“I WANTED A LOT SIMULTANEOUSLY: TO LEAVE ART OUTSIDE FOR THE PUBLIC, TO BE A PAINTER OF MYSTERIOUS YET ORDERED WORKS, TO BE EXPLICIT BUT NOT DIDACTIC, TO FIND THE RIGHT SUBJECTS, TO TRANSFORM SPACES, TO DISORIENT AND TRANSFIX PEOPLE, TO OFFER UP BEAUTY, TO BE FUNNY AND NEVER LIE.” 1 In 1977, while Jenny Holzer was a student in New York, she began covertly to paste posters on the streets around Times Square and in Lower Manhattan. Posters were a familiar visual presence in these areas, whether advertising New Wave concerts or warning people about the possibility of contracting infectious diseases. Holzer’s posters consisted of alphabetical listings of concise pronouncements on subjects ranging from love to capitalism, which she termed Truisms. The posters’ lack of attribution and variety of viewpoints afforded Holzer an anonymity that she found productive, encouraging viewers to form conclusions about the Truisms rather than attempting to determine the intentions of the author.2 She recalls, “People would star things or underline parts. Sometimes I would come back around and stand close enough to listen to people argue over them.”3 In the years since, Holzer has continued to address the pitfalls and promises of language: how words convey meaning, what they can obscure, and the ways in which context informs how particular phrases are read and understood. Her pithy, often enigmatic messages infiltrate public life and consciousness both through “high art” media such as painting and sculpture and via everyday objects such as LED displays and T-shirts. Emblazoned with these texts, utilitarian objects come alive with phrases—such as “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE” and “MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU
ANYMORE”—which alternately warn, rejoice, and mourn. Holzer’s texts can represent multiple voices and perspectives, from individuals both imagined and real. In addition to her own writing, in recent decades Holzer has increasingly worked with words written by others, often poets. For her installation at MASS MoCA, Holzer developed a campuswide program of works that activates museum and public settings, encompassing a variety of media including temporary projection, carved stone benches, paintings, and posters. Following their debut in 1977, Holzer’s Truisms have appeared on baseball hats, condom wrappers, LED signs, stone benches, and projections, among other media. The lines from Truisms are inflected by the medium on which they appear and by the associations that the viewer might have with each medium. The benches, for example, might remind us of those found in cemeteries and at memorials, while the baseball hats may recall the insidiously catchy slogans of political campaigns. Visitors to MASS MoCA will encounter Holzer’s benches gathered at eight locations throughout the grounds and within the museum, engraved with texts that Holzer wrote during the first two decades of her career: Truisms (1977–1979), Living (1980–1982), Survival (1983–1985), Under a Rock (1986), and Erlauf (1995). The benches are placed near waterways, beside old factory buildings, and in quiet stands of trees, encouraging viewers to explore rarely
visited corners of MASS MoCA’s sprawling industrial campus. The specific materials, scale, texts, and locations that Holzer chose for the benches subtly influence our experiences of them. One black granite bench, which sits in the shade of trees at the confluence of the north and south branches of the Hoosic River, displays a text from Under a Rock: “People go to the river where it is lush and muddy to shoot captives.” Meanwhile, the matte limestone Memorial Benches, with their fragmentary memories of war, are placed beneath a large auger—a mechanical chute originally used for emptying ash from the factory’s boiler house—whose name is a homophone of augur, a sign of future events.
above: Truisms (1977–79), 1977 (detail) Installation: New York, 1977. Offset poster; 34.75 x 22.9 in. © 1977 Jenny Holzer, member, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY below: Benches, Doris C. Freedman Plaza, New York, 1989 (exhibition view) © 1989 Jenny Holzer, member, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photo: Oren Slor
In Holzer’s light projections, the first of which she realized in 1996, large-scale block lettering is cast onto landscape and architecture. The slowly scrolling texts are a sort of ephemeral graffiti, linking her street-based practice to her longstanding engagement with media and tactics common to news and advertising. In 2007, Holzer created the projection shown above for MASS MoCA’s monumental
PROJECTIONS, 2007 Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Text: “The Terrorist, He’s Watching” from Poems New and Collected: 1957–1997 by Wisława Szymborska. English translation by Stanisław Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, © 1998 by Harcourt, Inc. Used/reprinted with permission of the author. © 2007 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photo: Attilio Maranzano
Building 5 gallery, her first indoor projection in the United States. For the grand opening of Building 6, she designed a massive new outdoor projection, on view during summer 2017. Projections and LED signs (electronic signs made from light-emitting diodes)— both of which Holzer uses regularly in her work—interest her in part because, as she says, “The effect of the light on the body can stand in for some of the consequences of the content”4 of the writings. In some cases the light might be “aggressive,” in others it might “glow,” making a space “turn pretty amber and melt,”5 in each case subtly changing how we perceive the words as the light hits our bodies. The relationship between form, place, and language in Holzer’s work reflects her belief in language’s essential fluidity. Says Holzer, “There’s good and bad in fluidity. Sometimes you can’t fix the meaning, and that’s a loss.
Other times, the multiple voices and interpretations and the motion stand in for change and possibility.”6 — Alexandra Foradas
1 Jenny Holzer on Truisms, in Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “An Interview with Jenny Holzer,” in Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 117. 2 For more on authorship in Holzer's work, see Joan Simon, “Other Voices, Other Forms,” in Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT, 11–26. 3 Brett Sokol, “Taking It to the Street With Jenny Holzer,” The New York Times, December 12, 2016. 4 John Yau and Shelley Jackson, “An Interview with Jenny Holzer,” Poetry Foundation website, September 6, 2006. 5 Quoted in Joan Simon, “Other Voices, Other Forms,” 12. 6 Yau and Jackson, “An Interview with Jenny Holzer.”
For more than thirty-five years, Jenny Holzer (b. 1950, Gallipolis, OH) has presented her astringent ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including 7 World Trade Center, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her medium, whether formulated as a T-shirt, a plaque, or an LED sign, is writing, and the public dimension is integral to the delivery of her work. Starting in the 1970s with her New York City posters, and continuing through her recent light projections on landscape and architecture, her practice has rivaled ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, and courage. Holzer received the Leone d’Oro prize at the Venice Biennale in 1990, the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award in 1996, and the Barnard Medal of Distinction in 2011. She holds honorary degrees from Williams College, the Rhode Island School of Design, The New School, and Smith College. She lives and works in New York.
Inside flap: Wish List/Gloves Off pewter, 2007 (detail) © 2007 Jenny Holzer, member, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Jenny Holzer On view starting May 28, 2017 Principal exhibition support is provided by Anne and Gregory Avis. Major exhibition support is provided by the VIA Art Fund. Contributing exhibition support is provided by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation. For more information, visit massmoca.org/jenny-holzer
The Anne and Greg Avis Family Gallery in Building 6 is dedicated to hosting rotating exhibitions of Holzer’s work through 2032. Installations will include work spanning the breadth of Holzer’s explorations of language and material, from her acclaimed LED pieces to her redaction paintings, many of which have never previously been exhibited. River Street
Jenny Holzer at MASS MoCA Rive r Street
B5
Ho
os
ic
B4
B6
Ri
ve
B7
G
B10
B8
B11 B17 B14
G Gallery
Projection
Benches
Posters MASS
eet Marshall Str
r
Holden Street
Hoosic River
1040 MASS MoCA Way Anthony Drive St. North Adams, MA 01247 413.MoCA.111 massmoca.org Mohawk Trail