Jenny Holzer: Blue at Rhona Hoffman, through May 29
Holzer told an interviewer that in a group of early works, “Inflammatory Essays,” she was trying to convey “a great sense of urgency about the subjects, which I thought could be done by…using really hot language.” The same might be said of the texts in the six 1998 works–four LED signs and two stone benches–at Rhona Hoffman. Responding in part to atrocities against women in Bosnia, perhaps also to her mother’s recent death, and apparently to violence against women in general, Holzer writes texts certain to provoke strong reactions: “The color of her where she is inside out is enough to make me kill her.” But many people can produce “hot” language; more deeply engaging are Holzer’s ambiguities.
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In the LED display Lustmord (a German word Holzer roughly translates as “rapeslaying”), the text–available in a printed version at the gallery desk–alternates between a perpetrator (“I step on her hands”), a victim (“I am awake in the place where women die”), and an observer (“She smiles at me because she imagines I can help her”). But because some of the phrases are themselves ambiguous (“I have the blood jelly”) and because of the run-on way the text is displayed, these “characters” aren’t clearly differentiated at first. Holzer frequently blurs the identities of her speakers: Arno begins with what sounds like the voice of a lover (“I see you…I tickle you”), but soon the voice shifts to that of a victim (“You are the one / You are the one who did this to me”). Near the end of Arno we read, “I shelter you / I run from you.” Blue conflates a number of voices and stories: lovers, victim and victimizer, mother and child, a dying older woman, a dying man.
Holzer’s two benches–Memorial Bench I: Always Polite… and Memorial Bench II: Eye Cut by Flying Glass…–are just as provocative as her LED signs even though their texts are incised in stone. Reading them remains an active process because of the benches’ neutral gray and the illumination, which can make the words almost invisible. The fact that viewers can sit on the benches creates a physical connection, and some of the phrases are so direct (“Your mother with no real power”) that they forge an emotional connection. The texts on the benches make up the fourth LED sign, Erlauf, which ends “Who died looking / Whose thoughts are missing.” One of Holzer’s goals may be to provide a voice to the voiceless, but she also succeeds at a more difficult and more noble task–allowing us to hear that voice with the same under-the-skin intimacy of a lover’s whisper.
If Davis sets up a dynamic contrast between the irregular stones and the more regular belts, Karen McCoy in Childhood offers an even starker contrast: she’s compacted burs into five shapes that read as solid rectangles from a distance but actually have nary a straight line–they’re full of holes and prickers. The piece is a study in the tension between two kinds of energy: that of the minimalist box and that of natural, almost chaotic forms.
