 | Jenny Holzer
| PROJECTIONS, 2008
Light projection
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA),
North Adams, Massachusetts, USA
Text (pictured): “Parting with a View” from View with a Grain of
Sand by Wisława Szymborska, copyright © 1993 by the author.
English translation by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh,
copyright © 1995 by Harcourt, Inc.
Used/reprinted with permission of the author.
© [2009] Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights
Society (ARS), NY.
Photo: Attilio Maranzano |
| A little knowledge can go a long way…A lot of professionals are crackpots
Abuse of power comes as no surprise…Being sure of yourself means you’re a fool…Believing in rebirth is the same as admitting defeat…..
| The first Australian survey of recent works by Jenny Holzer will open at ACCA in December.
| Holzer became well-known in the 1980s for her text-based works and public art. Her first series, Truisms (1977-79), contained concise, aphoristic statements that revealed and questioned truths, beliefs, and ideologies. While Truisms first appeared on posters placed in the urban environment, Holzer’s texts later took a number of forms including light projections on high-profile public buildings, LED (light emitting diode) signs, stickers placed on surfaces such as parking metres and telephone booths, and public furniture such as marble and granite benches. Holzer's recent practice incorporates the writings of others, including works by internationally celebrated poets and declassified government documents. Like her own texts, the borrowed writings and documents address personal and public calamities in a range of voices and tones that approximates the complexity of daily life.
Holzer has used words and ideas in public spaces for the past thirty years. She has also created large-scale projects for prominent institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris).
For ACCA’s main exhibition hall, Holzer will project poetry in the form of light onto the floors, ceilings, and walls, making the language something felt as well as read. In addition, she will display works from a series that began in 2005 where she translates declassified government documents into paintings. The documents are left exactly as they were found when rendered through silkscreen onto oil-painted grounds. The marks of a censor are seen in the text blocked out by a black scribble or box. These works come, as Holzer has said, from her “frantic worrying about the war and attendant changes in American society.” The projections and paintings are accompanied by an LED installation titled Torso. In this work, Holzer stacks ten semi-circular signs that display in red, blue, white, and purple light the statements, investigation reports, and emails from case files of soldiers accused of various crimes in the Middle East. Providing these voices, part damning, contradictory, sympathetic, anecdotal, and evidentiary, Holzer layers accounts of abuse and blame.
| Jenny Holzer - 17 December 2009 – 28 February 2010
Jenny Holzer - ARTISTS TALK – 19th February, 2010. Details TBC.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank.
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday 10am-5pm, Weekends 11am–6pm. Mondays by appointment.
Tel: 03 9697 9999. Admission: Free. www.accaonline.org.au
For further media information: Katrina Hall on 03 9697 9999,
mobile 0421 153 046 or email kathall@ozemail.com.au
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