Jenny Holzer, photo: Nanda Lanfranco
Holzer is primarily interested in the concept of authority. In her works she often refers to politics and gets involved in important social issues. Since 2004, the artist has been focusing on analyzing declassified documents of the U.S. government. She uses painting and large-format light projections, notes, testimonies, emails, directives, judicial sentences and other goverment materials concerning the situation in the Middle East, which forms a collective image of war and torture.
The Redaction Paintings series began in 2005. Working directly with copies of documents which were often censored and redrafted, that outside the area of black lines or rectangles, only a few words remained. Holzer processed these words into screen prints, which she then enlarged and affixed to a canvas.
The exhibition at the Art Station Gallery presents three series of works by Jenny Holzer. In one of them, each of the paintings shows a hand imprint of a U.S. soldier accused, yet not necessarily convicted of crimes committed in Iraq. All the imprints have been censored by shading them black, thus preventing any kind of possibility of identifying the presented individual. One of the paintings has no signs of erasure or censorship - the posthumous hand impression of a person, who died while being in an American prison.
In the second series, the American artist replaced the black censored spaces of the documents with colorful elements before printing them out as screen-print images. By following Kaziemierz Malewicz's suprematism, Holzer effectuates elements of choice, arbitrariness, discretion and conscious decisions into the conventional forms of abstraction. When using this type of pattern with government documents, she disputes the idea that the machinery of bureaucracy has no features. It shows that the authorities and bureaucracy are in fact a set of individual decisions. To highlight the recent dialogue between her work and the historical avant-garde achievements of Eastern Europe, the artist also presents two pieces by the Polish constructivist, Henryk Stażewski. The third series of paintings shown at the exhibition consists of slide reproductions from a PowerPoint presentation, prepared at the White House by the Central Command, which lays out the invasion strategy of Iraq. These images provide insight into the business of war - the procedures of military operations. They also highlight the gap between intention and what what actually happens in the course of an operation.
Jenny Holzer has been creating light projections out of texts since 1996. They are displayed in cities all around the world. As screens she uses historic buildings and ancient walls, as well as natural environmental space: a water tract, ocean waves or snow-covered hills- the projections in Poznań are displayed on the facade of the Old Brewery and the Town Hall. Through the lyrics and the location choice for the projection, she provokes a clash of what is public and private, conscious and unconscious, alive and dead.
In 2001 the artist started creating projects based solely on the texts of others. She focused on literary works and collaborated with such artists as: Elfriede Jelinek, Wisława Szymborska and Henry Cole.
Holzer describes the affinity between her work and the works of the Polish poet:
Szymborska writes on a number of subjects that are of interest to me. She has a poem about torture, (and another) about refugees. There's one about a terrorist. These are things on people's minds now. She writes about writing. She writes about being guilty. And then there's one about parting I like at the end (of the film) because it's a gentle release. Szymborska manages to speak to everything essential, and I think that's a good thing to proffer to people. Here is what's essential, written by a superb poet, floating by and on you.
The artist, together with Wisława Szymborska personally made a choice of twelve poems. Some of them of a political overtone, such as "The end and Beginning, Children of Our Era, Tortures and The Terrorist, He Watches, refer to Holzer's paintings presented at the Art Stations exhibition. The other picked out poems are mainted in atypical for Szymborska - ironic and reflective style: Possibilities, In Praise of Feling Bad About Yourself, Some People, Clouds, "Thoughts that Haunt Me on Busy Streets", The Three Oddest Words", Metaphysics, Farewell to the View. On April 8-9, these poems were projected onto Poznań's Brewery and Town Hall buildings.
The exhibition runs from April 8 until the end of August, 2011.
In May 2011 the Gallery will issue a publication documenting Jenny Holzer's projections in Poznań. It includes a text by Clare Cavanagh (a translator of contemporary Polish poetry, including poems by Wisława Szymborska) and an interview with the artist by David Breslin.
Art Stations Gallery
Stary Browar
Poznań
www.artstationsfoundation5050.com
Source: press release