Plague of Text: Jenny Holzer at Tate Modern
- Maria Kaminska
- Mar 24, 2019
- 6 min read
Over the entrance to one of Tate Modern’s huge white spaces hangs an information sign - a long strip made out of orange LED lights, exactly like the one that tells you when your next train departure is, or how much 1 USD is worth today. However, if you fix your eyes on it for a few seconds to follow the fast-flowing text, you will notice that instead of train times and currency exchange rates, it tells you that DECADENCE CAN BE AN END IN ITSELF and CONFUSING YOURSELF IS A WAY TO STAY HONEST. DREAMING WHILE AWAKE IS A FRIGHTENING CONTRADICTION *** ENSURE THAT YOUR LIFE STAYS IN FLUX ***RAISE BOYS AND GIRLS THE SAME WAY*** EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID ***, it spits out with an urgency that seems both very fitting and absurd at the same time.
One of Jenny Holzer’s best known artworks, the piece is called Truisms and is, as the artist, remarks, a survey of belief. It explores the power of the word, as does the rest of her exhibition.
Inflammatory essays is concerned with the revolutionary sublime, with the energy that can be accumulated and transferred through text. Words sampled from political extremists, 'crackpot literature' and religious radicals printed on bright colored paper combine to form a buzzing wall of text, a multiplicity of voices, a kind of grid, a playing board of radical opinion. Not only is the piece about what those texts say but about how they say it and about the undeniable appeal of radicality - in other words, if you’ve watched Manifesto you’re bound to have Cate Blanchett reading them out loud in your head.
The statements made in Inflammatory Essays can also be found on a series of bright blue and pink led strips, multiplied and flowing in parallel with a dizzying speed, creating a an equally surreal and hi-tech glow of purple light.
In her statement on Tate’s website Holzer remarks “I wanted to be to be explicit but not didactic”. The exhibition, as much as it is about the subjects it deals with is always about the power of the word, and what is interesting and very essential to Holzer's style - it’s always the written word, never the spoken.
She’s playing with materiality of the text itself, exploring different contexts and different modes of engagement with the text, from the more contemplative - gravestones, monuments, marble carving, to the high-speed, industrialized aesthetic of LED strip displays.
Holzer creates situations, stages formal setups in communication with the viewer, sending and leaving messages through various mediums.
The largest room in the exhibition is a carefully engineered assemblage, a kind of semantic/textual terrain. The first thing to catch the viewer’s attention is a gigantic led strip, more modern than the one over the entrance, bright and multi-colored, bathing the room in a cool light. It looks almost like a hologram with its 4-sided display surface and the way it’s inserted into the room – hanging imposingly overhead at a slightly uncomfortable angle and seemingly protruding from the wall. Here, the texts moves so quickly it’s hard to follow at times. YOU ARE TRAPPED ON EARTH AND SO YOU WILL EXPLODE - it announces as you enter the room. Other apocalyptic messages follow, in the seamless glide of a news-strip, too quickly to focus on any one of them, leaving you dizzy and anxious after some time. The strip is surrounded by marble benches, gleaming and polished like fresh gravestones. It seems a bit wrong to sit down on this monumental object but you still do. And as you sit there you notice that the benches contain text as well. It’s engraved in simple, slightly decorative lettering, the type you would find on a monument or a grave stone. The lettering is not that easy to decipher, the characters are only visible if the light from the large strip overhead crosses over them. “HE SMILED AND LISTENED HIS EYELIDS DROPPED HE DIDN’T KNOW SUCH WORDS ARE TOLD TO A SOLDIER ONLY WHEN HE’S DYING” The marble surface starts burning, you get up from the bench, feeling like you’ve committed some kind of blasphemy.
You’re surrounded by text, a plague of text.
There’s more – on the wall opposite hang small metal and leather plaques. They resemble notes put next to monuments as much as information signs in expensive hotels. They also require you to come near to be able to read them. IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY, reads one of them. BODIES LIE IN THE BRIGHT GRASS AND SOME ARE MURDERED AND SOME ARE PICNICKING, SAYS ONE A COUPLE FOOTSTEPS AWAY.
The whole set-up creates a network of text and distraction, the attention of the viewer is never in linear focus, constantly making leaps between different texts and messages, never able to fully focus on one of them, incessantly disturbed by the nagging presence of the others. The architecture of the room mirrors this fragmented but interconnected mode of reception – light from one of the works is needed to see the other ones properly, physical interaction with the benches is an unavoidable effect of engagement with other texts, and so on. The lived space of the exhibition corresponds the constant efforts of the viewers to make connections between the texts, to come up with a sort of hermeneutic narrative, the lived space converges with the semantic space. At first, its elements seem unrelated, almost randomly put together, but after some time familiar lines start appearing in multiple (if not surprising) places, changing mediums in alchemical transformations from led light to stone carving to metal lettering, creating a sense of inevitability.
There is also a profound dissonance between mode of engagement with the text and the content of the text.Through the insertion of a poetic macabre in the place of what is usually purely functional, without the slightest tinge of emotion, the artist finds a way to tap into our information-wired brains.
Arguably the most powerful piece in the exhibition is another single LED screen, titled THEY LEFT ME displaying transcripted excerpts from accounts of Syrian refugees combined with Anna Świrszczynska’s poetry of siege and resistance. As your eyes follow the fast-flowing text, you are increasingly overcome with a sense of heightening panic, a kind of impending doom.
LED text is here a frighteningly immediate medium, beaming itself straight into your consciousness. You have to keep focus all the time, sometimes the text dissolves, glitches, reverses, speeds up and becomes unintelligible which results equally in a kind of panic and detachment. The text becomes an immediate visualization of its meaning.
Though confined by simplicity of a basic LED display, different visual effects, colors, glitches and fonts provide you with additional data, in a kind of peripheral perception. While you focus on the text, this creates an atmospheric, almost emotional background, sometimes so powerful that the horror of the testimony cannot be ignored.
But perhaps the most interesting part is the process of the viewer's engagement with the text. When you first see a piece of text in Holzer's work (before consulting a gallery description) it already, unclassified, makes its way into your brain. In this it is a stand-alone independent entity, depersonalized and detached from its source, and at the same time rich with possible connections and associations, and it is hard not to make subconscious guesses as to where it is coming from. Thus, I think, another very powerful aspect of Holzer's work lies almost beyond the work itself - this moment in which a text is connected to its source, in a sudden realization of reality and actuality: what you initially take to be a quote from Aida or a work by Hemingway turns out to be the very real words of a Syrian refugee. It would however be unfair to omit the reverse of this process, present for example in Truisms: you are initially taken in by the appealing radicality of the text, which at first at least seems like a kind of direct revolutionary manifesto, only to be disillusioned by the very truistic nature of the statements as well as their simultaneous repetitiveness and inconsistency.
The essence of Holzer's work could be said to lie in the way she unpicks our relationship with the written text and modes of communication, from monuments to the evening news. This deconstruction is an active and creative process, aimed perhaps at countering the blasé attitude and trying to get our long forgotten empathy running, but it is also - in a rather perverse way - an intense aesthetic experience in itself.
Comments