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JENNY HOLZER AND THE INFLUENCE OF ANXIETY

I met Jenny Holzer a couple of years ago. She was kind and self-effacing, little of which was on display in her latest show at the Whitney Museum of American Art (which now travels on to the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland). "Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT" concentrates on her work since the 1990s, from her now iconic LED signs to her more recent Redaction Paintings, which incorporate declassified government documents. Given the ineptitude and criminal missteps of  the Bush administration, these latter pieces seem to vindicate Holzer's trademark delphic warnings.

Holzer’s medium-is-the-message artwork has always been clever. But I had lately found that her aphorisms on consumerism and chauvinism had outlived their time. Such scrolling dispatches no longer provoked; rather, they elicited smirks from the choir. Her work had become, in a word, trite. But what has always been intriguing about Holzer is the tacit relationship she creates between artist and viewer. The artist vents her neuroses, and viewers patiently receive them, like a letter sent from a patient to her psychiatrist. Holzer’s art has always traded in the trust and intimacy that only an author and reader can share.  

Holzer’s exhibit opens with ten LED signs with amber messages that scroll along the floor and loop back like returned bowling balls. The pronouncements are drawn from Holzer’s whole career, so the content is what one might expect:

BEING HAPPY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING ELSE

BEING ALONE WITH YOURSELF IS INCREASINGLY UNPOPULAR

ANY SURPLUS IS IMMORAL

ANIMALISM IS PERFECTLY HEALTHY

AT TIMES YOUR UNCONSIOUS IS TRUER THAN YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND

BAD INTENTIONS CAN YIELD GOOD RESULTS

ARTIFICIAL DESIRES ARE DESPOILING THE EARTH

AT TIMES INACTIVITY IS PREFERABLE TO MINDLESS FUNCTIONING
 

Pretty much boilerplate sentiments derivative of “1984”. What truly adds substance to the style are the Redaction Paintings. These blown-up pieces of censored materials, silk-screened on to stretched canvas, afford an unnerving glimpse at how we fight wars. Authored by countless bureaucratic functionaries, they feel both predictable and eye-opening.

All of the embedded journalists in the world couldn’t produce as clear a picture as the government did in documenting its own malfeasance. Many of these documents feature the blurred type of countless reproductions, a sign that time is burying these paperwork tragedies until they become illegible and unactionable.

Holzer didn’t have to doctor these documents for heightened effect; the black bars that enshroud the names of victims and their tormentors speak for themselves. One autopsy report describes the fatal suffocation of a prisoner of war forced to maintain a stress position. In some cases nearly whole documents are ominously blacked out, like a national Rorschach test.  

“How could we do such things?” we are left asking. This is where Holzer’s guiding hand is most evident. In one instance she displays a heart-wrenching, two-page letter from a Florida father, a church leader and school principal, begging for an honourable discharge for his son, who is facing a court martial for an unspecified crime on the battlefield. After listing his son’s athletic and academic accolades, he writes, “This is his first failure.”

Holzer’s sterile, detached approach to such horrific subject matter ranks this work in the same league as Errol Morris’s documentary on Abu Ghraib, “Standard Operating Procedure”. Both deliver a strong moral message with restraint, attentiveness and sympathy, not outright condemnation. This show also includes some new LED works that marry electronic exhortations with the raw emotion and confusion of some declassified documents. These powerful pieces lend real heft to Vegas lustre.

After walking through this show, expect Holzer’s anxiety to become your own. I found it hard to spend so much time pondering America’s recent mistakes without losing my appetite. The Claes Oldenburg show on the floor below comes as a relief.

~ DANIEL ARIZONA

Picture credit: Jenny Holzer, "Monument" (2008) top, © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photo: Vassilij Gureev
Collection of the artist; courtesy Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Berlin and London; and Diehl + Gallery One, Moscow

Jenny Holzer, "Palm, Fingers & Fingertips 000406" (2007), © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Collection of the artist; courtesy Cheim & Read, New York; Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Berlin and London; and Yvon Lambert, Paris