diego.
- Please Change Beliefs (1995) [link], created for the internet art gallery adaweb [link].
- For the City (2005), nighttime projections of declassified government documents on the exterior of New York University's Bobst Library, and poetry on the exteriors of Rockefeller Center and the New York Public Library in Manhattan.[link]
External links
- [Guggenheim illustration]
- [Please Change Beliefs]. Visitors of the website are allowed to evaluate and modify a selection of Holzer's Truisms.
- [link] pdf of Holzer's work for the opening of the BALTIC
See also
- Martin Firrell
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.