Jenny Holzer
Contemporary artist Jenny Holzer has long used words as her medium. In her upcoming installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, she intends to wrap up visitors inside them Holzer's work has centered around the idea of text as art. Often she examines importance of words and language — selective phrases, the way people choose to say the things they say and the sorts of things people take as wise, homespun homilies to live by are often co-opted warped by politicians — why not the artist?
Holzer has utilized a variety of media to do her week — LED signs, stickers, T-shirts, even a giant sign in Times Square. With her new show at Mass MoCA — "Projections" — Holzer will bring her art indoors after years of fashioning it for public spaces.
The exhibit will feature a large room filled with words projected all over the space — walls, floors and ceiling beams. The projections will be akin to film credits rolling. Aside from technical equipment, what physical objects the artist adds to the space will be minimal.
"We are adding something, a whole bunch of silvery bean bags in which to plunk yourself while watching the text," said Holzer. "It's crazy that people stand up at art shows."
The text will be culled from several sources, including the poetry of by Polish Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska, Austrian Nobel Laureate, Elfriede Jelinek and Holzer's own library of text on film that pulls from a decade of such work. It's only recently, however, that Holzer has begun indoor projections — her first ever was in Europe one year ago.
"I've done projections for the most part outside for over 10 years now," said Holzer, "and these involve very large projectors that are strong enough to let me have giant text on large buildings, big chunks of the ocean, boulders, small mountains and so on."
In the back of the gallery, Holzer will be displaying silkscreen paintings of official U.S. documents pertaining to the war in Iraq. Some are map paintings derived from PowerPoint presentations used in advance of the war for planning and discussion. There are also typewritten documents and e-mails discussing interrogation techniques and the pros and cons of various methods.
"I think the paintings might be the current events room and the projections could be any place, any time, other worldly," said Holzer. "There's not an a and b kind of connection, but I like a little mystery."
The graphics on the PowerPoint pieces are relevant to Holzer's work — large words like Protect, Fix, Isolate and Cease are placed in such a way that they function graphically as artistic propaganda. The language of the Bush Administration in general has been artistically sound ground for Holzer to mine — after all, deliberate language is important to both her and the president.
"What I've been thinking about it is that Orwell nailed this a long time ago," said Holzer. "My work is a pale applause, but a real applause."
It was in regard to Orwell that Holzer found one of the most amusing examples of government double speak, on a number redacted FBI files on the author.
"They say at the bottom 'There is no mention of George Orwell or any A.K.A. on this page,'" said Holzer. "After doing a number of the autopsy documents, interrogation ones, it's good to go back to the sad, dark, funny of those."
Holzer has been going through documents for three years now, a process that started when Wired Magazine asked her to come up with what she would like to see on the Google start page. Holzer decided that it would be neat to see a secret every time she logged on. This ignited her own curiosity.
"I started looking around for examples of secrets and stumbled across a funny document from Ken Lay to then governor Bush and some back and forth about some piece of western art work that one man had given to the other," said Holzer. "Then I started looking in the FBI archives for old ones about Viet Nam period things and things like the FBI following Brecht around, spending tax dollars on noticing that he was often in his pajamas at his typewriter. Really good stuff that'll keep us all safe."
Holzer eventually decided to focus on the documents from the two Gulf Wars, spurred on by the map paintings that she rendered in purple or pewter backgrounds.
"I will choose a document, then I will think about what color or colors," said Holzer. "I will try to see how a certain document looks on a plain white background, how the document feels when it's factual looking and how it changes on a horrible red or a heatrbreaking blue."
Holzer's reputation is not built on paintings though she received a degree in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. She ceased to pursue the form as her medium, however.
"Way back when, I started with rather conceptual pieces and then became an abstract painter," said Holzer, "because that really was where my heart was. I had, at the time, an irreconcilable desire to have content and I would have like to have been Richter and figured out how to be a great painter and have fascinating content, but I couldn't and didn't. But now after practicing this and that for 30 years, I think I've found a way to have interesting and mysterious paint and useful content all in the same place."
Holzer had found herself thinking in more painterly terms about preservation and the documents offered her a chance to pursue her instincts in a non-traditional manner.
"I've been creeping up on making much more visual things," said Holzer. "Visual is shorthand for installation, atmospheric, what have you. A number of the larger LED pieces, such as the one at the National Gallery in Berlin — or even the convention center in Pittsburgh — did things like color the air so that a fair amount of air would be amber or blue, and that softened me up and had me think of doing something like painting."
After years working with the medium and subject matter of text, some might say that Holzer's work has come full circle. In this age of digital information, people are literally en-veloped in text — specifically, advertising that in some ways assimilates Holzer's ideas of aphorism that she has long used in her work. In her Mass MoCA piece, this is very much understood.
"It's maybe a visual version of what one hears," said Holzer. "I've been trying to represent what that for a while. One run at it was when I had the spiral sign in the Guggenheim — that seemed like we're being wrapped in words, and then for a room in the Venice Biennale, I had electronic signs on three sides and then a very polished floor so you would see them down beneath you"
On occasion, Holzer has made her pieces aggressive in order to function as a caution to people witnessing it. Other times, she's purposefully made the words attractive, alluring in such a way that the meaning of their existence is processed more gently.
"I've tried to have them in such a way that people will be drawn to them," said Holzer, "so that information is picked out of the surround and people figure out what to do with it, because it's important."
An indication of Holzer's observations of the last three decades can be evidenced on the bizarre turns that advertising has taken online — some might even say it's her influence. Either way, some Web pages look perfectly in sync with her work — though whether that makes Holzer a visionary or prophet might not be the important concern.
"Better not to think about oneself, it's paralyzing enough to think about what's around you," said Holzer.
