Jenny Holzer, 'Artist Room' At mac Birmingham

Jenny Holzer, 'Blue Purple Tilt', Illuminated LED Signs X 7, 2007

I met my friend and fellow artist, Andrew Smith again, in Birmingham, the other day.  It was an enjoyable day of chewing the fat, (and falafels), which also involved taking in a couple of rewarding exhibitions.  Amongst those was American conceptual artist, Jenny Holzer’s ‘Artist Room’ at mac Birmingham.  Although minimal (if elgant) in physical content, the exhibit contains a wealth of artistic/intellectual content.  My hunch is it would actually repay repeat visits, which isn’t bad for what might, at first glance, appear to be merely two ‘pieces’ in a single room.

  

Those two pieces comprise of illuminated LED arrays, along which texts continually chase.  They’re the kind of thing one might encounter in a transport hub, stock exchange or public space (such as New York’s Times Square, for instance), and reflect Holzer’s habitual attempts to present potentially challenging Art content via more traditionally utilitarian or commercial delivery systems.  At one end of the gallery, six such parallel display units are arranged, vertically in the frontal plane - but also angled back to the wall (entitled, 'Blue Purple Tilt').  The same textual content scrolls along each of these six bands, whilst fluctuating coloured light illuminates the wall behind and immediate surroundings.  The second piece ('Floor') forms a single, longer array, extending horizontally along the floor - and appearing to emerge from (or disappear into) one wall.  In both cases, text is orientated vertically in terms of each physical light box – meaning that, in this piece, one must tilt one’s head to the side, or view the piece end-on, to easily read the scrolling text.

However, as already intimated, the real meat of the show is in the textual content – itself a wide selection of Holzer’s earlier text works, be they polemical or of a more personal/emotional/autobiographical nature.  The radical and consciously feminist underpinnings of many of Holzer’s ‘messages’ are no secret.  However, this show’s essential function as compilation just emphasises how this material can fluctuate between the direct, or even sloganeering, and the more obliquely allusive.  The negotiation of this particular tightrope is something I’ve been considering in relation to my own ‘This S(c)eptic Isle’ work, of late.  It also illuminates (literally) the potential interrelationship between personal and ideological politics.

Would it be too simplistic or stereotypical to attribute this ability to bring a distinct emotional intelligence to bear upon conscious political analysis to a number of leading contemporary female artists, I wonder?  In reality, one might hope that such binary distinctions between the emotional/theoretical, or between female/female habits of thought in general, might be rendered increasingly obsolete, as gender-based identities themselves become seemingly ever more fluid.  Whatever the truth of this, Holzer herself shows no inclination to pull her punches, with emotionally raw, sexually graphic, or polemically strident elements all taking their place alongside more poetic or ambiguous material.  Andrew and I both relished the way she will sometimes present a series of unrelated, superficially simplistic truisms in a direct, seemingly relativistic manner – leaving the reader to unpack the layers of meaning or potential connections which may or may not be there.

Jenny Holzer, (L.) 'Blue Purple Tilt', (R.) 'Floor' Illuminated LED Signs, mac Birmingham,
August 2017

In fact, to say the main point of Holzer’s work is in the content isn’t strictly true, and actually, that understanding of the ‘work’ required on the part of the viewer is key here.  As with all the best Conceptual art (I sometimes consider ‘philosophical’ a preferable label), the real rewards are to be found in considering the relationship between what may be said (or suggested), and the manner in which it is being said.  It all goes back to all that old McLuanesque stuff about medium and message, I suppose, but in an ever more mediated culture, and one in which supposed  ‘truths’ and ‘facts’ are no longer regarded as imalleable.  Context and our ability or inability to absorb and evaluate it are more relevant than ever when considering our relationship with any stream of information.  Holzer’s work is, above all, concerned with the nature of delivery systems, and how they colour (again, literally), our apprehension of the material they carry.

Jenny Holzer, 'Floor', Illuminated LED Sign, 2017

It seems to me that the brilliant (and again) trick she pulls with these chasing text pieces is to make them quite, but not completely difficult, to read.  Our familiarity with such kinetic, matrix-based displays is that they require a certain amount of work to decipher.  In common usage, the trade-off is between the expenditure of this effort, and the often bald or simplistic nature of the information delivered.  Such scrolling or flashing messages are, by their very nature, fleeting, but then, so often are the meanings they impart.  They imply a temporary  relationship with information, as well as a temporal one.

 

Holzer uses all near-subliminal tricks of the medium to upset this customary interaction.  These include an almost-too-fast-to read pacing and distinctly torrential relentlessness of the texts, the gimmicky programming of colliding, overlapping or flickering phrases, their integration within potentially conflicting, colour-shifting background patterns, and even the simple expedient of awkwardly rotating characters by 90 degrees.  It all serves to make us work harder than we might choose to extract meaning or to arrive at a possible interpretation.  The retention and satisfactory digestion of Holzer’s words are rendered near impossible.  We are forced to confront, in a seemingly inappropriate manner, the kind of profound or emotionally resonant material traditionally reflected upon over repeat visits to the printed page.  It feels like an accelerated form of philosophy - but equally, as a philosophical interrogation of the nature of acceleration.

One consequence of all this might be that the disengaged viewer might spend only a few seconds with the show, before losing heart, searching for coffee, or returning to a different illuminated display of their own.  Another is to abandon the impossible task of keeping abreast of the ceaseless parade of writings, and to relax into the enjoyable ambience of coloured light and shifting shadows.  My own experience became one of oscillating between the Textual engagement and non-specific immersion, in the event.  Once we learned from a gallery attendant that the complete textual cycles take 20 and 24 hours respectively, a third option of dropping in and out over repeat visits felt like the most feasible one of all.  Geography, time and fuel prices make that impossible for me, but it does make sense of Holzer’s habit, over the years, of placing her work in the street, where one might regularly pass by - or in very public spaces to which one might repeatedly return.

Dan Flavin, 'Untitled (To Don Judd, Colourist) 4', Illuminated Fluorescent
Tubes, 1987. 'Dan Flavin: It Is What It Is And It Ain't Nothing Else',
Ikon, Birmingham, April - June 2016

I’m reminded of my vist to Ikon’s much-lauded Dan Flavin exhibition - also in Birmingham, last year.  I’d approached it with much anticipation, but came away somewhat underwhelmed in the event.  I’d enjoyed it initially, but  had a lingering sensation of having partaken of thin gruel, if you will.  Superficially, in terms of presentation, at least - Holzer employs similar tools of minimalist formality, and of coloured light and its effect upon the physical environment.  However, Flavin ultimately supplies, in his own words, the sense that 'It Is What It Is And It Ain’t Nothing Else'.   Holzer’s injection of time, and of course, words, into the mix does exactly the opposite.

Any good French philosopher of the twentieth century can explain at tedious length just how slippery is the relationship between the ‘form’ of a word, and its freight of information or meaning.  Add in the intangibility of words expressed purely through the medium of shifting photons, and the philosophical possibilities multiply even further.  Holzer’s work may tend towards the insubstantial (her grandest statements are simply huge projections), or be limited in extent (as at mac), but dig vertically through the strata of possible meaning it implies, and it starts to feel like something altogether different.