Humorous Wisdom in Jenny Holzer’s latest show “Light Line”
Jenny Holzer | Wikimedia Commons
The famous Guggenheim inner spiral was charged with the energy of Holzer’s iconic LED texts, Truisms that preceded news chyrons by a decade, flowing without repetition for six hours. These Truisms— I smile. I tickle you. I see you.—trickled from the skylight down to the rotunda among viewers who looked up as if waiting to receive some sort of holy light or epiphany.
Jenny Holzer. Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Born July 29, 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio to a car salesman and a horseback riding instructor, Jenny Holzer is a neo-conceptual artist currently based in Hoosick, New York. She embarked on a focused yet winding path to becoming an artist: she took up general art studies at Duke University from 1968-1970; studied painting, printmaking, and drawing at the University of Chicago, and completed her BFA at Ohio University in 1972. In 1975, Holzer participated in the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design. The following year, she joined the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program where she began her work on language, installation, and public art. She is widely known for her Truisms, texts that impart observations or personal truths that seem to find themselves the sharper cousins of glib affirmations like Live, Laugh, Love.
Art critic Nancy Princenthal, in referring to Holzer’s artist book which only features her Truisms as reproduced charcoal rubbings, writes in The New York Times that “Interpretive essays are not needed.” Resisting interpretation, I came upon the marble benches containing her “Inflammatory Essays”. Among them, resting in a row like headstones for the dead, I finally find a taste of comfort and eternity: A POSITIVE ATTITUDE MAKES A DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD. Jenny Holzer’s sardonic Truisms are part illumination and part comic relief. That in itself is something of a gift.
Published November 12, 2024. Media by Zeny Recidoro-Fesh for Women in the Arts, Inc.