Jenny Holzer's “WORDS”: The Exhaustion of an Empty Prophet
By Uma Halsted / Issue 1 / November 14, 2024
The space is swarmed with women over 65 with expensive face lifts and even more expensive Chanel skirt suits. The room is overpopulated with Jeff Koons knock-off sculptures and overly colored, decorative canvases. I quickly realize that I - with my baby bangs and cross body baggu tote - am very out of place here: this is not an art opening for critical or even thoughtful looking, it is one for sale. This is also not Sprüth Magers. It's upstairs. With fewer people and a slight relief of the stuffiness and anxiety I felt of knocking something over on the ground floor, I enter Jenny Holzer's show at the German gallery's small New York space. The scene is distinctly crisper and more breathable, not a single overlap in crowd to the room just below. However, there remains a shared art world buttoned-up elitism here: I am still direly underdressed, I am still the youngest person by 10 years at least, and I am still very out of place.
Upon entry, in front of an original, dark wood-lined fireplace, there is a gray-marble bench. This bench is not for sitting. It's shiny and to be looked at, and on its surface, reads "WORDS TEND TO BE INADEQUATE." Decorating the walls around it is a salon-style hanging of large, framed word-drawings done on tracing paper, each with a different phrase written often in penciled block letters, with a square acting as a frame around the words to make them (not unlike the benches) resemble tombstones or monuments: these drawings are intended to indicate process and turn this small exhibition into a retrospective of sorts. They are models, plans containing and practicing the display of Holzer's "truisms" for her far more manicured and commercial benches and LED light installations.
This curatorial pattern continues into a second room, where another bench (my personal favorite) reads "THE MOST PROFOUND THINGS ARE INEXPRESSIBLE" across blue marble. And, while writing this now, I can't help but laugh at the object's own irony and be repeatedly struck with my own lack of verbal expressibility -- not because I am or aspire towards anything profound here, but because these six simple words have the subdued effect of immediately exhausting all speech. Rather than capturing the profound in the inexpressible, Holzer achieves something distinctly unprofound in creating the inexpressible: an ironic effect of a political and, some might say, once "radical" word artist.
The show, at its core, is a retrospective of Holzer's "truisms" such as these ones; various didactic, liberal, feminist proclamations that we've heard too many times by now overwhelm the old-fashioned gallery space on and off the walls and simply drain energy, leaving my mind blank and frustrated. The phrase "MEN DON'T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE" is printed on condom wrappers in a jar, and "PLS HAVE POTUS CALL THIS OFF AT THE CAPITOL. URGE RIOTERS TO DISPERSE. I PRAY TO YOU" is typed on a sheet of framed paper atop of which charcoal hand streaks dramatically drag across the page.
Scattered across the space, these truisms have nearly the opposite effect of what they each prophesize, and there's a cringiness to how much the artist seems to care and how little her objects ask their audience to. This apparent severity and gravity on Holzer's part (supported by her austere way of dress, make-up free face, and long gray pony-tail) demand a kind of urgency, but remain so trapped in their own superficial surface reality to inspire any kind of action or even thought on part of the viewer. As a viewer, I can't even bring myself to read all of her words on the walls. But then again, they are not to be read; they are to be looked at.
Isn't the whole idea of "word art" that it is meant to be different, and not purely aesthetic? At the very least, shouldn't "political art" (whatever either of these phrases mean) inspire change, hatred, courage, shame, something... beyond looking? Here, what is inspired is a banal, hypocritical absence instead. Perhaps most embarrassing is the way Holzer\'s work has become a parody of itself. In flattening words and their meanings into clustered arrangements, she has achieved the very commodification of radical ideas that she once posited herself against.
Her truisms, far from sparking conversation, now shut it down with their smug self-satisfaction, highlighting the self-important pretense around the entirety of art that claims to de-prioritize aesthetics. For there is nothing more aesthetic than the complete calcification of words into meaningless images and objects with no afterlife beyond a commercial sale. Maybe Holzer's Postmodern work has finally reached its stasis. Or maybe, I -- as audience -- am just immune to and numbed-out by this form of self-proclaimed dire "radicality."
Holzer's austere presentation, punctuated by the occasional rainbow glint of light on a bench or accidental smudge on paper, gestures halfheartedly at depth and almost gives the hope of life present, only to reveal a profound emptiness at its core. With each work, she sets up radically oppositional ideas (the expressible/inexpressible, material/immaterial, old/new, indoor/outdoor, word/gestures) but never activates the conversation. If this show is a retrospective, Holzer's sketched plans populate the walls with the conceited impression that they hold a profound answer to the very questions her "finished" work prompts. But what exists instead is a room filled to the brim with highly aestheticized, commodified, and marketable art objects (drawings and paintings are much easier to sell than sculpture after all), veiled in an appropriated political agenda in a way that some may even argue takes a turn towards the fascistic.[^1]
[^1]: "The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life." (Benjamin, Walter. "A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," 1935).