TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/073090/0730400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.7 KB | 121 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 66

A Sampler of Witless Truisms


America's Jenny Holzer showers Received Ideas on the Biennale

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Jenny Holzer is the first woman artist to fill the U.S.
pavilion at the Venice Biennale. For America to represent
itself with a woman at the world's oldest festival of new art
was a long-overdue gesture. But alas, the best thing to be said
about it is that Holzer is a woman. Considered as art, the
installation by this 39-year-old conceptual artist seems lavish
but mediocre, especially when divorced from the feverish
context of the Biennale's opening.

    For a few days in late May, the whole international art set
converges on Venice, jams Harry's Bar and the Corte Sconta, and
migrates from one lavish party to the next. Briefly the
choruses of "interesting" drown out the arpeggios of the
singing gondoliers. This preserves the idea that the Biennale
has some kind of following outside the art world itself -- an
illusion. For everyone then departs, leaving the festival in
a state of utter torpor with three months to run.

    On a sunny Sunday morning in July, near the height of the
Venetian tourist season, the public gardens are empty. Where
is the audience for the new? The national pavilions, that
whimsical collage of defunct official styles, are as deserted
as the dream piazza in a De Chirico, populated only by young
guardiani doing their nails in the humid silence. It reminds
you of the old nursery rhyme:

    Miss Smarty     Gave a party:       Nobody came.      Her
brother     Gave another --        Just the same.

    This gap -- more like a canyon -- between the Art World and
the Real World seems particularly sad in Holzer's case, since
the one thing she evidently yearns to do is make contact with
a wide public by showering it with improving mottos, printed
on posters, zapping from light-emitting diode boxes, and even
carved in stone: EATING TOO MUCH IS CRIMINAL, for instance, or
ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE. In the late '70s, after
graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, Holzer was
smitten by an insight. To subvert the slow and, natch,
"elitist" way in which art tends to find an audience, she
started writing short slogans and leaving them in public places
for people to read. "If you want to reach a general audience,"
she proclaimed, "it's not art issues that are going to compel
them to stop on their way to lunch, it has to be life issues."


    Too true, although it is hard to know how far Holzer's work
succeeds in this agenda, there being no restaurant behind the
U.S. pavilion. But short of building one, American cultural
officialdom could not have been more obliging. The funding
bodies, which included the National Endowment for the Arts, the
U.S. Information Agency and the Rockefeller Foundation, paid
to have her thoughts chiseled on benches and, in four languages
(not always perfectly translated), on the marble plaques  with
which the pavilion floor is newly paved. Electronics mavens set
them moving across giant LED screens on the walls. Not since
Cecil B. DeMille caused lightning to peck the Ten Commandments
onto Charlton Heston's tablets had American culture spent so
much on lettering. All this to tell the world it should not
overeat. Tipicamente americano, one might think.

    But not more so than the content of Holzer's thoughts.
Starting with Goethe, Pascal and Chamfort, the list of
aphorists to whom she is inferior would be exceedingly long,
but she does try. Not for nothing does she call her utterances
"truisms." Their lack of wit is almost disarming. They have an
earnest hortatory confidence that makes other kinds of word art
-- Ben Vautier's in France in the '60s, for instance  -- look
semidetached. Holzer's trouble is that although she wants to
use language alone as the stuff of visual art -- a dubious
enterprise anyway -- she has no language. She just rambles, and
her linguistic poverty strikes people as "radical," as though
it were the result of some exacting distillation. But it is
thin and complacent, tarted up with costly materials for the
audience of consumers whose pretensions it affects to despise.
Its bathos (LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL) might have issued
from the warm heart of some Midwestern creative-writing course.
Her phrasing (IDEALS ARE REPLACED BY CONVENTIONAL GOALS AT A
CERTAIN AGE) is like a Hallmark card rewritten in academe.
Holzer may sometimes remind you of Seneca (EXPIRING FOR LOVE
IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID) and sometimes of Bakunin (PRIVATE
PROPERTY CREATED CRIME). But down deep she is a homebody.

    Thus her Dictionary of Received Ideas seems to have tapped
a main vein. Holzer is the modern version -- rewired,
subsidized, eagerly collected, but still recognizable -- of
those American maidens who, a century ago, passed their hours
stitching improving texts on samplers: THOU GOD SEEST ME, ABC,
XYZ. The main differences are that instead of using biblical
texts, Holzer writes her own, and that instead of using needle
and thread, she inscribes them in LEDs and marble. Once Old
Nick made work for idle hands; today the art market does.

    It may seem odd that Holzer was chosen for the Biennale over
artists like Susan Rothenberg or Elizabeth Murray. But one
should remember that America is touchy about its lack of
literacy; someone must have wanted to stress that American
artists can write. Besides, elitism is an extremely dirty word
in art circles these days, and whatever else she may be, Holzer
is no elitist. Her work is so faultlessly, limpidly pedestrian
as to make no demands of any sort on the viewer, beyond the
slight eyestrain induced by the LEDs.