Jenny Holzer@The Baltic, Newcastle
Micro-sentiment installation by American idealist
Photo: Colin Davison
The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne is seemingly quite proud of its newest exhibition by Jenny Holzer – a prolific artist and a big cheese in art circles.
This installation is her largest for 15 years, so it seems right that there’s a tangible buzz around the Baltic – I had high hopes.
The exhibition spans two floors and can also be seen from the viewing gallery on level five. It features a lot of Holzer’s signature styles, such as the use of text and huge LED displays which captivate observers with one-liners which neither fit coherently nor always make sense. They are a mixture of clichés, Holzer’s own musings and quotes from famous scripts.
Her work was often used in public spaces relying on a glimpse from those passers by – they’d have one of her trademark quips or statements thrust under their nose and they’d carry on their day, a little more enlightened, a little more confused.
That concept works well for artists like Holzer but inside a gallery with the echo-space and prestige of the Baltic, the atmosphere is too big and soaks up micro-messages rather than blowing them out. Her art is more akin to Twitter when the gallery looks like Facebook.
Her quips are designed to flash before the eyes of her audience, spellbinding and captivating but here the process is laboured, slower and with people milling around reading each statement it lacks the desired affect.
Instead of taking one statement, deciphering it and letting a subjective voice stammer home the meaning of life, the viewer becomes bombarded with text that meld into one unmemorable yellow blur.
Each Holzer piece deals with gritty and deep human emotions and themes like war, rape and despair. The ideas are thought provoking and fittingly, difficult to comprehend.
There are official military documents, the hand prints of soldiers charged with commiting crimes, political speeches and a table full of bones – it’s no secret it’s political and it doesn’t take Gore Vidal to guess what the artist is trying to convey, but without context the work lacks impact.
Her Lustmord Tables are actually about the systematic rape many young girls and women endured during the Yugoslavia conflict. Some of the bones are clasped by metal bands inscribed with text from one of Holzer’s essays on the subject. As with all of her work, some text is deliberately illegible, open to interpretation and even invisible.
The space makes sense only after digesting the pamphlet a few times, perhaps an obvious remark but without guidance it rather looks and feels like an empty, sinister night club where the lights are flashing and no one is dancing.
In the digital age where everything is so fast and we all expect to know everything instantly, it is good to slow down and let things sink in in their own time, elongating the visitor experience but whether this was intentional or not is another question.
Like numerous greats who have influenced so many, this work seems to have lost a little of its original shock factor and innovation that would have stood out even ten years ago. We have seen so many similar installations since digital means graced the walls of the artistic arsenal – and some has been so much better.
This is an exhibition which deals with highly difficult themes in an exciting, albeit slowburning, way. It certainly lacks aesthetics but definitely packs a punch and well worth a look if you are in the area.
Jenny Holzer at the Baltic runs until 16 May 2010
