Jenny Holzer talks about Text vs. Image (sound only, 400K)
Green Table, 1992
Although best known for her arresting and contradictory texts, and her skillful manipulation of mass media channels -- ranging from text-laden, light-emitting diode (LED) signs to street posters, plaques, and even brief television spots -- Jenny Holzer has demonstrated significant skill in conceiving and implementing site-specific installations. Her transformation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York into a moving spiral of electronic information and her widely praised pavilion at the Venice Biennale, composed of LEDs, benches and inscribed marble floors, have fused the text-be it a declaration, a challenge or a lament-with the architecture and sculpture.
For the Stuart Collection, Holzer has created Green Table, a large granite picnic or refectory table and benches inscribed with texts. Several temporary projects were placed throughout the campus as well; some remnants remain. Like many of the works in the Stuart Collection, Holzer's table and benches, sited in the Muir College quad, monumentalize an ordinary and functional set of objects. Like all tables, Holzer's work serve as an informal gathering place for students and faculty to eat, talk, or study. Unlike the typical table, however, it is inscribed with texts on the top and sides of both table and benches. The various attitudes Holzer adopts in her writings - from humorous commentary to politically charged criticism - transform an ordinary gathering place into a site of questioning and debate. The temporary component of Holzer's project for the Stuart Collection included texts on existing LED message machines and inserted onto the Central Library computer, television ads, a series of cast aluminum plaques and poster installations throughout the campus.
Holzer's art came to prominence in the late 1970s and early eighties when she began to plaster posters of her "Truism" series throughout the streets of New York. This contradictory list, arranged in alphabetical order, seemed like a catalogue of cliches, but was, in fact, written and orchestrated by Holzer. The "Truism" dramatized a depersonalized and amoral information landscape throughout juxtapositions. Holzer has since produced a variety of texts with points of view ranging from inflammatory manifesto to feminist or parental concern to bleak resignation. In all of her work she links ideological statements with the forms and meanings of architecture.
