I wanted a lot simultaneously: to leave art outside for the public […], to be explicit but not didactic […], to disorient and transfix people, to offer up beauty, to be funny and never lie.
Jenny Holzer, 2019
I’m looking at Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays (1979-1982) because I’m interested in introducing text into my own practice and I also want to make my work more accessible to non-art (and also non-tech) audiences. Holzer exemplifies both strategies.
The artist’s photo, above, documents one of her own torn fly-bills wheat-pasted to a graffiti-covered wall. Black italicized ALLCAPS in lightly serifed neutral font, xeroxed on cheap white paper, weathered gray-pink, slightly shiny from the cooked gum of water + flour. The site must be well-trafficked: dense palimpsest of basic graffiti and vestiges of previous posters.
How do you penetrate public space with words? Holzer’s answer: posters, t-shirts, hats, cups, condom wrappers—merch—also LED displays, bronze plaques, stone benches, truck tarps, laser projections. Large text, legible typography, intruding into busy spaces, lots of words on many things, punchy, provocative copy, the logic of advertising and of populist news.
I like placing content wherever people look, and that can be at the bottom of a cup or on a shirt or hat or on the surface of a river or all over a building
Jenny Holzer, 2012
I used language because I wanted to offer content that people – not necessarily art people – could understand.
Jenny Holzer, 2012
Is there a threshold at which scale + legitimacy = spectacle
I want to make more pieces for handheld devices, because I think my stuff could live happily there, in tablets and phones.
Jenny Holzer, 2012
So how do you penetrate digital space? How might ‘Holzer-like’ work “live happily in phones and tablets”? Well, what is the form & logic of digital marketing and populist content today? Ads on search engines and in social media feeds, influencer marketing, brand collabs, PR stunts, endless content marketing, ecommerce placement, bloggers, vloggers, TikTok influencers, demos, tutorials, webinars, podcasts, motivational videos, extremist disinformation, much of it machine generated.
But how does artwork taking the form of, say, a beauty influencer’s brand-collab TikTok make-up tutorial not itself collapse into popular culture, especially when the OG content is already appropriating real artists’ work, itself riffing on AI-generated images produced by data models trained on millions of other real artists’ work?
Holzer offers some tactics for preventing such a collapse.
Tone: the voices of Inflammatory Essays are variously aggressive, unhinged, rapturous, religious, paranoid, fanatical, apocalyptic, dangerous, revolutionary, deluded maybe…maybe not. Whose voices are they? Not Holzer’s. Personae? Performances? Impersonations? Yes! Whose text? Faked or found? Essay, manifesto, letter, lecture, dear diary, deranged confession? Definitely not commercial marketing. This is probably the least useful tactic right now, when much of the web reads like a Holzer screed, unhinged, fanatical, angry.
The object of the anger though. Is this why the register often seems political? Much of Holzer’s work is overtly political—addressing misogyny, AIDS, wartime rape, Iraq, extra-judicial torture, Syria, NSA surveillance, school shootings. Overt. Explicit. Rarely didactic. Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays are not overtly political, but are strafing, dissident.
Who is the essay intended to inflame? A condescending professor? An abuser? The patriarchy itself? Certainly not a customer. Fictional target, productively vague. The actual audience confronting the work is given quite a bit of space.
Typography again. Bold neutral font highly legible. Italics urgent, toppling headlong into the future. ALL CAPS loud. In digital forums, VIRTUAL SHOUTING IS OBNOXIOUS AS HELL. Hence still a solid tactic? Unless I am actually a wacko pretending to be an artist.
Conclusion #1.
Angry dissidence about a hot topic addressed obnoxiously to an invisible yet dominant system of control—and abusing the logic, language and material infrastructure of that system while doing so—is not a bad tactic for maintaining critical distance between reader and text, viewer and art work, for preventing collapse.
The web, appearances notwithstanding, is absolutely not a public space. Some privately owned town squares (quaint!) may be entered in return for surveillance and anonymized data extraction. Others require entry via CAPTCHA, a bleak reverse Turing test (fun!) in which humans prove they are humans to machines (yay!), meanwhile generating data to make the same machines harder to beat (w00t!). Walled gardens (idyllic!) want meat identity, mother’s maiden name, maybe card details, everything needed to defraud you in the event of data breach (unlikely!).
The web has no commons either. Even the open source spaces are owned by big tech. (GitHub = MSFT. HuggingFace = GOOG, AMZN, NVDA). Possibly some emergent commons exist on the internet outside the web. IPFS. Blockchains. Yet who, but tech bros, venture there?
Should we disrupt the digital surface with dissonant, dissident text strings like Laimonas Zakas (fig 3.1) – glitch, crack, break the privately owned spaces with (programming) language? Platform police take down? Screengrabs document? Or archive / curate / restore, as Olia Lialina did for Geocities pages (fig 3.2), her “heart-breaking” analog glass slides beyond the reach of server admins. Hence most other people, too?
What is accessibility? An admixture of privilege, permission, precedent, affordance, know-how + availability/prevalence of the object to be accessed.
Holzer’s words outside work well. Affordance and permission are maximal – even those without the privileges of sight and literacy know that words are there to be read. Reproduction is easy, cheap, promiscuous, polyvalent. Prevalence fast, easy. Exclusion is jargon, dialect, idiom, cultural context, esotericism, illegible font, bad handwriting, poor placement, secrecy.
Digital video is one contemporary alternative: also highly affordant & endlessly replicable, it’s flexible, fluid, fast, durational (like reading), mired in commercial marketing and pop culture, and accessible to anyone with a smartphone. Host, post, embed, link, blog, message, email, stream, screen, project. Anywhere, online or off. At any scale. For any duration. With or without sound (speech). You can put a video in your pocket yet project it on a building. Even production is accessible: kids of seven make memes and minor masterpieces with CapCut.
Conclusion #2.
Artists must make angry, obnoxious TikToks about sensitive subjects and document them before they’re taken down.
Even digital posters still kinda work when well-executed…
Links
- https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/jenny-holzer
- https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/jenny-holzer/exhibition-guide
- https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jenny-holzer-1307/5-ways-jenny-holzer-brought-art-streets
- https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/02/21/arts/jenny-holzers-truisms-feel-urgent-ever-mass-moca/
- https://www.apollo-magazine.com/jenny-holzer-guggenheim-bilbao-interview/
- http://evenmagazine.com/jenny-holzer