World-renowned conceptual artist Jenny Holzer has had her work displayed in the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Gallery, and the Centre Pompidou. But however great her museum credits are, the true home of Holzer’s work is the everyday landscape of an urban environment. Most of her pieces take the form of creative text on display, either as single sentences or longer essays, which interact directly with their placement in the public space. Holzer’s work has been seen everywhere from benches and parking meters to buildings and trees. Now through February 29 Holzer’s earliest works can be seen in “Truisms and Essays” on exhibit at the Davison Arts Center (DAC).
The opening piece, and Holzer’s first major work, “Truisms,” was compiled between 1977 and 1979. “Truisms” appears at first as a stiff listing of aphorisms such as “categorizing fear is calming” and “looking back is the first sign of aging and decay.” The one-liners are starkly printed in alphabetical order in bold uppercase letters on two large sheets of paper. One realizes then that the austere quality forces the viewer to actively make judgments and then to question those judgments.
Because Holzer intended her work to have a “found” quality, the exhibit is modestly arranged not in a gallery room, but in the breezeway of the DAC.
Eliza Spaulding ’04, curator of the exhibit, admitted that it was tricky to arrange the works.
“We decided the hallway space was nice because it is a site of traffic,” said Spaulding.
In trying to capture the feeling of having just stumbled upon the texts, Spaulding used existing holes made by previous pushpins to hang the pieces of paper.
“I really did just happen upon [the exhibit],” said Aaron Welo ’04. “I knew it was an exhibit, but because I wasn’t expecting it, it was kind of cool.”
“Truisms” functions partly as a new ABC’s of adages. One questions not only the adages themselves, but also the nature of rules and supposed universal truths as a whole. The second work on display, “Inflammatory Essays,” moves away from the sparseness of “Truisms” and towards a more personal, emotional content. “Essays” stems from Holzer’s reading of Mao Tse-tung and Vladimir Lenin, among other social thinkers. It is actually a collection of several short themed essays, each one hundred words and twenty lines long. The topics of the essays range from the death penalty to child molestation. The colors of the paper run the gamut of the rainbow.
“In the ‘Truisms,’ one can gain a lot by reading and understanding specific truisms, though so much more can be gained by understanding how those truisms relate to the other truisms in the list,” Spaulding said.
Though Holzer’s works may be from a nascent period artistically, their in-your-face timelessness is striking.
“So much is contained in them that one can always return to them and find something new,” Spaulding said. “In both series, Holzer discusses issues that will be pertinent for a long time, if not forever.”
The same can be said for “Essays” in that they are arranged in groups of three or four, reflecting Holzer’s original checkerboard arrangement. One essay is so affected by all the others around it that each word becomes a pixel of a larger picture. A foursome of essays in neon stand out is particularly remarkable. The juxtaposition of the colors guides the viewer’s eyes, creating an interesting relationship between the texts. A meditation on rebellion moves to a meditation on the pleasure of domination, which moves to a discussion on fear as a weapon, and ends with a piece about sentimentality.
“Since they’re just kind of there to look at, I guess you can see them in whatever order you want. They mean different things that way,” Welo said.
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