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Artist Reseach

 

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer is a conceptual and visual artist who uses text and digital technology to communicate with the public and instigate powerful thought. Her textual choices situate themselves timelessly amongst the fabric of our history.
Her work most often appears in communal spaces and on prominent government buildings. She represented the United States at the 1990 Venice Biennial and was the first woman artist to receive the American Pavilion. She gained notoriety early in her career thanks to her compilation of short, often cynical, phrases she called truisms. The work, Truisms created a solid foundation for her career. She put these short sentences in black writing onto white flyers and hung them throughout Manhattan. She began creating the truisms when a reading list, of value to her, seemed too long. Holzer wanted to figure out a way to unpack the material and make the most pertinent things accessible. In 2003 she stopped using her own writing to feature the writings of others, in order to “cement” history.
Her, nearly, three hundred truisms that have appeared in a variety striking ways, she wants to “keep people awake with her words.” In order to have significant impact on the public, Holzer uses means by which people are automatically involved. “To do this, she has turned various user-friendly, pop-culture modes of public address into early warning systems, including posters, T-shirts, billboards, broadsheets, plaques, giant projections and incised marble benches. Electronic LED signs are her best-known, most spectacular method; they also reflect the military-commercial-entertainment complex that, bit by bit, her art exposes.” (Smith). The LED lights are used to physically alter the role of text within a space. Viewers have been forced to walk on text, sit on it, wear it. Protect Protect, featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “relates to the problematic power of personal desire as encapsulated in one of Holzer’s best-known statements: PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT” (Whitney). In the ways that our desires can be overpowering the LED lights were overpowering. Viewers experience vertigo and nauseous at times. The light sculptures tend to disorient the sense, in the way that the words should arouse thought.
In response to September 11 and the War in Iraq, Holzer composed a series of projections consisting of US government, truisms and international poetry. The text was projected onto the Rockefeller center in 2005. The words projected, questioned the government, war validations and the public response. She is able to weave thought into conscious by carefully constructing the she hopes will facilitate historical memory. The projections were posted in the three most trafficked area of New York City, to reach as many people as possible.

Holzer has hand carved her truisms, along with other texts into marble benches. She intended that these benches act as public furniture but that they could also be seen as memorials of thought. Her messages inscribed in stone are very different from the LED installations because they have a permanent home; the words never change. Viewers are able to return to the same place to reengage with the text, to reconsider and appropriate it within their own lives. They are accessible and consistently available, even without all of the technology illuminating the text, the words are jolting. Putting the words in stone asserts their timeless nature and their permanence in an “authoritarian rhetoric.” Jenny Holzer powerfully confronts the dark side in order to educate, challenge or question authority, the public and herself. Her work 25 years ago is still readily accessible for today’s viewers, her words eerily foreshadowing the cultural conscious of America. She is explores private messages within public spaces, using technology as a tool for a more gentle expression. She expresses a range of perspectives and opinions that strike conversation and promote awareness.

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois creates works that explore emotionality, experience and representational space. Often her works specifically explore human suffering and pain. Her need for art derives from many traumatic emotional experiences that she is able to digest through making. The work Bourgeois presents acts as a therapy for her, although she intends for it to open questions about the viewer’s own interactions within our complicated existence. Her works are multilayered, in that the conceptual and visual meanings are deep, open for interpretations and should not simply refer to her life story for their utter explanation.
Bourgeois was born into a middle class family who restored tapestries. From a very young age Bourgeois witnessed hardship and distress. The influence of her personal life on her art has always been evident but wasn’t directly understood until Bourgeois gave an autobiographical account, at age 70, during her first exhibition at the MOMA. Her father had an uncontrollable temper; she hated him with every fiber of her being. He had a long-term affair with her nanny, while her mother ignored the whole thing. Bourgeois was always concerned for her mothers wellbeing and resented her father for the position he put them both in. She had been interested in geometry and mathematics, due to their logistical nature, something consistent that she could rely on in contrast to her father’s outbreaks. It wasn’t until her mother died that Bourgeois started making art. The emotional devastation caused by her mother’s death is embodied throughout her work. Spider (1996), is a steel sculpture of a spider, hovering 9 feet off the ground. The spider symbolizes her mother “because [she was] my best friend…and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as a spider” (Bourgeois).
Bourgeois saw many afflictions caused by war; Her uncle was killed in battle, her father survived several gunshot wounds and her brother spent the rest of his life in institutions suffering from shell shock. “Bourgeois explains how these terrible events affected her art: ‘My relation to the war appears in the work by the use of black, the black of the war, which was the black of mourning.... What the war meant to me was that suddenly, and this was documented by dozens of drawings, I saw everything in black, black coffins, black legs, black people. It was the deep mourning of the war, it is as simple as that.’”(Stuart). She has made a considerable amount of work that consists of limbless bodies, or just body parts themselves. Couple (2001), is a sculpture of two figures embracing, the left body is missing an arm. The sculpture is ragged and soft, made out of fabric the material represents a certain kind of vulnerability. The figure holding onto the armless other is actually standing on the feet of the armless figure. This creates a unique visual composition but also presents insight to the emotionally charged relations of the figures. Both forms are supporting each other; there is no caretaker specifically, the roles are interwoven, Intricately connected bodies are a theme throughout her work as well, the act of weaving, sewing and mending has always had a major influence on her. Both figures are giving and receiving empathy, compassion and love, while clinging to each other for support. Couple, stresses the need for those things and encompasses a yearning for unconditional love. The emotional discharge of this sculpture exhibits significant changes in Bourgeois herself since she began making art.
When she first began making art, her sculptures were stiff, and her materials (up until the early 2000’s) had been mostly non-traditional, mainly industrial materials (latex, wood, resin, steel, found objects). Personages, demonstrates a very different emotional state and approach to her making. Bourgeois made nearly eighty wooden structures that elicit loneliness and fragility. The structures are unable to stand without a base; they seem top heavy and unsure of themselves. Bourgeois was probably internalizing these characteristics at the time. “Aesthetically, the rigidity of the early wood sculptures begins to loosen into multiple elements piled vertically and that had the possibility to pivot, as in Untitled (1950). In Forêt (Night Garden), the artist created a crowded, more intimate congregation of bulbous wood carvings assembled on a singular base. Bourgeois described the shift in her work at this time as “a change from rigidity to pliability” (National Gallery of Canada).
Critical life experiences have been of great influence to Bourgeois, however it would be a shame to limit her art to such personal experiences alone. Bourgeois creates in ways that are incredibly intimate tales of her own life, “although her art is based on her experience, it doesn’t speak only to the primacy of our intimacies, but to also the ways we must engage in social interactions to give plausibility to our identities.” (Sabatini). The traumatic accounts in her life; of infidelity coupled with such jarring visuals revulsion and caring for her dying mother caused a great sense of feeling and overwhelming emotional force that influenced her Cells series. Over three decades Bourgeois made “cells” that are often considered sculptures but are better described as environments. Within the body of work Bourgeois extrapolates memories, and visceral experience through texture, objects, representational and non-representational space. Room 8, at the Tate Modern featured Spider 1997, a metal spider whose legs surround a cage. Inside is a wicker chair, empty and tattered, there is a sense that someone occupies the space. Using a the cage is a representational way of emitting her feelings of being trapped and unable to fix the problems around her, she is just stuck inside of them. The sculpture/ environment while mostly autobiographic reconstructions the variations of fear, concern, destruction, fragility, vulnerability, suffering and pain to mention a few reflect much more broad, universal concerns.
If we resort purely to understanding Bourgeois through her personal identity then the viewer will certainty miss many other cues and prominent features of the work. Sabatini describes theoretical threats posed by singular understandings, interpretation of the lack thereof. Death of the Author, an essay written by Roland Barthes talks about how, as viewers, we search for truth and finality based upon the maker instead of engaging with an object itself. This idea is pertinent to Louise Bourgeois because it is very easy to dismiss other possibilities prompted by the work. Pieces by Bourgeois are not merely a story of her life but a way in which we can recognize and engage with our own experiences and emotions. Her work becomes about all of us because we all deal with emotion and therefore it provides a platform to discuss and analyze encounters with emotion that are commonly shared.

Bibliography:

Bal, Mieke. "Autobiography Louise Bourgeois." Project Muse. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/bigs/Bal_louisebourgeois.pdf (accessed March 10, 2014).

Hustvedt, Siri. "The places that scare you." The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/oct/06/art (accessed March 13, 2014).

McNay, Michael. "Louise Bourgeois obituary." The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/may/31/louise-bourgeois-obituary-art (accessed March 13, 2014).

Museum of Modern Art. "LOUISE BOURGEOIS: THE COMPLETE PRINTS & BOOKS." MoMA. http://www.moma.org/explore/collection/lb/themes/spiders (accessed March 10, 2014).

Sabatini, Frederico. "Louise Bourgeois: An Existentialist Act of Self-Perception."Nebula 4, no. 4.4 (2007). http://nobleworld.biz/images/Sabatini2.pdf (accessed March 10, 2014).

Stuart, Paul. "World Socialist Web Site." Sculptor Louise Bourgeois: A year of events celebrating her life and work -. http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/01/bour-j14.html (accessed March 13, 2014).


 

 


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This page was last updated: April 10, 2014 3:07 PM