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Jenny Holzers work talks a lot but says very little.
Holzer makes her utterances sensual and haunting by materializing words into light.
Holzer emerged in the late 1970s putting up Truisms around downtown Manhattan.
We were all in on the joke: Art was infiltrating the world and speaking back to it.
It does so less today.
(A take on her 2008 facade-projection piece was on display at the Guggenheim last month.)
We follow this for a few bays to where it ends in a pile on the floor.
Holzers writing style is not Barbara Krugers commanding voice of the Father.
She implores, submits, and is passive aggressive.
SHE HAD A SON DIE.
I WOULD NOT DO HER ONE BETTER BY KILLING A GIRL.
Part of the cringey text reads, I WILL THINK MORE BEFORE I CANNOT.
I LOVE MY MIND WHEN IT IS FUCKING THE CRACKS OF EVENTS.
I WANT TO TELL YOU WHAT I KNOW IN CASE IT IS OF USE.
We see government documents and paintings about surveillance, interrogation techniques, Nixon and Kissinger.
Holzer forces language to exist in symbiosis with architecture and space.
It is the news ticker transformed to make buildings speak in uncanny voices.
Or perhaps something youd see at a crypto convention.
Short exclamatory phrases drift by: I AM CRYING HARD.
YOU ARE THE ONE WHO DID THIS TO ME.
I CANNOT WALK.
I AM LOSING TIME.
Gone is the psychosexual otherness of her earlier work and any vestige of speaking to institutional power.
Holzers Truisms have ossified into didactics; at the Guggenheim, it comes off as a misuse of space.
Jenny Holzer: Light Lineis at the Guggenheim Museum through September 29.
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