|
Signs of Decay
This is what happens when the medium is the message.
by Lance Esplund
10/24/2009 12:08:00 AM, Volume 015, Issue 07
Jenny Holzer
Protect Protect
Fondation Beyeler
Sonderausstellung
Basel, Switzerland
Nov. 1, 2009 - Jan. 24, 2010
Jenny Holzer's artistic aphorisms--her text-laden T-shirts and posters; projected wall-size slogans, and large, running LED signs--at first are cause for alarm.
Read as stream-of-consciousness warning signs, their cryptic meanings and clinical delivery can be sobering. Holzer's language art, which she has been making for the last three decades, fires off its messages--prophetic and apocryphal, public and private, dealing with heartache, politics, religion, and war--like a running ticker tape of all the world's problems. She deploys language so that words are dropped into our consciousness, bit by bit, like Chinese water torture.
When her cautionary haikus are at their best--"Decency Is a Relative Thing," "Private Property Created Crime," "Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise," "With You Inside Me Comes the Knowledge of My Death"--her language is as unnerving for its brevity and bite as it is for its billboard-scale browbeating.
In her recent retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, now on exhibition in Basel, we are treated to a spare yet in-your-face selection of Holzer's artworks from only the last 15 years, which makes it not a proper retrospective per se. Some of her text works, which have been projected onto surfaces including building façades, trees, cliff faces, and ocean waves, have looked more innovative and convincing than they do here. To its credit, however, "Protect Protect," for better or worse, includes no documentary images of previous installations. This exhibition is more ...
|
