휘트니 미술관 JENNY HOLZER

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2008년 겨울 구겐하임뮤지엄건물위에  빔 프로젝트 작업을 시작으로 2009년 3월부터  
휘트니 뮤지엄에서 그의 개인전이 연결되어 전시하고있다. 뉴욕 전시는 거의 4개정도의 뮤지엄을 연결하면서 전시를 진행하고 있어 더 많은 정보와 자료를 가지고 작가를 만날 수 있다는 것이 장점이다. 
그의 작업이 건물위에 많이 보여지고 있던 터라 실내에서 그의 전시를 게다가 텍스트, 조금 지루하지 않을까 하던 나의 우려는 말도 안되는 걱정이었다. 예전에 빌 비올라의 전시를 이 장소에서 보고도 그런 생각을 하다니 내가 많이 갇혀있었나보다. 그의 텍스트는 현란한 네온으로 바닥에 벽 귀퉁이에 그리고 구름다리계단, 타임스퀘어의 전광판인듯, 벽과 바닥을 연결하여 네온 분수를 보는 것 같은 착각을 불러일으켰다. 역시 완벽했다.

On view March 12-May 31, 2009

 

Jenny Holzer's pioneering approach to language as a carrier of content and her use of nontraditional media and public settings as vehicles for that content make her one of the most interesting and significant artists working today. Alternating between fact and fiction, the public and the private, the universal and the particular, Holzer's work offers an incisive social and psychological portrait of our times. PROTECT PROTECT centers on Holzer's work since the 1990s and is the artist's most comprehensive exhibition in the United States in more than fifteen years.

holzer began writing early in her career; her most well-known texts are the Truisms (1977–79) and Inflammatory Essays (1979–82). She uses various media to disseminate her writings, particularly LED (light-emitting diode) signs, which are commonly used for advertising and to report the news in the public realm. The LED signs in this exhibition draw from declassified government documents as well as the thirteen texts written by Holzer from 1977 to 2001. Documents have been re-keyed for the LED works and only changed as necessary for the medium. For example, redactions are represented by a series of X's.

 

The artist carefully considers every aspect of the signs from shape, font, and color choice to the pace of the scroll and movement of the text. In some cases the intent of the work is to soothe; in others, to repel or make the viewer uncomfortable. Holzer’s light sculptures have both an intimacy and grandeur, and create almost force fields around and within the spaces they define, transforming the contemporary gallery’s “white cube” into an immersive environment.

Red Yellow Looming (2004), Thorax (2008), and Purple (2008) are programmed with declassified documents. Red Yellow Looming touches on policy-making and public debate as it unfolded through the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. The documents deal with such issues as the international trade in arms and oil, the “war” on terrorism, 9/11, and the FBI and CIA, but all concern events prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Thorax presents an array of documents concerning one case in which an Iraqi non-combatant was killed by American forces. The documents contain many conflicting accounts of the same incident from different perspectives. Purple includes autopsy reports of detainees that died while in American custody, documents detailing various events and conditions at Guantánamo Bay, a series of policy documents regarding the treatment of enemy combatants, as well as the same case file included in Thorax.

 

Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT

For over thirty years, Jenny Holzer's work has paired the use of text and the centrality of installation to examine emotional and societal realities. Her choice of forms and media brings a sensate experience to the contradictory voices, opinions, and attitudes that shape everyday life. With a turn in practice towards greater visual and environmental presence, Holzer joins political bravura with formal beauty, sensitivity, and power. With essays by Joan Simon and Elizabeth A. T. Smith, and an interview with the artist by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, this publication centers on Jenny Holzer's work from 1990 to the present. Paperback, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 128 pages. 2008.

 

Using language as her medium, Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) has created a critically important body of work over the past three decades. Her texts have appeared in nontraditional media such as posters and electronic signs, billboards and T-shirts, and most recently as dematerialized, luminous projections on surfaces as different as crashing ocean waves and the Louvre’s large glass pyramid. Perhaps surprising for those who have followed the work of this artist for many years, her chosen texts recently have been rendered in oil paintings and in dazzling, large-scale electronic sculptures. While the political content of Holzer’s latest work fits in the tradition of Goya, the ethereal color and architectural scale draw inspiration from Matisse, Malevich, Rothko, and LeWitt.

The works in this exhibition feature selections of Holzer’s writings from 1977 to 2001, as well as declassified pages from U.S. government documents she has used as source material since 2004. The exhibition’s subtitle PROTECT PROTECT derives from texts detailing plans for the Iraq war, yet it also relates to the problematic power of personal desire, as encapsulated in one of Holzer’s best-known statements: PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT.

Whether she is using her own idiomatic texts, borrowing the words of international poets, or citing formerly classified materials containing policy debates, battle plans, and testimonies of American soldiers and detainees in U.S. custody, Holzer works between the public and private, the body politic and the body, the universal and the particular. Always timely, she provides a range of opinions, attitudes, and voices in works infused with formal beauty, sensitivity, and power.