Jenny Holzer, Writing on the Wall
Emily Steinfeld
I saw a crowd was gathered as I approached. Shifting from side to side, milling about, across the street from the NYU Bobst library. This is the site of Jenny Holzer’s second installation in series of projections entitled "For the City." Three locations, the New York Public Library, Rockefeller center and the NYU Bobst Library, were selected to have their surfaces illuminated by projections of poetry and United States government documents recently declassified under the Landmark Freedom Act of 1964. I noticed the crowd and had a moment of disbelief that such a horde could be gathered for an art installation. I got closer, and noticed that they were not looking at the two massively scaled documents comprised of scrolling text, blacked out words and hasty signatures. They were instead, gaping at the door of the NYU auditorium across the street. "What are you waiting for?" I asked a man in a cowboy hat and wraparound sunglasses. He looks at me like I am missing a chromosome. "Bono," he answers succinctly and swivels back around to stare at the doorway, where I now knew the erstwhile U2 pop star cum political activist would soon appear.
As the crowd waited some glanced at Holzer’s text, some genuinely interested and some just killing time until Bono’s diminutive form materialized. The text scrolls at a leisurely pace, big enough to see clearly, but going fast enough down the wall that you get a little dizzy. You have to stand there, your head cocked slightly backwards, to read each line as it goes by. The formation of blacked out text, like storm clouds, creep over the massive documents, eating at the information–telling you something, but not permitting you to understand what. Eventually you let your eyes relax to a blurring degree and stare at one spot. The text then becomes Greek, scribbles, coded pricks of light against a ruddy background. As the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat said of his use of crossed-out words in his paintings "It makes you pay more attention to what I’m saying. You want to see beyond the erasures."
All of the texts were selected from files that are now on public record and available to anyone with access to the Internet or to research libraries such as Bobst. Though readily available on the web and projected for all the public to see, it is doubtful that many people have made use of the Landmark Freedom Act and their own rights to peruse these, as well other, recently disclosed documents. In throwing them up on the very wall of the library that they are available in, Holzer is defiantly telling a certain kind of apathetic, Bono gawking, public that they should look a little closer. One document is an FBI email. It notes that Defense Department individuals impersonated FBI agents at Guantanamo Bay so that if something came out about torture tactics used there, the FBI would be "left holding the bag." The war obviously has a lot to do with these selections. There are segments detailing interview tactics used on detainees as well as actual transcriptions of interviews. The documents literally highlighted on the wall, not only show what has been kept secret and what is still undisclosed but how accessible they are to the general public.
As art works, the documents go in an entirely different direction than Holzer’s previous projects. Her "Truisms" project, consisted of reconstructed aphorisms like "Absolute power comes as no surprise" and "Anything is a legitimate area of investigation" originally printed on t-shirts and scrawled on street corners, then reproduced in LED screens. These statements used a minimalist aesthetic to mimic the slogans and propaganda of advertising and political rhetoric. In "For the City" she appropriates the words of others and with this lack of her own words effectively she highlights the works visual aspects. The work breaks through the perpetual almost-darkness in NY and leads one to think more about the scribblings of Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat, than Barbara Kruger or Hans Haacke with whom she is more often associated.
Twombly is a good comparison for more reasons than one. John Berger described him as a "master of visible silence." One could definitely argue that Holzer does much with this visible silence idea in her installation. The image of text on the wall calmly places information in front of you and your job, as viewer is to realize that where there should be an answer, there is only more silence.
Cy Twombly’s exhibition, "Bacchus" at the Gagosian gallery in Chelsea, ran from November 24 to Christmas Eve. Though Twombly was never considered a public artist, his work could have lent itself easily to graffiti or light projections like Holzer’s. Twombly teases you with half words and symbols. One scribble looks like the word "cat" but it could also be the grass under an image that could, maybe, possibly, be a house. Holzer teases you too. Or shows you how you are being teased. She gives you what you are entitled to. Documents that are on file in the very library they are being projected on. But they are still in code. They are still blocked and if you don’t take the time to look past the artwork and into the library, or the Internet or wherever you obtain information, you are left with a feeling of secrecy without a secret.
It took about 45 minutes but eventually, Bono emerged from the building, his hat cocked forward his glasses pasted to his head, his look a bit glazed and his wave, very practiced and efficient. He stops to sign one autograph, and the backdrop of Holzer’s text lights Bono’s craggy face. He then makes a beeline for his massive limo. The crowd, confident that they had seen all there was to see, started to dwindle and eventually the block was empty.
