Jenny Holzer: Signs

by Diane Waldman, Bruce Ferguson

Genres: Art

Paperback

Published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really tried to get into this artist but I failed utterly - or is it me who failed? Produced to accompany a travelling exhibition that I saw at the ICA in London in the mid-1980s, Holzer's work mimics the late capitalist shallowness of an era well satirised in 'American Psycho'.

The book is not short of material - many images, an interview with the artist which is far from pompous and an 'appreciation' as well as the list of exhibitions which are startling in their number. She seems like a very nice lady. The book plays the story straight.

Unfortunately, the work itself is one extended gimmick, the very essence of conceptualism - ideas of exquisite shallowness performed in the to-hand media of the day. A surface sheen on a smooth-running system in which the cogs created meaning where they could. A market.

I suspect she will be 'historically referenced' because her work was important at the time but I just saw nothing there - again and again. There was not even the hackneyed excuse that this was irony or perhaps that some lucky sign expressed some zen mystery. The banality was staggering.

There is not much to add except that I know what troubles me about her work restrospectively in the year of Trump and the collapse of New York liberal pretensions. Not the shallowness (since shallowness can amuse) but the talking at and down to people to 'raise awareness'.

I still think raising awareness is a matter of dialogue and argument, concepts not conceptualism, between equals and that art is interesting only when it speaks of things that cannot be spoken in texts. These texts of Holzer's say nothing, imply nothing, make a virtue of the platitudinous.

Perhaps they amuse. Perhaps they cast a light on the mental attitudes of the creative middle classes of a certain era digging their own grave as they pretended to care or rather emote over the world. But they do not enlighten and they do not engage. Worse, they preach slyly and poorly.