DATE: 31-10-22
TIME: 12:24
IMAGE COUNT: N/A
TAGS: X
“But nothingness has no particular property from which it might derive its existence, it is therefore quite simply nothing. For this reason, as soon as the other creatures voluntarily associate themselves with nothingness then they lose their own properties and also come to nothing.”
(‘21. The Cosmos (From CAUSES AND CURES I),’ Hildegard of Bingen: Selected Writings, Hildegard of Bingen and Mark Atherton (trans) (2001), p98, 99)
“I.1.c.
1958–
The conflation or merging of concepts, facts, etc.; the blurring of one thing with or into another [...]
I.2.
1812–
The cutting out or suppression of any information [...]
II.3.
1615–1881
Breakage or striking with physical force, so as to split or force a gap [...]”
I.1.c.
‘The conflation or merging of concepts, facts, etc.; the blurring of one thing with or into another’
(“elision, n., sense I.1.c., I.2, II.3”. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press)
“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.” (2 Timothy 4: 3-4)
New York, 1979-1982. Decaying against a graffiti background of varied opacity is a pastel pink poster. Perhaps not always pastel pink: it has a certain tone to it that laments sustained degradation, and, soiled as it is with greying gum, it gives the impression of clinging desperately to its ephemeral window for recognition. It does not mask the mouldering, colourless paper underneath it, which worms its way to the surface through the nouveau’s rips. Reading it reveals a message turgid with irony:
YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON. YOU THINK I’M AFRAID TO REACT.
THE JOKE’S ON YOU. I’M BIDING MY TIME, LOOKING FOR THE SPOT.
You’ve just encountered one of Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays as they would have first met the public eye. Flyposted around a renowned city of culture, these posters were both aesthetically and semantically intriguing, blending in each instance the struggling voice of an extremist with pared-back formatting. They are the works she remains most famous for even now. I myself, as part of a school art project in 2015, carefully parsed her truisms for the quote best-befitting a baby punk such as I then wished I was, though I ended up forcing a friend to pose in a t-shirt bearing an Arthur Miller quote instead: WITHOUT ALIENATION THERE CAN BE NO POLITICS. Of course, in even endeavouring to re-present one view I endorsed out of the masses spanned in her posters, I had missed the point of Inflammatory Essays entirely.
In his video essay ‘We Must Destroy What The Bomb Cannot’ (2023), the YouTuber Big Joel points out that although we want to believe some of Holzer’s essays align more with her beliefs than others, and want the words we agree with to stand out more from the rest, all sentiments are presented to us uniformly: stylistically homogeneous, everything is on par and designed to inflame, and thus falls into the flat rhythm of outrage that is familiar to us in the media age we live in. Hildegarde of Bingen describes nothingness, as in the quote used as this article’s epigraph, as having a kind of lack of niche or personal quality. Similarly, outcry and indignation, ubiquitous as they are for us now, have very quickly become boring, unpersuasive, and often function only as a deathblow to attempts at rhetoric. To become nothing is to be seen to use the conventions of something that has lost meaning, and thus to become engulfed by that thing’s own long established failures. Nothingness is an absence of significance. In the current age, it is maybe more white noise than it is no noise at all. Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays are widely recognised as exploring modern fatigue with mass media and how its failed potential has made it extremely difficult to transmit radical ideas to a popular audience if they do not already have an inclination towards such ideas. Now that there is a monopoly on form, views seem to blur into one another. YOU THINK I’M AFRAID TO REACT. THE JOKE’S ON YOU. I’M BIDING MY TIME, LOOKING FOR THE SPOT, says Holzer, aware that before any meaningful discussions between people of opposing values can take place, an entire upending of form is necessary.
I said before that the Inflammatory Essays are taken to be directed at mass media. But Holzer at this time, and increasingly so after it, is also someone deeply immersed in the art world. She’s specifically an artist active during the broadcast of the hugely influential series Ways of Seeing (1972) by the critic John Berger. In this series, Berger examines the ‘language’ of visual art in a way that seeks to draw attention to how, as with textual mediums, we look at art in certain ways, upholding in this way of looking, certain ideas. Something Berger identifies is the idea that media continues to cultivate a mystique around artworks, specifically so-called originals, in an attempt to defend them from losing value in the age of reproduction. “For the first time ever,” he says, “images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. [...] They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power.” He says next:
“Yet very few people are aware of what has happened because the means of reproduction are used nearly all the time to promote the illusion that nothing has changed except that the masses, thanks to reproduction, can now begin to appreciate art as the cultured minority once did.”
In right-wing internet circles, there seems often to be a similarly quasi-religious faith placed in an idea of being able to discern what a good argument is using ‘sense’. Precious little has changed with regard to the archaic idea that a detached tone of voice should signal rationality. The Joe Rogan Experience podcast receives consistent praise for its “impartiality” and commitment to “freedom of speech”; ironically, his channel does exactly what Holzer’s piece sets out to criticise, yet has become reputed by many to be an oasis from the internet’s general clamour, where people can say what they think and are judged purely on the merit of their words. Sense is something that has proven impossible to define, something that can be claimed to motivate vastly different parties to endorse vastly different ideas. It’s the end point of our deference, and it has no particular property. Is it nothing? No, but it does a lot of work for something so uninterrogated. Sense as it's treated at present is numinous in the etymological sense of the word; it’s anything that approaches that divine (that is, ultimately served) will in ourselves, which has been quietly accumulating broadly for each of us as we’ve existed beneath the limits of our self-knowledge. It seems reasonable to assume most of us would want it to amount to more than that. Inflammatory Essays encourages recognition of how the mysticism we see (despite disillusionment) upheld in political and cultural discourse is inherited from advertising, which in turn inherits from art of the past.
Berger goes on to suggest that new technologies enabling mass reproduction in turn make possible a new and empowering “language of images” which would actually bring us closer to authentic ways of talking about our experience and the world around us, individually and as a culture within history. This, he feels strongly, makes art of the past a political issue we must engage with now. And so here is where we begin, exasperated with blind allegiance to a mausoleum that bleeds us dry the more we revisit it. A present stuck still on old stories of itself and its ancestors. Mouldering confrontations in our streets whisper, in stark Holzerian speech, of what is to come. They say: ‘You have been impoverished by what has preceded me. Exploited for so long out of true knowledge of your existence, your story, the revolution has come and you are threatening to miss it. But no matter, I will show you as you need, and we will move our dumb tongues together until we make something new and better from this mess. You’re sceptical? Cynical, even? Good. Me too. So let’s try and find something finally that we’re not supposed to see.’
I.2.
‘The cutting out or suppression of any information’
“Behold, all of them are false; Their works are worthless [...]” (Isaiah 41:29)
SLIPPING INTO MADNESS IS GOOD FOR THE SAKE OF COMPARISON
From the Archive : Jenny Holzer (Youtube, 3:46). Shot of text (above) scheduled to appear on t-shirts and of Holzer attached to a white phone. Then the lead up to Holzer’s solo show at the Guggenheim Museum, 1989, N.Y. Sheepishly ambitious and thus par for the course, Holzer liaises with a series of aides. There is much shifting among wires, and then: touching her fingers to her chin as she briefly admires their technical success. Her pleased sigh calls out “next.” Work continues. Cut to Mike Glier, a fellow artist:
Her work is about sharing ideas. It’s about ideas that are for free. You can go to a Jenny Holzer show and watch the sign run, and have all the information, and you take the information away with you, and that’s really the art. You don’t have to own a Jenny Holzer to appreciate it at all. (9:52)
Here we are again (in case you haven’t identified the wolf in sheep’s clothing) with Berger’s Ways of Seeing, although this time, we’re getting a little more specific with the role of the (art) marketplace and how it gives power to certain values over others, and sets an answer to what isn’t always recognised to be an open question about what is good. At this moment, public literacy of the western art canon is in a state of continual decline, however whilst the masters ride out their death throes in museums and galleries, they continue to lend a vague and thus sexy haze of something classic and established to all potential purchases. The historic rite of buying an image of the goods one has is replaced by an interminable, almost Sisyphean process of buying goods in the hopes of emulating the image of another-who-once-had, thus always implicitly upholding the judgement that this is a more worthwhile endeavour than seeking an image that’s authentically one’s own. The holiday candid of you à la La Grande Odalisque feels made of cloud paint, brow sculpt, your primer and your palette. You are art [3 likes] accompanies your unframed piece in the comment section, the highest compliment available. Enter Holzer at the Guggenheim, candescent in LED evangelical splendour. Ringmaster of the Guggenheim at least for tonight, her exhibition does not require the same deference to the air of something recherché you are used to indulging inside such an institution. Reading text on screens is an everyday occurrence for the majority of us, and carries none of the same implications of exclusivity. This is because the process of making writing a more accessible mode of communication has long been at work, and although elitism is still a problem in lexis, there are at least relatively communal registers of speaking, reading and writing that the majority can engage in comfortably enough. So while strokes in oil paint sit partitioned off, safely obtuse on its white walls elsewhere, the Guggenheim this evening gathers its congregation around Holzer’s scrolling signs. In this soft, sacred glow, people wait for art this once to come down and tell them what it’s trying to say in no uncertain (that is to say, no unwritten), terms. The range of responses:
- — Well there you are, that’s my message.
- [LAUGHTER]
- Anybody who writes something this big is gonna be strong! You could say —
- — It’s sort of re-presenting mass marketing to us for us to understand it —
- — Far more effective in trying to reach the masses and trying to make art more accessible.
- — A manipulation of this museum, and this space [...]
I find it fascist [...] we’re overwhelmed by this power of space —
- [SMILES, ENGAGED IN READING]
- – [ALMOST BASHFUL] I don’t think it has anything to do with art.
I think the evening was a success, don’t you? If you didn’t like it, my apologies, but it’s necessary you’ve seen it for the next part.
As 4 points out, Holzer’s work during this period is keen to demystify mass marketing and, as Glier hints, simultaneously allude to the dependence of the West’s traditional art values on the market for their last-ditch hope at survival. In democratising the valuation of her work by using the familiar conventions of advertising, and moving away from images, she coaxes the spectator to appreciate that aesthetic matters are always also ethical, political and cultural matters. Doing this in the Guggenheim calls into question the value of all the other pieces displayed in their building, and in art galleries and museums elsewhere, and so the heights reached by its concentric circles seem just a little less grand and intimidating. Soon after this we see Holzer, amused, respond by saying that she’s glad the fascist quality of the exhibition was gleaned by at least some of those that saw it, hoping it served as food for thought. There is a reaction to Holzer’s exhibition that I’ve missed from the above list. It actually comes just before 6. It goes like this:
6.5 — I think you need to see it with her sense of control, with her sense of manipulating your brain, and your body, you know?
Though Holzer elsewhere glosses her writing style as, true to her upbringing in a culture of Midwestern traditionalism, “expeditious”, there’s footage in From The Archive of her asking that already legible maxims move at a slower pace before the eyes of her viewers. At the exhibition’s opening, we’re actually shown several mouths moving slowly over the words as they appear on the signs and halting periodically, forced to linger on strange syllables, stalled until the display unhurriedly obliges to reveal its next letters. These artworks delay and therefore assume control of the previously spectator-centric event that is the meeting of the art work and the spectator. The nature of Holzer’s Jenny Holzer (yes, the exhibition was self-titled, and so feel free to muse over the implications of that) as an installation in motion and as comprised of text creates, unlike a standard oil-on-canvas, an apparent intimacy between itself and its viewers rooted in that insistence on some sort of mutual agency and power to affect.
At the onset of Ways of Seeing, Berger lays out an idea of crucial differences in the ways our different sensory faculties let us draw conclusions about the ontology of what’s in the world around us. Praising sight, vision, he highlights its immediacy, dynamism and scope in comparison to words and touch, likening touch to a “static, limited form of sight” (9). “To touch something,” he says “is to situate oneself in relation to it,” but of course this prevents us from knowing other things quicker, if less deeply. Efficiency of the self-and-other-definition process when using the visual is the overwhelming sense one gets, and though he caveats his compliments as early as the first page, observing that “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” later sketching vital connections between vision’s efficiency and visual culture being the preferred mode of capitalist promotion, Berger’s advocacy for touch and language never comes. He bleakly seems to read words as things that are always a bit out of step, clumsily grasping at our world like a bereft outlander. Of course, with its title being Ways of Seeing, one might anticipate that the essay never steps outside of the view that vision has some right to be the paramount sense, if only it is used correctly. It’s not an uncommon stance to take. But is it possible, even if Berger didn’t explore it as an idea, that touch, ironically, could have the capacity to mediate some of the thoughtlessly exploitative tendencies of sight and the visual under capitalism?
II.3.
‘Breakage or striking with physical force, so as to split or force a gap’
“For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.” (Ecclesiastes 1:18)
The third definition of elision is relatively dead. Its usage is limited to between the 17th and late 19th century, really. But at least for a while there dwelt within the same word a sense of absorption, homogeneity, erasure and rupture, the creation of space and difference. At the point of physical connection between two things there comes into existence, or rather into consciousness, something undeniable, something resistant to manipulation, that sets an unignorable limitation between the self and the other. To encounter something else physically necessitates a break in the continuity of an experience of the world as within your reach. Brain-in-the-vat theory advocates will of course contest that in principle, there is no reason to regard the touch faculty as any more reliable than our other senses. Regardless, evidence of our esteem for touch has long been around. In ancient times, Jesus offered that a doubtful Thomas may stretch out his hand and “thrust it into [his] side” to confirm his wounds. Today, perhaps because we are more squeamish, we knot little fingers with another to show that we can be trusted. Moreover, we privilege the seriousness of physical assaults against our bodies and reserve a unique horror for offences that are tactile in nature. And, returning to the matter of art of course, Berger includes a whole section describing the cult of texture in the European tradition. Why was conveying texture regarded as a huge part of the technical success of a painting? Because the feeling of the thing matters, because it evokes the tangibility of the thing, because the tactile quality of things occupies a higher status than we tend to appreciate.
Between 1993 and 1994, Holzer created a series of works titled Lustmord as a response to testimonies of the sexual violence and murder from the Bosnian War. Translated as ‘sex murder’ in English, one encounters Holzer’s signature use of text in three different ways. First: extreme close up photographs of skin with words in ink on it, scratchily handwritten. Second: engraved into mahogany benches. Third: written into silver bands wrapped around human bones, arranged on a table. I choose not to reproduce the text here because it feels, (and I will proceed to explain why), inappropriate to remove the words from their framing, but they are available quite freely online to see as Holzer intended them to be seen. To summarise, the work recounts sex crimes from a variety of unspecified perspectives, including what seems to be perpetrators, victims, and witnesses. I bring up Lustmord because it appears to necessitate an important pivot away from Holzer’s approach in 1989 and elsewhere more recently, favouring a slow and much more bodily interaction between spectator and artwork. The series seems specifically interested in tempering its use of a visual medium with an emphasis on touch. The unique texture of the bones, the wood, asks its spectator to slow down. That is not to say the idea of reproducibility is not present in Lustmord, as emphasised by Holzer’s use of photography. But the relationship between reproducibility and physicality, and whether reproducibility makes physical originals seem disposable, is poignantly foregrounded in a way that specifically examines the effect art’s progress has had on women.
In feminist art theory circles of the early 1990s, there was a notable swell of interest in the Weimar Republic as the provenance of the Lustmord (as in the ‘sex murder’ motif) fixation in art since. Critics described how sexual violence against women as a popular subject in art seemed to emerge out of a desire to displace post-war perceptions of political and national failure and vulnerability onto the female body. The female body thus became, at least for a sect within Weimar Germany’s avant garde, “part of the symbolic vocabulary of political dissent raised by left-wing artists” (Women in the Metropolis, 202) in the words of Beth Irwin Lewis. But the boundary between imagined Lustmord transgressions and real life sex crimes was perturbingly soft. Otto Dix is recalled to have said, upon being questioned in relation to the murder of a sex worker near his house, that had he not been able to create his own Lustmord series, he would have had to do something similar himself (Jessica Davis, German #MeToo: Rape Cultures and Resistance, 1770-2020, 145). Understanding how treatment of real female bodies become subsumed by the symbol of the female body through art history, despite arguments that they can be treated separately, is crucial to appreciating what Holzer’s Lustmord is trying to do, at the other end of the century, lamenting war-time violence against women in 1993-1994.
Returning to Berger for a final time, Ways of Seeing describes how the nude in European art history embodied an impoverished idea of womanhood. In Berger’s words, “To be naked is to be without disguise. To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded.” (54) The nude is an act of surveyance at the loss of a moment of true recognition. One can see quite easily how the idea of the nude, or the conventionalised, motivatedly-constructed distortion of the idea of nakedness has merged the intimacy of the truly naked body almost out of existence, in a way that is particularly detrimental to how we engage with the female body, both culturally and interpersonally. Berger writes that “[A woman’s] presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste – indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence.” (46) Never centred within herself in the way that a man is, womanhood is always seen as a totally volatile form of existence, limited strictly to the objects she consumes, her acts, her imitations of other things. I have often had the conversation about how Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2003 UK) is his filmic ode to girlhood, and I always feel that No-Face offers a fantastic representation of what it's like to go through the world especially in a female body, either horrifying everyone else with incessant patterns of consumption, or mumbling, ghost-like, always the shadow to a protagonist, never really getting how to occupy your own space.
It is precisely because of this volatile idea of the ontological status of women, bred out of the ravaging, spectator-centric lens of European art history and capitalism, that the re-centring of touch in Holzer’s Lustmord is so important. And I think it's why, in the series, she seems to break with some of Berger’s optimism about the potential of visual culture and technological advancements facilitating mass image reproduction. Touch is the only sense which, disregarding exceptional cases, necessitates a mutual experience between two things. Holzer’s Lustmord holds past art accountable for claiming to hold a gap between creative representation and reality, but not making strong enough breaks when it is most needed. Her series seeks in tactility and slow mediums a more mutually active relationship between spectator and spectated. Rather than falsifying a sense of proximity by manipulating perspective, as on a canvas, Lustmord (1993-1994) forces you into a room with a real body, and asks you to confront how you would process it, when it is made into an art piece. It asks you to register its physical force, and see, or feel, all that you have previously missed, in your speeding up.