My first document

JENNY HOLZER

This exhibition and catalogue have been achieved through the essential support of many individuals. Jenny Holzer’s involvement has been crucial to the exhibition’s success. Her dedication and vision have made this project an exciting and rewarding undertaking. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts for its commitment to Holzer’s work and its generous sponsorship of the show. I am equally indebted to Jay Chiat for his enthusiasm and financial assistance. It is with sincere appreciation that I also acknowledge the continuing generosity of The Owen Cheatham Foundation, The Merrill G. and Emita E. Hastings Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts, whose contributions have helped to make this exhibition possible.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT DEDICATION

INTRO DUCTION

The text-based art of Jenny Holzer appears in places one wouldn’t expect to find it. On t-shirts, billboards, parking meters and LED signs (Holzer’s signature medium), her stark one-liners call attention to social injustice and shed light on dark corners of the human psyche. “PRIVATE PROPERTY CREATED CRIME,” “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE,” and “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT” are intended to generate debate and make us think critically. A political activist as well as an artist, Holzer’s aim is to disrupt the passive reception of information from damaging sources. As her reputation has grown, so has the ambition and scope of her work, which has traveled to public spaces in much of the world. In her profound skepticism toward power, Holzer joins the ranks of anti-authoritarians in art from the birth of modernism (which is itself a rebellion against tradition) through the 21st century.

INFLAMMATORY ESSAYS

Before galleries were vying to show her work, Jenny Holzer advocated for herself by taking to the streets with a DIY approach. Under cover of night, adhesive in hand, she plastered her multicolored “Inflammatory Essays” (1979–82) around New York City neighborhoods that corresponded with the messages contained within the series of text-based posters.

“It was good, encouraging practice to start out illegally, because then I could realize anything I wanted to get done, to the limits of my endurance and stealth,” Holzer toldEven Magazine in 2016. But even the best criminals get caught if they stay in the game long enough, and Holzer is no exception. During one 3 a.m. run in SoHo, she was apprehended by the police and put in the back of a squad car. “I launched into a rambling explanation and they decided

“Inflammatory

KAELAN

1979-1982

MASS MoCA

Walls”

BURKETT/JENNY HOLZER AND ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY

I was not worth keeping,” she recalled in a 2016 New York Times story. “I was dripping with so much wheat paste they probably didn’t want me on their back seat much longer.”A run-in with the law seems apropos given that Holzer culled her textual materials from a hodgepodge of writings by incendiary figures who caused much controversy throughout their own careers. Then a student at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s independent study program, Holzer was inspired by her assigned reading list, which included screeds by Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, Emma Goldman, Adolf Hitler, and Leon Trotsky, among others. To provoke passersby, Holzer extracted these disparate voices into a uniform format of essays, each composed of 100 words arranged into 20 lines.

For Holzer, the street, unlike the museum, offered an egalitarian viewing experience. “I try to reach a broad audience, the biggest possible,” she said in a 1985 interview. Without an entrance fee, and with no assumption of previous knowledge, the project was free and exceptionally open to the public. “From the beginning,” Holzer explained, “my work has been designed to be stumbled across in the course of a person’s daily life.” (This also holds true for her contemporaneous “Truisms” series from 1978–87, consisting of photocopies similarly posted around New York that feature maxims like the oft-repeated “Abuse of power comes as no surprise.”)

At the time, Holzer estimated that

bustling city dwellers would give her anonymous, unsigned works just seconds of their time. But in 1979, before late capitalism had transmogrified leisure into a luxury commodity, piqued pedestrians would stop and engage. “People would star things or underline parts,” Holzer told the Times. “Sometimes I would come back around and stand close enough to listen to people argue over them.”

Unlike the text-based work of artists such as Zoe Leonard, whose poem “I Want a President” (1992) marks a clear statement of intent, Holzer’s “Inflammatory Essays” series is not a personal manifesto. The works delight in subterfuge; contradictory views abound. One poster reads “UPHEAVAL IS DESIRABLE,” while another suggests squashing dissent: “MAKE AN EXAMPLE OF 2 OR 3 REBELS, DROP THEIR BODIES OFF BY A ROAD.” Despite these apparent contradictions, Holzer chose to gradually release the posters over a period of four years in order to slowly establish a larger context for the series. “Alone,” she admitted in a 1990 interview, “some of them would be completely irresponsible.”

It would seem that the lack of authorship ascribed to the posters is both a rejection of ownership, as well as moral responsibility. But Holzer was acutely aware that anonymity could help stave off sexist misreadings, and the artist purposefully obfuscated her identity as a means of ensuring a fair reception of her

work. “I wouldn’t want it to be isolated as a woman’s voice because I’ve found that when things are categorized, they tend to be dismissed,” she informed Art in America in 1986. “I find it better to have no particular associations attached to ‘the voice’ in order for it to be perceived as true.” Still, this precept proved complicated in practice: “Yet, I do want my voice to be heard,” Holzer continued, “and, yes, it’s a woman’s voice.” While this defense might read as slightly hypocritical—Holzer wished to defy gender stereotypes by eliminating them, while also maintaining the inherent femininity of her voice—by initially packaging the essays as anonymous, and then reclaiming them as her own as she became a more established artist, Holzer was, paradoxically, able to achieve both goals. Similarly, the oscillating sentiments within the works have invited alternate interpretations. The way in which one essay admits to vengeance (“MONDAY SOMEONE DIED BECAUSE HE HURT ME SO I CUT HIM WITHOUT THINKING”) while another condemns the concept (“A CRUEL BUT ANCIENT LAW DEMANDS AN EYE FOR AN EYE”) makes the series seem Trumpian in its ability to publicly counter its own beliefs.

Following the 2016 election, Manhattan gallery Alden Projects staged a show drawing on the political parallels between the rise of Trump and the troubling times when Holzer was showcasing her work around a bankrupt and blighted New York City. Things have

changed drastically since the Carter administration gave way to Reaganomics and the “Greed is Good” messaging of the 1980s, but the strategies Holzer employs in her “Essays”—in which she co-opts fascistic language to ultimately parody its aims—seems to foreshadow Trump’s own baffling tendency to adopt authoritarian messaging (remember when he unwittingly quoted Mussolini on Twitter?), albeit without any sense of irony or ethical concerns.

In a recent article in Art in America, Leah Pires observes that Trump’s speeches “bear an uncanny resemblance to the freewheeling incoherence” of the “Inflammatory Essays.” “Frequently pairing affirmations with denials, advocacy with dismissal,” Holzer’s work, Pires argues, can be read as a postmodern precursor to the president’s doublespeak, which “can be difficult to summarize and disconcertingly easy to interpret as sympathetic to a broad range of views.”

Whether Holzer’s series resonates as an encapsulation of the dystopian, financially fraught New York of the late 1970s and early ’80s, or as a prescient refutation of today’s morally bankrupt administration and its tactics of deceit, “Inflammatory Essays” continues to prompt the public discourse it set out to in the first place.

INSTAL

“Heap 2012” 5 Beekman Street, New York March 4, 2013

Photo: Collin LaFleche

For more than forty years, artist Jenny Holzer has presented her astringent ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public places and at international exhibitions. Her medium, whether on a T-shirt, a plaque, or an LED sign, is writing, and the public dimension is integral to the delivery of her work. Throughout her career, Jenny has received several awards, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale,

the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award, and the Barnard Medal of Distinction.

A three-and-a-half hour drive from New York City led me to Hoosick, where I met with Jenny on a warm and quiet summer afternoon. We walked around her property until we found a pleasant spot to begin our conversation. For decades, Jenny has projected phrases on to surfaces such as mountains, ocean

“All Fall 2012” L&M Arts, Los Angeles September 13–November 3, 2012

Photo: Joshua White / JW Pictures

Photo: Joshua White / JW Pictures

waves, and rocks. Going outside is her biggest inspiration, so meeting her in this natural context was a privilege for me. Starting in the 1970s with the New York City posters, and continuing through her recent light projections on to landscape and architecture, her practice has challenged ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, and courage. The reigning art world star Jenny Holzer occupies a territory in art that is entirely her own.

Hugo Huerta Marin: Let’s start by talking about the strong relationship between the language and the materials that you use in your work: large-scale projections, LED displays, T-shirts, bronze plaques, stone benches, offset posters, and condoms, to name a few. How do you decide which specific material to go for?

Jenny Holzer: Work often starts with the content. Sometimes the text will arrive and it will demand a particular medium. Other times there is a text that is very flexible—even promiscuous—that can live almost anywhere, from a poster

to a shirt to a stone bench. The more serious texts seem especially suitable for stone, and when I want to present a high volume of material, an electronic sign with a big brain is a happy home.

“I like to make the floor drop out from under me and everyone else.”

HHM: What role does space play in your work?

JH: I love being an installation artist. I do better when I attempt the whole surroundings. That’s preferable to making one object that’s to be everything. I adore impressive environments.

I like to make the floor drop out from under me and everyone else. I color the air all around—and there needs [to] be meaning in the surroundings.

HHM: I can see that. I’ve always thought that one of your pieces would be fantastic for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

JH: Yeah, I need an invitation though. It’s preferable not to break in (laughs).

HHM: How does the language change

between one viewer and the other?

JH: I try to make language accessible more often than not, because I want the content to land. That said, in a museum I might present more content than I would in the street because I can expect people’s attention spans to be longer indoors. The night-time light projections can have a poetic language, because people may be quieter after dark and more inclined to attend and linger.

HHM: One of the things that came to my attention was the work you’ve done on memorial gardens like the Black Garden of Nordhorn or the Erlauf Peace Monument. When did you first become interested in the concept of memory?

JH: When I was young, I went to a cemetery in my grandparents’ hometown—high on a river bank—and there was a stone bench inscribed with a poem, selected by the poet’s widow to mark his grave. That caught me, because people could pause, look at the broad river, and think of a man and his expression. Because I tend toward

bleakness, people began to invite me to make memorials. I had largely stopped writing my own text then, so sometimes I’d use the writing of those who were to be memorialized. Perhaps these people had been murdered or died in some unnecessary way. It was a whole new experience, and a liberating one, to rely on the text of many others.

HHM: It seems that your work sympathizes with victims.

JH: Let’s say I want to keep good people, with their virtues and their utterances, with us.

HHM: To put it better, is spirituality assumed in your work?

JH: Hopefully feeling is. I have a repressed spirituality (laughs). I am not religious in any conventional sense, but I am all for applying appropriate feeling that might make for sanity and better behavior.

HHM: So where does Jenny Holzer end and the formless and indefinable voice begin?

“All Fall 2012”

L&M Arts, Los Angeles September 13–

November 3, 2012

Photo: Joshua White / JW Pictures

JH: Oh, I’d like to keep myself as far from the voice as possible, because, among other things, it’s freeing, if unhealthy, to be disassociated from it. It’s not an accident that I was an anonymous street artist. When I was a young woman, anonymity let me produce relatively unselfconsciously, and perhaps gave me a bigger voice than I would have had if my work were signed Jenny Holzer—a twentysomething-year-old female artist whom no one had heard of. That signature would have turned the volume down, that was an address for nowhere.

HHM: I also think it’s no coincidence that many people think some of your work was done by a man.

JH: Absolutely.

HHM: Do you think it is because people associate the male voice with authority?

JH: Sure. When I was writing first the Truisms and then the Inflammatory Essays, I explored many different subjects, wrote from multiple points of view, and probably inhabited two, three,

or four sexes, and some in between too. If you want to understand people’s motivations, it’s good to indwell as best as you can. Unless they’re a murderer, then it’s best not to follow through (laughs).

“Art can fuse a dreadful or wonderful reality with dreadful or wonderful representation so that people realize and feel what is, and then act.”

HHM: What is your relationship to writing like?

JH: Troubled. Reluctant and frightened, resentful, slow… a lot of sad words like those. That’s the reason it was a tremendous relief to start making memorials with others’ texts, to go to poems for projection, to greatly improve on what I could do solo and to present more than I could generate myself. I’m honored to show text by people who are real writers. Once in a while, as recently for trucks with electronic displays, it’s been possible to compose blasts like “COVID-19 PRESIDENT” or “COVID-19 ECONOMY.” That kind of writing I can muster, to steal what’s now and flash it.

HHM: Do you find there is a difference between writing words that are to be shown and those that are not?

JH: I mostly don’t retain notes. Someone with very good intentions once gave me a number of beautiful diaries to fill in, and in the end I gave them to a poet friend after they sat empty for ten or fifteen years. I desire to be anonymous and largely invisible, so perhaps that influences what I show and what I don’t, what I keep and what I won’t.

HHM: Do you consider yourself a political artist?

JH: I’m an artist, and a person who is political; I make some separation here. I do not represent that art is as straightforward and immediately effective as voting or doing community work, and I don’t think art always can or should be pragmatic and utilitarian. At times, however, art can fuse a dreadful or wonderful reality with dreadful or wonderful representation so that people realize and feel what is, and then act.

“Red Yellow Looming 2004” Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria June 12–September 5, 2004

Photo: Attilio Maranzano

“Red Yellow Looming 2004” Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria June 12–September 5, 2004

Photo: Attilio Maranzano

“Red Yellow Looming 2004” Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria June 12–September 5, 2004

Photo: Attilio Maranzano

“Heap 2012” 5 Beekman Street, New York

March 4, 2013

Photo: Collin LaFleche

“Heap 2012” 5 Beekman Street, New York March 4, 2013

Photo: Collin LaFleche

PROJEC TIONS

September

October

“Blenheim Palace 2017” Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, England

27–

10, 2017

Photo: Samuel Keyte

Jenny Holzer has been throwing light onto buildings and landscapes at night since 1991. Because her aim is to illuminate and reveal, she is different from the moon, whose light can create dangerous shadows in our everyday world. When she was a little girl, Holzer drew horses, and, later, when she was an art student, she made abstract paintings. Her art then had everything to do with touch—the touch of her crayon against paper and the touch of her brush against canvas. Today, with her nighttime projections, we experience the touch of light against the surface of public spaces. Whether this light is white (which is

“North Adams 2007” Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art North Adams, Massachusetts, USA November 17, 2007–November 17, 2008

Photo: Attilio Maranzano

pure), or blue (which is melancholy), or amber (which is neutral), her installations present words in motion, so our eyes move, too, as if we are at the cinema or theatre, and we are plunged into darkness where images float before us. She has renegotiated the line between writing and image.

I first met Holzer at the American Academy in Berlin, where we were fellows in 2000. Often we talked about our work during long walks. A few years later, in Venice, she projected, with her xenon light, the text of my love poem “Blur,” a sonnet sequence, onto the Palazzo Corner della Ca’ Granda (currently housing the police headquarters). This was a building Venetians feared during the Second World War, so it was scary, and meaningful, and brave of her to scroll my erotic poem across its face. Seeing my poems projected in this way, onto landscapes and buildings, I feel

that the words leap out from a different zone, where they are observed as much as read. Language is more direct, open, unself-conscious, precise, and human. It doesn’t belong to me anymore but to the atmosphere, and this makes me happy.In Holzer’s installations, words— not images—strive to say something true, often about love, death, sex, war, or forgiveness. Sometimes, it is something unspeakable. There is no boundary between the human and the mechanical in Holzer’s work, and this is my favorite part. Because Holzer now thinks of herself mostly as a reader, rather than a writer, she is happiest reimagining space with light, color, and form suffusing it, while a powerful beam is projecting poetry into the night—poetry with all its paradoxes, ironies, contradictions, understatements, and devastating truths.

To me, this suffusion of language and light is like a chorus, because the

scrolling words must harmonize with light, or push up against it. Also, there is the voice of the city—ambulances and cries in the night. And the voice of nature—a river’s current, a frog’s bellow at the forest edge—blending with the sound of our own breath as we stand in the dark and ponder a beam touching the night air as a hand touches flesh. When we are out strolling at night— whether we are in London, Florence, Rome, Vienna, Buenos Aires, Paris, Dublin, Kraków, Singapore, or Boston— and happen upon a light projection by Jenny Holzer, we ask, What is this? Is it art? And our puzzlement is part of the imaginative experience she intends, while a powerful light is illuminating lines of poetry about sorrow or love. People reading together, out in public at night, have a very special aura about them, like children reading alone in their rooms at home.

“Milan 2007”

Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy

March 28, 2007

Photo: Attilio Maranzano

“New York 2004” Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, New York October 26, 2004

Photo: Attilio Maranzano

“New York 2004” Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, New York October 26, 2004

Photo: Attilio Maranzano

“VIGIL, 2019” Light projection Rockefeller Center, New York

Photo: Filip Wolak

“VIGIL, 2019” Light projection Rockefeller Center, New York

Photo: Filip Wolak

INDEX A

“All Fall 2012”, 18-19, 21

M“Milan 2007”, 33

B“Blenheim Palace 2017”, 28-27

N“North Adams 2007””, 30-31

“New York 2004”, 34-35

H“Heap 2012”, 16-17, 26-27

R“Red Yellow Looming 2004”, 22-25

I“Inflammatory Essays” , 8-9

“Inflammatory Essays”(New York), 13

“Inflammatory Essays”(Art Institute of Chicago), 14-15

“Inflammatory Walls”, 10-11

V“VIGIL, 2019”, 36-37

SOURCES

https://projects.jennyholzer.com/

https://publicdelivery.org

https://www.artic.edu

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-jenny-holzers-inflammatory-essays-perfect-work-times

https://lithub.com/jenny-holzer-on-a-life-of-turning-public-spaces-into-art/

https://www.mutualart.com

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/light-as-touch-jenny-holzers-nighttime-poetry-projections

KAELAN BURKETT/JENNY HOLZER AND ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NY

https://www.artsboston.org

Waldman, Diane. Jenny Holzer. Guggenheim Museum, 1997.