Jenny Holzer
at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
October 25 – February 1, 2008

I enter through the gift shop at the Museum of Contemporary Art and experience the usual crass material envy. I can easily imagine a life in a stark Skinner-box of a condominium with a view of the lake, its interior filled entirely with extremely witty hand-crafted items or the sterile lines of impeccably industrially designed flatware. A visiting friend’s child could drool on the exquisitely whimsical imported wooden toy, perhaps a giraffe of primary colors, or a book pairing the alphabet with the masters: ‘A’ is for one of Cezanne’s apples, ‘B’ is for Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, ‘C’ is for cat, an austere kitty from a Japanese woodblock print. If the cupboard was bare, I would simply drape a ragged scarf around my neck, a diaphanous scrap of holes and lace whose subtle shading suggests that it was used to wipe up ashes at some postbombing memorial site, yours for a mere $220.00, sling an enviro-friendly grocery tote ($55.00) over my shoulder, and promenade to the Gold Coast Whole Foods with my mutant little companion animal strapped into a cruelty-free organic hemp harness. PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT, silver block lettering announces from the front of a black t-shirt ($35.00 – 42.00), and I nod agreement.

I also proceed to think aphoristically, an affliction that will follow me throughout the galleries: AESTHETICS ARE A LUXURY would be followed by BEAUTY IS A RIGHT. Up the plainly finished stairs through the bookstore – of course, the cultural accoutrement in the alternate contemporary-art-museum-gift-shop reality would include huge glossy picture books, facetious diatribes, hyper-aware semiotic creeds, ironic appropriations of the pop culture or advertising images of bygone times – the soundtrack must be either minimal and experimental, global, obscure, or all-of-the-above. I emerge into the lobby, check my coat – SERVICE CAN REDEEM YOU – and turn to face the strangely sterile documentation of so much human pain.

I genuinely like the work of Jen Holzer, as well as Barbara Kruger. Kay Rosen strikes me as too glib and irrelevant. Word play, sure, but if you’re going to sloganeer, at least have a perspective. “The pun is the lowest form.” At the opposite extreme of word artistry, Erika Rothenberg strikes me as too didactic, no matter how much I agree. Hemingway’s perspective was, “If you want to send a message, go to Western Union.” I own a Barbara Kruger tee-shirt from the MCA’s sale table from when it was located on Ontario Street. For years, I carried around a poster of Holzer’s Truisms and displayed it prominently, frequently on the bedroom door (perhaps the text should have included ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE or WORK WILL MAKE YOU FREE). One consistent guest informed me that exposure to the truisms may have scarred her during her formative years, particularly MURDER HAS ITS SEXUAL SIDE. Any negativity in this review is a manifestation of my perpetual ambivalence and tendency to question the cultural relevance and role of Art, the vain hope that it achieves something other than amusing and distracting the pretentious affluent. I have the pretentiousness, just not the resources. Pity.

The large-scale lobby pieces consist of government document excerpts, some so heavily redacted that they resemble Rothko-like “sketches,” perhaps executed with India ink and a roller. In communicating emotional and literal carnage, a certain degree of removal appears to be most effective. The text is from transcriptions of atrocity, plain black on white. One hundred men were held in a shipping container: “b(7)(c)-5 noticed the man next to him was dead. He saw green foam coming from the man’s mouth. _______ had not eaten or drunk anything for two days.” Is humor a valid tool? I imagine a pairing of images: one hundred men jammed in a shipping container across from a gleeful gang trying to stuff twenty-three in a Volkswagen beetle in a frequent game of the 1950’s and 60’s. “Fear of dogs and snakes appear to work nicely” – snips and snails and puppy dog tails. I have only the vaguest recollection of Winston Smith’s torment with rats, but it is too chilling when reality reflects the cold mirror of the documents created to indict it. And since the beginning, world without end, Amen. One bureaucrat e-mails a “wish list” of “alternative interrogation techniques.” My discomfort is doubtless just an aspect of my perpetually cultivated naiveté, a defense mechanism – ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE.

There are so many things that I don’t want to know about just to perpetuate the ease of my banal existence, a life that one suitor described as “puny and meaningless.” (He included himself, and all of humanity, in this category. Fun guy.) But perhaps there are obligations, moral absolutes, that any sane and responsible human must acknowledge: using fifteen year-old retarded girls as human bombs is wrong. Setting dogs loose on confined, beaten, and broken men is wrong. Holzer states that she makes work that “focuses on cruelty in hope that people will recoil.”

What does it mean if people don’t recoil? I keep myself intentionally sheltered from pop culture, or just lack interest, but could Gitmo ever had made it to fodder for a reality show? “It’s time for G-MO! In cell block G we have native Tunisian e(9)(f)-6, arrested in Afghanistan and a suspected Al-Qaeda operative accused of changing the oil and air filters for the Taliban. Let’s see how long he lasts. All our viewers remember ‘Sparky’ – “(camera pans to a battery). Also, those who attend museum shows are perhaps among the least likely to need the thought-provoking displays along the lines of “your tax dollars pay for the torture and imprisonment of possible innocents beyond the jurisdiction of your national borders.” We preach to converted choirs. How can you effectively persuade those who own an opposite world view?

One of Holzer’s recent shows was entitled Truth to Power, perhaps inspired by the injunction to, as Grace Paley observed, “…to do as the Quakers say, to ’speak truth to power.’” Noam Chomsky rejoins: “We don’t need to speak truth to power. Power knows exactly what it’s doing. The truth that we need to speak is to one another.” Also, the question immediately arises – once we speak truths to one another, what do we do about it? And this line of inquiry makes me feel even more petty and guilty for coveting the cute recycled paper bowls in the gift shop ($120), as well as sampling the cologne for sale, a spritz on the wrist (too heavy for my antiseptic preferences, too many musk notes), ornate silver-tone baroque bottle atop the jewelry case, clear glass over an array of trinkets reminiscent of washers, nuts, bolts, and matte metal fishhooks spread on velvet, tastefully creased.

Viewers enter the north gallery to see a set of eleven (11) LED strips on the floor, each a moving band of orange dots about a half-foot wide. They reflect on the ceiling. The strips of sentiments expressed include:

A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE GOES A LONG WAY GOOD DEEDS ARE EVENTUALLY REWARDED GIVING EXPRESSION TO YOUR EMOTIONS IN AN HONEST WAY IS A LUXURY NOT A NECESSITY FEAR IS THE GREATEST MOTIVATION

A big lilac map of Iraq is featured in the next room, a silkscreen-seeming image with tags delivering monosyllabic injunctions: PROTECT FIX SUPPRESS PROTECT ISOLATE EXPLOIT SHOCK AND AWE EXPLOIT.

Everything old is new again: one set of LED steps, evenly staggered 6′x6′ beams, broadcast transcriptions regarding the Iran/Iraq War intelligence. “Their economy is in shambles.” The southeast corner of the north gallery houses the most elaborate piece. Two tables of human bones flank the space. The wooden tables’ surfaces are rough, not the usual smooth, mechanical, minimalist presentation. Ribs, scapula, mandibles and the odd coccyx are all laid out in increasing size. The tables are reminiscent of the faux austerity of “Shabby Chic.” The bones appear to be rather authentic. I scan them, looking for breaks. The south gallery includes a column with strips of informative purple text that announce SIN IS A METHOD OF SOCIAL CONTROL, STASIS IS A DREAM STATE, SYMBOLS ARE MORE MEANINGFUL THAN THE THINGS THEMSELVES, and THEY STILL THINK, AND THEY KNOW THAT THEY HATE YOU.

Another piece offers more romantic context – I WALK IN I TICKLE YOU I TEASE YOU I SMILE in coquettish lavender and pink. I examine the hand print paintings on the south gallery wall and then walk out. A television set in the lobby’s end plays an arts program. Holzer is interviewed in her studio, on her farm compound. A white horse lifts its tail and dumps in the background. NATURE PERSISTS. A platoon of assistants pull prints. Sheets of words are stored in drawers, a brightly colored heavy weight stock, yellow pink blue. “I like my pieces to be very short moments,” she observes. “Time is an especially important concern with the public works.”

It is time for me to go. I tuck a pen in my pocket and even resist getting a souvenir postcard. On the way home, the orange dots of the LED sign at the Stony Island Leona’s Pizza offer their usual wisdom. This time, it’s HE WHO ANGERS YOU, CONQUERS YOU. Last week, it was A FRIEND ONLY STANDS IN YOUR WAY IF YOU’RE GOING DOWN. Perhaps I will wear my old Kruger shirt as a nightgown – We get exploded because they’ve got money and God in their pockets, visual of a fist to the side of a face – and read some Paley or Chomsky before I go to sleep.

by Erika Mikkalo