Positivism and its Discontents
Jenny Holzer at the Guggenheim
The Jenny Holzer Message has all the empathy of a Pentagon briefing.
Jenny Holzer: Light Line. Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York. May 17through September 29, 2024. https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/jenny-holzer
The good news is, you can catch the gist of Jenny Holzer’s show at the Guggenheim New York without having to pay admission. The bad news: that’s the only subversive thing about it.
From the floor of the Rotunda you can admire Holzer’s signature scroll of trite messages flashing up the ramp in various patterns and colors: capitalist fortune cookies. Except, instead of scrolling through Twitter, Twitter does the scrolling for you.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s building has a way of showing up those artists who are incapable of engaging with it. Looking up from the Rotunda floor, you might be led to believe that Holzer’s met the challenge: the messages scrolling up the spiral seem to be fully integrated with the architecture itself. Save your illusions, and your admission fee, because once you’ve bought your ticket and moved up the spiral ramp, Holzer’s engagement’s not merely inappropriate, it’s inadequate, it’s out-and-out offensive.
For starters, there are empty gaps in the display modules — lots. That’s the kind of incompetence you expect from startup artists who don’t have a body of work sufficient to fill the space, and it spells career death, or should. What’s left is a series of “messages” slapped into the corner of gilded canvases or pieces of stone, slapped against the canvas like a scrolling slapped against a building, with no relation of concept to form:
Holzer’s one of those positivists (like Barbara Kruger, or Martha Rossler) who’d like you to believe that duplicating nasty messages constitutes a critique of nasty messages, which of course it’s not: Holzer, as her bio proudly informs us, was awarded the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award in 1996, and the US State Department’s International Medal of Arts in 2017.
And that alone would be reason to despise this show, except for something else: I used to work at the Guggenheim, it’s one of the very few places where I’d turn up an hour or two ahead of time, simply to bask in the near-mystical sense of joy that radiates from Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. And it’s not as if Holzer chooses to engage with this utopian pleasure: that I could understand and appreciate, even if I might not share it.
But as I said, it’s not that she doesn’t want to engage, it’s that she can’t. Her inability to exist in the same conceptual space is repeated without change. Throughout you get that creaky Reagan Era feeling, that somebody thinks that this is what everybody thinks. So good to be reminded of other times, our own included. Beware when you stare into the dream, for the dream might stare back at you.
WOID XXIV-05
Wednesday, May 22, 2024