I was in NYC last week, and went to the Guggenheim to gawk at the big Jenny Holzer exhibit. She likes words. I like words. Why not?
I think it was worthwhile, ultimately, but I'm sort of torn. I haven't read much about her or her work, so I don't know if there's any real consensus I'm restating or breaking with here, but here are some general thoughts:
A) Putting words everywhere kind of transforms text into texture (see, for instance, the image below with the multicolored paper on the walls), so that you wind up feeling like you're immersed in knowledge or poetry or something, but it's hard to take much of it in, and most of the words stop meaning anything at all. I assume she knows this -- she's been doing this for decades -- and that it's part of her objective. We're often surrounded by words and other symbols any time we leave the house, so in a way it's nice to be prodded to stop and actually read things that aren't just advertising and storefronts and traffic lights, but at the same time, do I really need to pay to go into a fancy museum to be bombarded like that? I could've just walked to Times Square and gotten it for free (this was the day before the CloudStrike thing, so bombardment was still in full effect there).
B) Because the main gallery in the Guggenheim is effectively one long (sloping) corridor, the whole thing becomes like a kind of buffet, where you can sort of leave this one alone and move along to the next one that grabs your attention. That does sort of mitigate some of the problems described above: it's not exactly one overwhelming wave of text, so much as lots of smaller, briefer encounters. So that's kind of nice.
C1) I'm not sure that I really love making giant artworks out of plans for torture or mass killing. When she makes massive pressed metal reproductions of, for instance, Bush administration memos discussing just what kinds of violence "enemy combatants" in Iraq are to be subjected to or a giant, gleaming map showing battle plans for invading Iraq (see below), I think her intentions are probably good. The world is such a giant shitshow right now, that we in the US have largely forgotten some of the worst devastation of our recent past. In recent months, I've seen liberal commentators kvetching, for instance, that "today's GOP is no longer the party of Bush" (!). So by all means, Jenny Holzer, please do remind us of what horror that era brought. Forgetting all that is really criminal.
C2) But she's also making these artifacts of state terror sort of pretty. It reminds me of when Banksy went to the West Bank to do art on the border wall, and an old Palestinian man told him his work was making the wall beautiful. Banksy thanked him, but the man said "We don't want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home."
C3) But it also reminds me of 'The Act of Killing,' which has gotta be the best documentary film I've ever seen and everyone should run out and see it today (though it's *really* hard to watch at times). It presents three men who credibly claim to have killed thousands of "Communists" with their own hands in Indonesia in the mid-1960s, and is shows them reenacting their methods as though they were characters in genre films -- film noir gangsters, I think there's a western scene, there's one very elaborate scene shot like a 1960s musical. The whole thing looks kind of "arty," but letting these killers be movie stars for a moment also frees them up to basically act out their own brutality as though they were someone else. The jarring disconnect between the glossy, Hollywood scenarios and the real world mass murder somehow makes it hard to just look at it and remain numb to it, in the way Western people usually do when we read news reports about mass killing in non-Western countries. So wonder if beautifying the bureaucratic part of the US state killing apparatus might have a similar effect on some people? Maybe it did on me, a little.
C4) Contrary to all of this, sometimes Holzer's presentation of awful text as art really does just highlight the bleakness of it. For one example, she reproduced a series tweets posted by Trump in 2017-18, and they're all printed on jagged, rusty-looking bits of metal. Some were on the wall, some were just piled on the floor, almost daring people to stomp on them. One in particular stood out for me personally. It reads: "Our great country has been divided for decades. Sometimes you need protest in order to heel [sic], & we will heel [sic], & be stronger than ever before!" That was dated August 19, 2017, about a week after Unite the Right. Sometimes it's okay to be reminded, even before we've entirely forgotten.
#JennyHolzer #Guggenheim #NewYorkCity #NYC #Art #WordArt #Trump #GeorgeWBush #War #Iraq #Banksy #TheActOfKilling
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