ART ISLANDS: Ibiza -Jenny Holzer
Political activist as well as artist, Jenny Holzer aims is to disrupt the passive reception of information from damaging sources. Her text-based art appears in places one wouldn’t expect to find it. On t-shirts, billboards, parking meters and her signature medium, LED signs, her work call attention to social injustice and shed light on dark corners of the human psyche.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lune Rouge, Art Projects Ibiza & Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive
Jenny Holzer exhibits her work in Ibiza for the first time. “ARE YOU ALIVE?” is simultaneously shared between the Lune Rouge and Art Projects Ibiza from, in collaboration with Sprüth Magers. The artist encompasses her iconic LED artworks in parallel with a selection of stone benches and a site-specific commission. Drawing from original writings, poetry, literature and redacted government documents, the artist has produced a staggering oeuvre. Both message and medium are equally important in Holzer’s work. Her iconic LED signs use the same technology that transmits dates, speeds, temperatures and other impersonal information in public places. This allows her to launch a sneak attack on the urban environment, short-circuiting the system when, in place of the impersonal signage we expect to encounter, we find private, personal, or politically sensitive information. On view in both spaces are LED installations whose scale and permutations of color confront the buildings’ architectural framework. Interested in the accessibility of the medium and its association with the news, Holzer began working with electronic signs in 1982. The LED works in Ibiza feature Holzer’s series “Truisms” (1977-79), “Inflammatory Essays” (1979-82), “Living” (1980-82) and “Survival” (1983-85), as well as transcriptions of U.S. government documents. A Spanish translation of Truisms plays on one installation. A series of new footstools and benches made from unique stone such as Azul Bahia ang green Labradorite also feature lines from “Truisms” and “Survival”. The medium of modern computer systems became an important component in Holzer’s work in 1982, when nine of her “Truisms” flashed at 40 second intervals on the giant electronic signboard in Times Square. The use of the LED machine allowed Holzer to reach a larger audience. By combining a knowledge of semantics with modern advertising technologies, Holzer established herself as a descendant of the conceptualist and Pop Art movements. She again utilized the electronic signboard with her “Survival Series” (1983-1985), in which she adopted a more personal and urgent stance. On view in Lune Rouge are “Arno Pair”, composed of two curved Carrara marble benches. The work’s seemingly lyrical content performs a call and response, however upon closer inspection the text reveals a struggle with the aftermath of a great love. Begun as an account of losing someone to AIDS, the work expansively treats living with the loss of all beloved. Accompanying the bench pair is the LED sculpture, “All Fall”. At Art Projects Ibiza is on view “Sworn Statement” in tandem with large-scale LED works in configurations created for the exhibition. In response to her time in Ibiza, Holzer took her first site-specific commission on the island. Using raw materials from the Ibicencan countryside and coastline, she will engrave poems on cliffs, monumental boulders and on bedrock.
Info: Lune Rouge, Calle Alcalde Bartomeu Rosselló Sala 7, Ibiza and Art Projects Ibiza, Calle Alcalde Bartomeu Rosselló Sala 9B, Ibiza, Duration 21/6-17/12/16, Days & Hours: June-September Tue-Sat 15:00-21:00, October-December Tue-Sat 11:00- 18:00, http://lunerougeibiza.org & http://artprojectsibiza.com
