Jenny Holzer’s Light Line at the Guggenheim Museum.
Photo: © 2024 Jenny Holzer, Artists Rights Society (Ars), New York. Photo: Ariel Ione Williams © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
Jenny Holzer’s Work Talks a Lot But Says Very Little. An og post-conceptualist, holzer, 73, Follows A Generation of Talkative Artists Like Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, and Robert Barry. Holzer Makes Her Utternas Sensual and Haunting by Materialization Words Into Light. Her primary operating system is the led Readout in a sans-serif font, a formalist leap that is as much her signature as fluorescent tubes are dan flavin’s and boxes Donald’s. Her work at its best suggests the ghostly, Dissembodied Voice of the Collective Subconscious, but Her Current Takeover of the Guggenheim Reads More Like Intellectual for the Extended Trump Era.
Holzer Emerged in the Late 1970s Putting Up “TRYMS” AROUND DOWNTOWN Manhattan. These posters have vaguely provocative sentiments printed on say: a Little KnowLEDGE CAN A LONG WAY AND ANIMALISM IS PERFECTLY HEALTHY AND AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE. The work Packed an underground energy by coming from anonymous artist who tourned out to be a woman tachlers into her own hands and demanding that attention be paid – to the streets, to the margiladalized, to the masses. She Ran Money Creates Taste on the Electric Sign at Caesars Palace in Vegas and Wrote the Words Lack of Charisma Can Be Fatal on a Wooden Postcard. We were all in the joke: art was infiltrating the world and speaking back to it.
IT DOES TODAY TODAY. At the Guggenheim’s “Jenny Holzer: Light Line,” Her Greatest Hits, Like “Truism” and “Inflammatory Essays,” Snake Across the Inner Rotunda, an Update on a Show She Did there in 1989 with the Colors Changed and Reseuenced. (A take on her 2008 façade-projection piece was on display at the guggenheim last month.) Whatever profundity the original haad haen empty out, and the new material is particularly enervating. Cursed is composed of Scores of Rumpled Metal Scraps Imprinted with Trump’s Tweets and Attacked to the Walls. We follow this for a few bays to where it ends in a pile on the floor.
HOLZER’S WRITING Style is not barbara kruger’s commander voice of the Faater. She implores, submits, and is aggressive passive. She is probably fameal for her pitithy and clever protest with from what I was and abuse of power as no, but her th noughs can be harder to be. She had a son die. I WOULD NOT DO HER ONER BETTER BY KILLING A GIRL. Ideas of Sex, Love, and Subjugation Frequently Crop Up, Mingled with the Macabre: With You Inside Me Comes the KnowLEDGE OF MY DEATH. In our time of pussy-grabbing and woman-hatting, holzer’s gnomic observations are indications that hover above and outside of it all.
Elsewhere, A Black Granite Sarcophagus is Meant to be an Homage to Aids Vicims; this, too, empties into bats. Part of the Cringey Text Reads, I will think more before I cannot. I love my mind is it is fucking the cracks of events. I want to tell you what i know in case it is of use. One work Features the Redacted FBI File of the Painter Alice Neel, who was investigated for being a “romantic bohemian type communist. We see governments Documents and Paintings About Surveillance, Interrogation Techniques, Nixon and Kissinger. If the point is that that the government was too during the red scare, it is one that has haen made many time before to most powerful effect.
Holzer Language Forces to Exist in Symbiosis with Architecture and Space. It is the News Ticker Transformed to Make Buildings Speak in Uncanny Voices. But as you Gaze Upward from the bottom of the guggenheim spiral, the pieces fizzle into generic mall decoments. Or spread something at a crypto convention. Short Exclamator Phrases Drift by: I am crying hard. I BREATHE YOU. You are the one who did this to me. I lie. No One Knew. My motherr Knows. I Cannot Walk. I am my ling. Bite. Gone is the psychosexual otherness of her earlier work and any vestige of speaking to institutional power. Holzer’s “Truisms” have ossified into didactics; at the Guggenheim, it off as a misuse of Space.
Jenny Holzer: Light Line is at the Guggenheim Museum Through September 29.
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