Jenny Holzer at the Tate Modern - Review

Jenny Holzer. FLOOR 15. Image: Tate.

Jenny Holzer is best known for bringing art to the streets, but in a retrospective of her work at the Tate Modern, the street is reimagined inside the museum. Her work explores cultural memory, political apathy and consumer culture through the medium of imaging technologies and text-based installations. Holzer is well known for appropriating the visual methods of communication used by the state and commercial world. Her large-scale installations have included advertising billboards, architectural structures, illuminated electronic displays and projections, as well as street furniture and posters amongst other visual media.

In 1984, Holzer wheat-pasted her first series of posters Truisms - 250 single-sentenced declarations on coloured paper - across lower Manhattan, New York City. The text is now composed of over 300 common sayings, cliches, maxims and slogans collected between 1977-79. The project was a blatant critique of our daily confrontation with contradictory life views. Initially, Truisms infiltrated into the public domain, taking the form of t-shirt slogans and street posters. The artist chose to leave this work unsigned, calling to attention the anonymous voice of the advertising world.

In the Tate’s Artist Rooms, the declarations takes a photostatic form which coats every inch of one room, recalling their pervasiveness. Holzer went on to print the text on mass-produced objects such as disposable cups and condoms as well as engraving them into silver spoons and bracelets. These works resemble museum artefacts, encased in a glass box as a sign of gravitas. As we reckon with our own indifference toward these cliches, we realise just how omnipresent they must be. Juxtaposing them against one another, Holzer reveals how how saturated our world is in myth. Truisms, at the very least, affect belief and shape political discourse. At worst, they leave us disorientated and vulnerable to deception.

FLOOR 15 is a large scale electronic display originally created to be shown on the ground, now mounted onto the ceiling. The sculpture proposes a different reading of the same text, displaying Truisms, Inflammatory Essays and Living, amongst other writings. As a medium typically associated with the media and financial markets, the sculpture confronts us with the subtextual ideas which pervade our cities.

Laments (1989), originally developed as a body of textual work, now takes form as a continuous row of stone sarcophagi - typically used as box-like funeral receptacles for corpses - to express what Holzer described as “voices of the dead”. The text imagines the final thoughts of thirteen victims of the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s, and was intended to commemorate those who died as a result of slow responding politicians.  Holzer uses signs of authority and importance through materiality, and shows us how history is told through commemoration in public space.

Jenny Holzer. Towards the Clouds, 2017. Image: Tate.

The Living series, made between 1980-1982, details directions, observations and warnings.  Cast in bronze plaques, their status is elevated to that of historical buildings and monuments.  Hanging equidistant at head-height, they prove an arresting contrast to the surrounding fast-moving LED sign Blue Purple Tilt (2017) and the fuchsia pink hue lights the space.

Towards the Clouds (2017), is made up of marble benches and occupies the central gallery space. Poetry by acclaimed Polish author Anna Świrszczyńska is inscribed on their surfaces, drawing on her experiences as a nurse and member of the Polish Resistance during the Second World War. In public space, the commemorative bench functions as communal furniture scarcely catching viewers attention. Now in the gallery, we are invited to consider the potential of our architectural cities in rousing the ghosts of the past.

Jenny Holzer confronts us with how a highly saturated consumer culture produces political apathy. The museum might invite critical thought on the matter, but is far from immune to reality. The genius of this curation is how an intensely “instagrammable" exhibition incites the very political apathy Jenny Holzer reveals to us. Tourists slump tiredly on the marble benches after a long day sightseeing, others excitedly snap selfies amidst neon lights. Do narratives of trauma not alarm us at all anymore?

Artist Rooms: Jenny Holzer was at the Tate 23 July 2018 - 7 July 2019.