STEAL THIS HOLZER
Want to steal an original Jenny Holzer? Joshua Caleb Weibley gives you some tips on just how you might do that (if you're so inclined), along with his unflinching review of the confusing, problematic, and underwhelming exhibition Jenny Holzer: Light Line, up through September 29 at NYC's Guggenheim Museum.
If you want to steal a Jenny Holzer, your best shot until the end of September is a plaque reading “THE FUTURE IS STUPID” installed outside the bathroom at the very top of her current Guggenheim exhibition Jenny Holzer: Light Line. There don’t seem to be any cameras, and the lack of identifying tombstone labels suggests the museum has forgotten about it. All you’ll need is a square-headed Robertson screwdriver (probably size #0 or #1; bring both), and it’s as good as yours. Drop it into your Frank Lloyd Wright tote and exit through the gift shop.
While the lingering vacated screw holes will catch a roving docent or security guard’s eye—you should leave the premises expeditiously—another otherwise blank surface wouldn’t seem out of place in this exhibition. If you didn’t know better, the emptiness of the walls would imply that Holzer hasn’t made very much art, but that isn’t true. She just elected to primarily showcase the most recent years of her career.
Exhibit? What exhibit?
Entering the chaotic mall of the museum’s ground floor, you’re encircled in the rotunda by a new version of the classic site-specific 1989 LED installation “Untitled (Selections from Truisms, Inflammatory Essays, The Living Series, The Survival Series, Under a Rock, Laments, and Child Text)”. It crawls along beside you for the duration of your trip like a comically elongated stock ticker, spasming periodically with interludes of busy frenetic effects.
The next work you’re greeted by as you begin the climb is a colorful presentation of Holzer’s 1979-82 wheat paste installation “Inflammatory Wall”. After this little else is older than 2022, and the vast majority of the exhibition is from 2023 or 2024.
“Inflammatory Wall” (1979-82), poetry handwritten in black by Lee Quiñones (2024)
Of this majority, there are two dominant bodies of work represented. Least engaging are Holzer’s joylessly gilded declassified government documents. The smugly rote works on linen of diagrams and redactions are sparsely displayed in awkward places and sometimes lean against the walls in an uncomfortably undergraduate attempt at engagement with the architecture.
The most recent iterations of her long-running series of impassive stone benches engraved with cryptic paragraph-length koans are arguably more graceful. Some have been melodramatically smashed, and all are fitfully strewn upright, upended, and in pieces along the spiraling galleries.
“Orwell yellow white I” (2006)
The farthest outlier in this largely homogeneous presentation of Holzer’s freshest output is a resin-cast set of human shoulder blade bones (“blades”, 2024) that bear no resemblance or clear relation to anything else on view. Its two halves are inexplicably tucked into a pair of odd recesses and do not at first seem to be an intentional inclusion.
Blink and you’ll miss it: one half of “blades”, 2024
To be fair, Light Line isn’t explicitly billed as a comprehensive retrospective, but it’s hard to shake the expectation that it be one based on the first couple of works that introduce it, and then harder to shake the disappointment that it isn’t when these deeply unfortunate recent works wash over you in sanctimonious self-satisfied waves.
Speaking of explicit billing, it is frustratingly difficult to read anything about anything on view. Wall labels are rarely within a piece’s line of sight. They play an annoying hide-and-seek game with the viewer, evasively concealing even basic material information about the work. Any further contextual details are only available via a QR code on that label (if you can find it) linking to an app that you look at on your phone while standing in a building that has poor wi-fi connectivity. The most generous reading of this decision is reducing the appearance of language in an already language-heavy show, but that’s being far too kind. At best, it’s ableist and classist to expect your audience to read from a smartphone.
One would think that a museum, which is a glorified ramp, would pay more attention to accessibility, but even built-in attributes of the works on display that might gesture toward accommodating a viewer feel coldly uninviting. No one is obviously discouraged from sitting on Holzer’s benches to take refuge from museum fatigue, but no one is doing it, either, just like almost no one is scanning those QR codes.
Former president Donald Trump once boasted of knowing and having all “the best words.” He would seem an interesting foil to Holzer, but the less said about her scraps of metal stamped with his social media posts (“Cursed”, 2022), the better. Is it remarkable or unremarkable that an artist ostensibly so dedicated to words would have so little to say? Or that a loutish buffoon speaking at a reported fourth grade reading level would command so much of our attention and political reality? To obsess over words is not necessarily to obsess over meaning or effectively produce it. As Mel Bochner said bluntly: “Language is not transparent;” it’s more often opaque than revelatory or generative.
“Cursed”, 2022
The wall label for the 2024 redux of Holzer’s 1989 LED piece finally appears at the top of the spiral just before the bathroom. It’s hard to tell—both from focusing on the sentence fragments that have been swirling past you, and from the ambiguously worded description of its materials—just how much of “Untitled” is generated thoughtlessly by Artificial Intelligence. Some phrases are non sequiturs, but others sound plausibly Holzerian. What would the difference be one way or the other? If it is only the seizure-inducing strobe effects that are somehow the product of an AI, how would that differ from other programmable randomized effects? Whatever form of embellishment the technology is adding to her 1989 formula, it somehow lands as much like an afterthought as a desperate grasp for relevance.
The artist Lee Lozano mused long ago, while reflecting on the rapid ascendancy of her peer Frank Stella, that artists who make very good work early in their career are forever in competition with that earlier work. Say what you will of his later production; it’s hard not to see Stella writhing and thrashing against the internal competition in his late excesses. He wanted more. He wanted bigger.
There isn’t even that kind of fight in the Holzer of today. She made her (figurative) bones in the 70s and 80s with an omnivorous attitude toward media, cooly pontificating on tee shirts, Times Square billboards, postcards, and any other proletarian mass culture delivery system the written word could graft itself to. By contrast, the limp gestures on view at the Guggenheim are overly precious, slathered in untold thousands of dollars of gold and platinum leaf.
A few simple items for sale in the gift shop, like a baby onesie reading “RAISE BOYS AND GIRLS THE SAME WAY”, are far more resonant and provocative than anything on display in the galleries, proving conclusively once and for all that Barbara Kruger—who more decisively stakes her claim in the popular commercial transmission of subversive words—will be remembered as having her generation’s clearest eyes. Kruger’s instantly recognizable red-white-black color palette and Futura Bold Oblique typeface aren’t meant to be pretty; they are meant to compete with and stand out against a sea of commodifications that alienate you from yourself and others. When she emblazons Selfridges department stores with the phrase “I shop therefore I am” Kruger isn’t treating the invasiveness of commerce as an associated postscript to her collected body of proper work. It is her medium and her message. Somehow, without being set in all capitals like Holzer’s words ordinarily are, Kruger’s always have the urgency of screaming.
This is not to say Holzer’s words never had that power, which is the point. In 2017 the art community’s answer to the #metoo and #timesup campaigns took its name, Not Surprised, from one of her most enduring aphorisms: “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE”. Consequently, a vintage image of Wild Style graffiti legend Lady Pink wearing the phrase proudly on a t-shirt unfussily cut into a tank top became a meme symbol of defiantly facing down sexism. As a pioneering street artist who elbowed her way into a boys’ club of graffiti writers while assuming a pointedly feminine nom de guerre, she was perfectly primed to be the spokeswoman for a grassroots movement against systemic patriarchal violence. Still potent over 40 years later, it’s an evergreen slogan for her image to speak. What you wouldn’t give to see anything as cathartic as that 1983 image in this exhibition.
Jenny Holzer, Abuse of Power Comes As No Surprise, from the series “Truisms T-shirts,1980-”, worn by Lady Pink © 1983 Lisa Kahane, NYC
That the Not Surprised movement fizzled in the years since carries with it a similar funerary mood of anticlimax as Holzer’s late work. Its gains are hard to quantify, and they feel insignificant if not reversed. The future is stupid, after all, but only if your past was worth a second look. You won’t find that perspective in Light Line, and the only reason not to skip it is if you have designs on the bathroom plaque.
Joshua Caleb Weibley is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. His estate is represented by 839 in Los Angeles, CA.
All photos, aside from the last shown, are by Joshua Caleb Weibley and Tyler Nesler
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