ART-PRESENTATION: Jenny Holzer
A political activist as well as an artist, Jenny 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.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MASS MoCA Archive
Jenny Holzer’s is best known for her light projections, begun when she illuminated the banks of the Arno River with her writings in 1996. In these projections, which have now appeared in over 40 cities in 20 countries, stark block lettering is thrown onto landscapes and architecture, creating ephemeral graffiti that links her early street-based practice to her long-standing engagement with media and tactics common to news and advertising. Following her monumental installation in MASS MoCA’s Building 5 in 2007, which marked her first indoor projection in the U.S., Holzer returns with a campus-wide program. The program includes a large-scale outdoor projection on the side of Building 6, a series of her celebrated carved stone benches located throughout MASS MoCA’s sprawling campus, an exhibition of her early posters, and additional rotating exhibitions of her work in, spanning the breadth of her career. In 1993, at the invitation of the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, the Sunday magazine of one of Germany’s largest daily newspapers, Jenny Holzer created a series titled “Lustmord”, prompted by the war in former Yugoslavia where sexual violence against women and girls was used as a strategy and weapon. Taking its title from a German word for “sexually motivated murder,” Lustmord treats sexual violence in its ubiquitous manifestations. It represents these acts from the perspectives of perpetrators, victims, and observers. For the magazine, texts were hand-printed on the skin of women and men and photographed in close-up. “Lustmord” also has been programmed for electronic signs. Later, for the “Lustmord Tables”, like the two on view at MASS MoCA, the text was engraved on silver bands encircling human bones, which were placed on worn wooden tables. The bones are ethically sourced and have been obtained through legitimate suppliers of decommissioned medical samples and teaching materials, such as articulated skeletons. In “For North Adams”, a new projection by Jenny Holzer, the artist explores war’s devastating humanitarian legacy and today’s unfolding international refugee crisis with vivid eyewitness accounts. Holzer projects a collection of texts onto five sections of MASS MoCA’s north façade, including works from contemporary international poets from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, and Ethiopia; over 60 poems by Anna Świrszczyńska from her epic cycle, Building the Barricade, a day-to-day account of The Warsaw Uprising, where she was a nurse working with the Polish resistance during the Nazi siege of the city in 1944; interviews conducted by Human Rights Watch with peaceful political protesters arrested, detained and tortured by the Assad regime shortly before the country’s civil conflict began; and case studies of Syrian families compiled by Save the Children in their work assisting refugees in camps in Jordan. These texts afford glimpses into daily life during wartime. Moments of violence, tenderness, and yearning coexist, confronting viewers with the very human implications of conflict.
Info: MASS MoCA, 1040 MASS MoCA WAY, North Adams, Duration 28/5/18-31/12/19, Days & Hours: Wed-Mon 11:00-17:00 (Fall/Winter/Spring) or Sun-wed 10:00-18 & Thu-Sat 10:00-19:00 (Summer), https://massmoca.org
