Jenny Holzer at Tate
Jenny Holzer at Tate

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Jenny Holzer at Tate

Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York: cities fetishized by camera-toting tourists for their distinctive neon signs. Flashing letters scream “LOOK AT ME” in a kind of aural/visual synaesthesia, fighting to occupy the barely-there spaces between buildings. The observer, bathed in the light of these fluorescent, blinking voices, quickly goes blind to the rows of Chinese restaurants, beauty salons and souvenir shops clamouring for their attention.

It’s as if every app on my phone is pinging simultaneously or a hundred toddlers are simultaneously demanding my attention – but this chaos is no thoughtless miscalculation.

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Exhibition view: Artist Rooms: Jenny Holzer, Tate Modern, London, 2018. © 2018 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photo: Jack Hems

Throw too much of anything in someone’s face and eventually they stop absorbing it. Take “compassion fatigue”, a phenomenon unique to our current state of living in which one’s attention is overworked and overwrought by reports of violent, emotionally demanding world affairs. In the face of such excess information, and no doubt compounded by the media’s negativity bias, our reaction is to switch off and shut down. We become desensitised to images of war, trauma and natural disaster, or simply oversaturated with them until they occupy as much mental real estate as an advertising jingle or train announcement. Enter Jenny Holzer, an artist zooming in on the lag between seen, and observed; heard, and absorbed.

In Holzer’s Artist Rooms installation at Tate Modern, words buzz at me in all dimensions and leapfrog over each other; off the wall, and into my line of vision. It’s as if every app on my phone is pinging simultaneously or a hundred toddlers are simultaneously demanding my attention – but this chaos is no thoughtless miscalculation. Nothing with Holzer is accidental; rather, her work is calibrated to induce overload. It’s inflammatory, the messages frequently in conflict with one another and – most crucially of all – impossible to ignore or compute.

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Exhibition view: Artist Rooms: Jenny Holzer, Tate Modern, London, 2018. © 2018 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photo: Jack Hems

Truisms covers all four walls. Smooth as a page, their text uniform in font, size, and colour, epithets and aphorisms sit on every surface of the relatively small space and make for a very compelling experience of claustrophobia. The phrases, cut from textbooks, political campaigns and shopfronts, present an incongruent collection of words. Some are drawn from American conflicts: the AIDS epidemic, the Vietnam war. Others are cliches or newspaper headlines. The dogmatic, “you must agree with authority figures”, is bedfellow to the anarchic: “you are a victim of the rules you live by.” Bolshie statements befitting a 1970s feminist manifesto – “the desire to reproduce is a death wish” – accompany the hawkish, “Freedom is a luxury not a necessity.” Holzer selects slogans with curatorial precision, the jarring opinions reflective of the multitudinous voices beyond gallery walls. Emotional responses, flippant as an ill-judged Facebook update (“people who go crazy are too sensitive”) sidle up to the intellectual, each statement invoking the image of a person who might utter it and giving the abiding impression of a party or rabble. “Use what is dominant in a culture to change it quickly” – Holzer, wordsmith, might be on to something there.

Glaring for its absence, of course, is context: words displaced from their source swirl around our heads, a glaring mirror of the thousand phrases and slogans we encounter every day and pulling from us, involuntary, our own associations. Holzer’s viewers can’t be passive; on the contrary, we’re each a lynchpin for her work’s smooth operation. It’s up to us to create meaning for every phrase, and to project in our mind’s eye a mouth from which a snippet might issue. Does “The Family is living on borrowed time” come from a cynical child of divorce, or a cult leader seeking to sever followers from their earthly ties? Is “three lines form a triangle or a star depending on their relationship” an Alt-J lyric, or a line from a maths textbook? Each reading says more about us than her – it’s not you, it’s me! – and Holzer’s provocative phrases are only the exoskeleton of the work’s organism. You’re its beating heart.

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TOWARDS THE CLOUDS, 2017. Text: "Earth and Sky" from Building the Barricade by Anna Świrszczyńska, English translation by Piotr Florczyk, © 2016 by Tavern Books. Used with permission of Ludmilla Adamska- Orłowska and the translator.

FLOOR, 2015. Installation: Artist Rooms: Jenny Holzer, Tate Modern, London, 2018. © 2017 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photo: Jack Hems

Why does one thing, and not the other, resonate? “Are they are alphabetised?”, mutters a man behind me. Unable to find the thread of corresponding sentence and meaning, the urge to impose order on the chaos is irresistible – but no. Truisms aren’t arranged from A to Z. By giving an equal platform to all snippets, no matter how mutually repellent their sentiments, Holzer implodes the polarity which often characterises disagreement. She demands analysis, a head-on-collision in place of side-step. Devoid of an overriding narrative – “people are boring unless there are extremists” (extreme) then “disorganisation is a kind of anaesthesia” (harsh) – Holzer’s own opinion is unclear amidst the melee. Does she believe “Humanism is obsolete”? Does she perhaps align herself with the conviction that “land belongs to no one”? Probing for motives, the only response you can be sure she wants is yours. Any reaction, please! Just not silence.

When Truisms was first exhibited, smoothed across a street wall in New York, it was defaced. Parts were torn down, almost like the process of verbal exchange – interlocutor rips apart an opening statement before being countered in turn – and while the vandalism might sound negative, at least there was engagement. It’s better to have a point of view, after all, than no argument whatsoever. Haven’t you heard that there’s nothing more terrifying than a blank page? Truisms argues most forcefully with itself: “timidity is laughable”; “words tend to be inadequate”. The maxim “actions speak louder than words” lurks behind the meta-joke – perhaps the fruit of an artist’s frustration, especially considering that Holzer’s entire oeuvre is language-based. More than that, it’s unusual to see her work in an enclosed space. Holzer’s work tends to land much closer to home, writing across t-shirts, take-out cups, condoms and billboards to reach a much wider (sometimes unwitting) audience than obedient gallery visitors. If “men don’t protect you anymore” barks at you from a Durex packet rather than a white-cube wall, chances are you’ll think a little harder about what comes next. Why shouldn’t art be in your dressing table drawer? Why oughtn’t it address you directly, as so much advertising does?

If the garden-path of Brexit campaigning taught us anything, it’s that you can’t believe everything you read (especially not on the side of a bus).

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Exhibition view: Artist Rooms: Jenny Holzer, Tate Modern, London, 2018. © 2018 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photo: Jack Hems

Be it 280 characters in a tweet, or a slogan on a sly campaign peeking up at you from below your Oyster card, advertised ‘truths’ and out-of-context statistics only add to the world’s echo-chamber-cum-cacophony of information. Truisms is literalising a tried and tested formula, a kind of war of attrition for truth and clarity where your attention span is the sacrificial lamb. We’ve seen our susceptibility to conflicting messages and falsehood illustrated all too clearly in the last few years: if the garden-path of Brexit campaigning taught us anything, it’s that you can’t believe everything you read (especially not on the side of a bus). Call me sceptical, but when the President of the most powerful economy retweets Fox news, critical reading is both life-line and new-world horizon in a sea of mistruths. Back in the gallery, words shoot overhead from all four sides of a strobe, hanging like a drunk Times Square skyscraper in the middle of the room. Lines of text exchange places, like illuminated trains – or ships – passing in the night. They’re challenging to read, complicated by the awkward angle of suspension, but the reference is clear: our capacity for understanding others’ voices hangs by a thread. There’s no absolutism or certainty in Holzer’s world of multiple perspectives; only a sense that humanity is teetering on the brink. Concentrate, now – your life might just depend in it.

By Claire McQue.

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