Jenny Holzer, Inflammatory Essays and All Fall

0:00:04.9 Steven Zucker: “The most exquisite pleasure is domination. Nothing can compare with the feeling. The mental sensations are even better than the physical ones. Knowing you have power has to be the biggest high, the greatest comfort. It is complete security, protection from hurt. When you dominate somebody you’re doing him a favor.” These are chilling phrases, and we’re standing in front of a wall that is plastered with them, literally, with wheat paste. These are paper signs commercially printed that were produced by Jenny Holzer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. To be precise, 20 lines with 100 words in each square.

0:00:46.0 Wendy Earle: They were reprinted in our gallery walls in 2023, taken from their original context, which would’ve been out on the streets. And they’re printed on these really brightly colored papers. These squares, normally what you see printed tends to be more rectangular, and these colors, I think, draw you in from across the galleries, and it’s overwhelming. It makes it hard to find a jumping in point. In some ways, you have to be very intentional about it. You can certainly walk past it. You can certainly use it as a backdrop for Instagram, but in a lot of ways, you have to engage with the text and make a conscious choice. And what does that mean in this day and age? To make a conscious choice, to engage with something so long, to take a break from the attention economy and to dive into these texts. There’s no bench here, so it would take a while. There are some repetitions you have to figure out. Okay, all the colors are the same text. There’s a lot of different colors. How are they organizing these? Is it just color coded? Where did these words come from? Are these words from the artist? Did she take them from somewhere else? How do you even start with a work of art like this?

0:01:57.0 Zucker: The title is Inflammatory Essays, and that’s what they are. The artist did draw from historical sources, but historical sources that vehemently disagreed with each other. From the extreme political left to the extreme political right. These are the words of Adolf Hitler. These are the words of Vladimir Lenin, of Emma Goldman, some of the most powerful, and in some cases, the most abusive leaders of the 20th century.

0:02:21.8 Earle: Originally, these would’ve been pasted on places like telephone poles, so it had a very DIY aesthetic, but they would’ve been mostly an individual essay. When you’re in an art museum, and especially in this particular configuration, it is all of them. In some ways then, that does give you more choice than just encountering a single essay on a telephone pole, because then you get to choose which one you wanna spend time with. Which one draws you? Is it the opening line? Is it the color? Is it the meaning of the entire piece? Is it the meaning of one word or phrase? And so she’s giving the power back to you, the visitor, and she’s saying, here are all of the things that I have gathered for you. Now, you make the meaning. You figure out what it means to you and what you’re going to take from it.

0:03:10.0 Zucker: If you’re willing to put in that time, and to be that brave, because these are scary in some ways. These are intimidating texts. They’re meant to rile us up. They’re meant to engage us in the most primal way, in the way that political speech often is. “Change is the basis of all history.” I read that, and I want to agree. Yes, change is the basis of history. “The proof of vigor.” I don’t know what that means. There’s an ambiguity there. “The old is soiled and disgusting by nature.” I wanna disagree with that. And so within the first three lines, I am in agreement, I’m confused, and I’m confounded. “Stale food is repellent.” Is there a humor here? “Monogamous love breeds contempt, senility cripples the government that is too powerful too long.” We’re bounced back and forth in our emotional reaction to each of these lines. She’s using all uppercase letters, all in italics. These texts are screaming.

0:04:11.5 Earle: And there is almost a humor. It’s so over the top. It borders on ridiculous. It’s about the power that the viewer has, I think, and how these are ultimately just words. It’s up to us to make something of them.

0:04:26.4 Zucker: And what was fascinating is that it wasn’t just that she would put up the work, people would of course stop and read them, but people also changed them. They took out their pens and they scribbled out areas, or they added things in. These were participatory. They were out in the world. They were public art in the truest sense. Directly across from this wall is one of her sculptures constructed out of LED signage.

0:04:53.6 Earle: And this is a seven hour runtime. So only if you came here on a Thursday when we’re open late, could you actually take in the entire thing. But it changes so often. There are Spanish segments. There are segments where the words scroll over each other so they are not legible. And even when it is your native language, and even when it’s just one word at a time, it’s a really fast scroll. So you engage with the color, the reflections on the wall, the reflections on the floor. But it is so hard to pick out these individual phrases. It is so hard to make the meaning of it. It becomes the Tower of Babel.

0:05:34.0 Zucker: Seeing text crawl across an electronic sign is something we’re all familiar with. We see it most famously, perhaps in Times Square, across the bottom of cable news networks. But in all of those cases, the intent is to cram as much information into as small space as possible, and to clearly project that information. Here, Jenny Holzer has confounded that expectation. The fleeting nature of our media culture is perhaps at issue here.

0:06:01.7 Earle: She’s making us think about how we edit, how we curate, how we make meaning in the world today.