PROTECT PROTECT
Jenny Holzer
Exhibition; Whitney Museum; March 12-May 31, 2009
Review by Sara Wintz

[at] PROTECT PROTECT: a museum dispatch from Sara Wintz

Jenny Holzer’s recent exhibition at the Whitney provides great opportunity for further exploration of the relationship between writers and the visual arts.

This exhibition, called PROTECT PROTECT, contains Holzer’s past fifteen years’ work; it is both well-attuned to recent trends in poetics, as much as it is to the media and politics of present day. Holzer’s use of unconventional media, such as digital screens and projections, firmly roots her practice in a larger internet-influenced art-making culture. However, her use of visual language also bears likeness to the “scripted, visual-works” produced by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alec Finlay, Ed Ruscha, and Sophie Calle.

Naturally, visual writing stretches as far back as William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, if not farther. But PROTECT PROTECT is representative of a mass culture much more recent than Ed Ruscha or William Blake’s origins. At the Whitney, Holzer’s exhibition begins with “For Chicago,” eleven outstretched LED signs installed on the gallery floor. Then further along we find “Lustmord” (“lust-killing”), a series of Holzer’s writings prompted by the systematic rape of women and children by Bosnian-Serb forces in the war of the former Yugoslavia. The eerily sparse, sterile presentation of human remains with neatly bent cibachrome tags drives home a deep sense of absence — physically, but also intellectually. Who were these people? And what information is left that still must be told? Holzer retells from the perspective of witness, victim, and oppressor:

HER BREASTS
ARE ALL
NIPPLE.

[...]

SHE HAS NO
TASTE LEFT
TO HER AND
THIS MAKES IT
EASIER FOR ME.

Her writing, and her choice of source material, is defiant, unrelenting, and politically charged. Readers are faced with a barrage of details that the news media tends to leave untouched. In the two examples above, her narrators’ perspectives ooze with entitlement, power, and an amplified degree of scientific detail. Holzer’s writing reflects upon and refracts from a station of power: it traditionally appears in all caps, with specific dimensions and characteristics dependent upon her level of physical access to a site; it is nearly dictatorial and oppressive, booming in scope. Yet, from within this position, Holzer broadcasts narratives that question the position of power in the first place.

Holzer’s medium is language, despite her use of non-traditional media in place of the voice or page. And her belief in the power and scope of language is not unlike that of the Flarf and Conceptual Poets (who read at the Whitney recently, in conjunction with this exhibition). After all, it’s a rare moment when a visual art institute presents work so verbal. Holzer’s decision to cite, quote, and manipulate language, within the context of a contemporary art space, demonstrates her underlying desire to process news media as a way of interacting with the world at large.

***