BEFORE CONSUMED YOUR CONVENIENCES

My first look at Jenny Holzer was a telling of who she was, like a painting of someone you’ve never met and yet you feel intimate with them. The front of her website is coated in her black and white portrait. Soft eyes, faint wrinkles, thin-pressed lips. An artist, as well as a common victim of restless want. Holzer begs her audience, “Protect me from what I want.” A small, vulnerable creature standing against a wave of something much greater than themselves: inadequacy. Like Kruger, Jenny places her small but provocative works in busy metropolitans with the intent to invade.

Jenny is from Ohio, but moved to New York City post-grad to allow it to swallow her whole. Her first major series is titled Truisms, posted all around Manhattan for strangers to drink in. Jenny’s piece, “Protect me from what I want” is plastered in Times Square, the hub of blind desire and corporate ladder dreams.

Since doing some work on Jenny Holzer, and even Kruger, I frequently return to the fascination contradiction that is two women fighting this immense hunger for consumerism moving to the heartbeat of the world: New York City. The city that has every store front stacked between two stories, the city where humanity is choosing not to hit a pedestrian with your car or maybe turning back to acknowledge who you just shoulder checked on the sidewalk. And I have decided that these women had to move here. Of course they wanted to, because even in the midst of crowded skyscrapers and overpopulated streets and smoke, there is a certain magic. In the same way you will never be seen in New York, you can be seen in New York. Both women have their work screaming from tall buildings in the busiest parts of the city. They had to come into the place that is too busy for love or laughter or breath and they had to break into the passer-byers, making them stop and think and sympathize with the quaint, pointed words on the screen above.

“Protect me from what I want.”

“I think therefore I am.”

In these small words, there lies immense weight the bystander must suddenly withstand. Why is materialism bad? Is it not a help to the economy? Am I not doing my part as a citizen by constantly wanting? Perhaps the motivation for both Kruger and Holzer pieces lies in the questioning. The economy may have a pulse, but has been cold to the touch for a long time. Lifelong debt will never caress your tears away. To not have enough within yourself is a violation to your right not as a citizen, but as a human being. So, reader, find warmth and vibrations and song and do not let the weight of the world, specifically the portion that will always want something from someone, collapse in on you.