Jenny Holzer on Twitter
Current Jenny Holzer (Season 4) Twitter message:
INHERITANCE MUST BE ABOLISHED
To see more of the artist’s aphorisms on the social networking site, click here.
Art:21 Wins Prestigious 2007 Peabody Award!
Season Four of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century has been honored with a George Foster Peabody Award - the premiere international prize in electronic media - in the 67th Annual Peabody Awards Competition.
The Art:21 series was recognized for providing “a unique forum for the display, analysis and appreciation of myriad forms of contemporary visual art” by the University of Georgia’s Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, which has administered the Peabody Award program since its inception in 1940. The Season Four episode Protest, featuring the contemporary artists Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, An-My Lê , and Nancy Spero, was singled out for its examination of the ways in which contemporary artists picture and question war, express outrage, and empathize with the suffering of others.
Selected from over 1,000 entries, Art:21 is the first visual art series to win a Peabody since 2002, and among only a handful of visual art programs to claim such an honor in the Peabody’s history. Art:21 is one of thirty-five recipients honored from the world of news, entertainment and radio, including such high profile programs as 60 Minutes, NOVA, Frontline, Planet Earth, Project Runway, The Colbert Report, 30 Rock, and Mad Men.
“The latest Peabody recipients reflect great diversity in content, genre and source of origination,” said Horace Newcomb, director of the Peabody Awards, at the announcement ceremony. “The Peabody Awards, in all their diverse and innovative examples, are models for what can and should be done across the board.” The Peabody Awards, the oldest honor in electronic media, recognizes distinguished achievement and meritorious public service.
The Peabody Awards will be presented on June 16 at a luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Brian Williams, the distinguished anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, will be the master of ceremonies.
The Peabody Awards, the oldest honor in electronic media, recognizes distinguished achievement and meritorious public service; the awards do not recognize categories nor are there a set number of awards given each year. The Peabody Board is a 16-member group, comprised of television critics, broadcast and cable industry executives and experts in culture and the arts, that judges the entries. Winning entires become a permanent part of the Peabody Archive in the University of Georgia Libraries — one of the nation’s oldest, largest and most respected moving-image archives.
SAVE THE DATE!
A special screening of Protest, followed by a discussion with featured artist An-My Lê , will be held May 5, 6:30pm at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the The New York Public Library. This event is free and open to the public.
Martian Museum show at Barbican features real Art21 artists
Examining contemporary art from the perspective of an extraterrestrial, the group show Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, which opens this week at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, features the work of Art21 artists Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Mike Kelley, Cai Guo-Qiang (both Season 3), Jenny Holzer, and Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (both Season 4). This unusual exhibition’s starting point is the fantasy of an alien anthropologist attempting to understand and explain human culture solely from contemporary art, and it builds from there to offer a quirky look at recent art practices. The curators invent a humorously imprecise classification system designed to raise questions about the practice of anthropology, as well as the role misunderstanding plays in the understanding of contemporary art. Interested patrons will also want to download mp3’s of the the exhibition’s audio guide, narrated by the director of the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, the “esteemed” Dr. Klaatu.
The show is open until May 18. Find more information, images, and the audio guide here.
The Missing Peace at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Currently on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama is a traveling multimedia exhibition that brings together 88 artists whose work reflects the principles or essence of the Dalai Lama. Organized by the Committee of 100 for Tibet and the Dalai Lama Foundation, the exhibition has a remarkable roster of contemporary artists, including Laurie Anderson (Season 1), Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Marina Abramovic, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Spencer Finch, Pat Steir, Santiago Cucullu, Lewis DeSoto, Anish Kapoor, and El Anatsui to name just a few.
Photographs of the Dalai Lama taken by Chuck Close, Herb Ritts, and Richard Avedon begin the exhibition under the heading “Interpreted Portraits.” An abstract portrait painted by Ken Aptekar‚Äîbased on Charles Demuth’s 1928 painting The Figure 5 in Gold‚Äîis also included in the introductory space. Though organized in nine sections, objects and themes overlap in their shared threads of Buddhist philosophy such as peace, unity, tolerance, impermanence, and unity.
On view at YBCA until March 16, 2008, The Missing Peace is “intended to be simultaneously educational, inspirational, and transformative; its goal is to engage and heal,‚Äù writes curator Randy Jayne Rosenberg. Visit The Missing Peace website for a full list of artists, venues, and a virtual tour; see a NY Times slideshow of works in the exhibition; or become part of Making Peace, an associated community-based project using mobile phones.
More Women in the City: installation views
Installation views of West of Rome’s Women in the City project, featuring Art21 artists Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, as well as Cindy Sherman and Louise Lawler. Thanks to For Your Art for these.
Jenny Holzer, “Sex differences are here to stay,” selection from Truisms, 1977-79/2008 displayed on the marquee at the Roosevelt Hotel, Hollywood.
Barbara Kruger, Plenty, 2008 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s LACMA West facing 6th Street and Fairfax Avenue.
Installation view of Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1978/2008 at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue.
All photos by Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of West of Rome
Women in the City: Holzer and Kruger artwork images
Jenny Holzer. Don’t Talk Down to Me, Selection from Inflammatory Essays, 1979-82. Offset poster. © 2008 Jenny Holzer, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Jenny Holzer. Destruye, Selection from Inflammatory Essays, 1979-82. Offset poster. © 2008 Jenny Holzer, Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Barbara Kruger, stills from Plenty, 2008. Video, 3 min. 15 sec. loop. Courtesy of the artist.
Kruger and Holzer in Women in the City
Women in the City is a viral public art exhibition throughout the streets of Los Angeles that starts today. Timed to coincide with the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Women in the City is on view at over 50 locations from Venice Beach to Pasadena. The project activates the relationship between art and the urban experience while investigating trends in consumerism and the language of popular culture.
The work of four seminal women artists, who began to emerge on the international art scene at the beginning of the ’80s within the feminist movement, will penetrate the urban and social geography of the city. Art21 artists Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, along with Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman, disseminate their work in various locations in on-the-road billboards, video screens, storefronts, a movie theater and even propagation through widely distributed stickers.
Today, Women in the City debuts Barbara Kruger’s new video Plenty (2008). The work appropriates advertisements and stereotypes commenting on consumerism. Presented on a temporary video billboard at LACMA, Plenty screens daily on continuous loop through mid-March. It is also presented on video billboards on the Sunset Strip, across from the Hyatt Hotel (8410 Sunset Boulevard) and at the Key Club (9039 Sunset Boulevard), where it is screened daily and fragmented between advertisements.
Because of its developing areas, its unique sprawl, and the diverse cultures that inhabit it, contemporary Los Angeles serves as a site for the recontextualization of Jenny Holzer’s political language within the social framework of the city. Beginning tomorrow, Holzer‚Äôs Inflammatory Essays (1979-82/2008) will be dispersed in both English and Spanish throughout all areas of the city. Posters will be placed in storefronts, alongside advertisement billboards, and in pedestrian areas. Her famous Truisms (1977-79/2008) occupy citywide LED screens, banners, and marquees. The Survival Series (1983-85/2008) is a set of aggressive phrases meant to propel the passive viewer into an act of questioning. They are distributed as stickers throughout Los Angeles clubs, shops, and will also be inserted into the LA Weekly on February 14.
Jenny Holzer: DETAINED opens in London
Monika Sprueth Philomene Magers gallery in London presents DETAINED, an installation by Jenny Holzer that opens tonight and runs through March 15. Beginning with her 2004 exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, Holzer has made the study of declassified US government documents the content for her context-based practice.
In DETAINED, Holzer exhibits new works including a series of paintings and a large LED configuration. Each painting depicts a handprint of an American soldier accused of crimes in Iraq, including detainee abuse and assault. Culled from documents made public through the Freedom of Information Act, Holzer’s hangs the hands of the charged next to those of the wrongly accused and those whose culpability has been lost, representing the fog of war. Her LED artwork, Torso, displays in red, blue, white, and purple light the statements, investigation reports, and emails from the case files of the accused soldiers. The installation lays bare that it is the individual who suffers and confronts the mechanics of politics and war. DETAINED makes substantial Wislawa Szymborska’s lament and statement in her poem “Tortures” that “the body is and is and is and has nowhere to go.”
Read an interview with Jenny Holzer and watch a video clip in which she talks about her redaction paintings on her Art:21 webpage here.
The Sum of Its Parts
Next week, New York gallery Cheim & Read will open a group show of works by twelve artists, among them Art21-featured artists Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Roni Horn (Season 3), Louise Bourgeois, and Bruce Nauman (Season 1). This diverse group creates artworks configured from multiple parts, sequences, or series - hence the connection among all of them and the exhibition title: The Sum of Its Parts. This title references to Gestalt theory’s statement “the whole is greater or different than the sum of its parts.”
Gestalt psychology studies the viewer’s innate tendency to create patterns, and to perceive separate parts as pieces of a greater whole. It is in this subconscious grasp at cohesion that the possibilities of meaning lie. The artists in The Sum of Its Parts effectively exploit language, repetition, and sequence to produce multi-faceted yet unified compositions.
Roni Horn’s piece, “When Dickinson shut her eyes: no. 859″ (1993), employs language from an Emily Dickinson poem, separated in parts, to create a work in which overall meaning is expanded. The repetition of circular shapes in Louise Bourgeois’s “Hommage Duras” (1995) is almost musical, the different rounds like notes of a harmonious score. Bruce Nauman’s separate images of contorted mouths in “Studies for Holograms” (1970) are unified by their serial layout and their identical format. Jenny Holzer’s “Hand Yellow White” (2006) also relies on format to unite the various parts of her subject; the heavily censored, wartime pages of declassified U.S. government documents become that much more haunting in the cool formalism of their presentation.
The Sum of Its Parts opens Tuesday, January 8 and runs through February 2 at Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street, New York.
Jenny Holzer’s Projections on live feed
More from MASS MoCA: Season 4 artist Jenny Holzer has new projections on view and you can view a live feed from the gallery on the museum’s site. These light projections, with text by Nobel prize-winning Polish poet Wis≈Çawa Szymborska, signify Holzer’s first interior light projections in the United States. The work is installed in the gallery where previous Art21 artists, including Tim Hawkinson, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Ann Hamilton, have also had solo exhibitions.
Also on view is a new series of paintings from declassified government documents, first shown, in part, at the 2007 Venice Biennale and featured in Holzer’s Art21 segment (click on “VIDEO: Redaction Silkscreen Prints” under “multimedia” in the left-hand navigation menu).
