Jenny Holzer 'Lights-Up' the MAK and Vienna in a Sea of Language

Friday, 16 June 2006 10:37

Vienna, Austria - The MAK exhibition “JENNY HOLZER. XX”, features a spectacular light projection with texts by the Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek.  The renowned American artist Jenny Holzer has developed a site-specific installation for MAK’s Exhibition Hall, her first light projection for an interior space. In Jelinek’s literature, Holzer discovers themes that she herself has explored through her art over the years: violence, repression, sexuality, feminism, power, war and death.  On exhibition until 17 September, 2006.

Holzer creates space for reflection by submerging the walls, floor and ceiling of the MAK’s Exhibition Hall in a sea of text taken from two of Jelinek’s novels.  Die Liebhaberinnen, 1975 (Women as Lovers), penetrates a world of false promises of happiness as it follows the fortunes of two working women.  Die Ausgesperrten, 1980 (Wonderful, Wonderful Times) deals with the games of petty bourgeois behavior.

“XX” also extends into public spaces throughout Vienna with a series of outdoor light projections, which will take place prior to the opening of the installation inside MAK.  Each night the stately buildings of Vienna’s Ringstraße (the Presidential Office, City Hall, the House of Parliament, the National Library and the National Opera) serve as sites for Jenny Holzer’s art, as do the Arenbergpark Defence Tower, and private buildings in Obere Donaustraße 97-99 and at the square of Stock-im-Eisen-Platz.  Here, too, Holzer samples from the works of well-known writers who confront current social politics, namely in the Middle East, as well as recent historical events.

Among the selected writers for the outdoor projections are Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska (born 1923 in Krakow), whose poetry deals with fundamental questions of life in the aftermath of World War II, and Adam Zagajewski (born 1945 in Lemberg), a Polish essayist and poet whose work is inspired by religion, politics, history and philosophy.  Holzer also includes the work of Israeli writer Yehuda Amichai (Würzburg, 1924–2000), as well as texts by Mahmoud Darwish (born 1941 in Palestine) and Fadhil Al-Azzawi (born 1940 in Kirkuk, Iraq).  Darwish today lives in Ramallah, while Al-Azzawi emigrated to the German Democratic Republic in 1977.  His poems, which are strongly influenced by the Arabic tradition, confront his homeland’s recent history.  Also quoted are works by Mohja Kahf, professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas; by Dana Goodyear, editor of the New Yorker; and by the American poet Henri Cole.

Whereas Holzer mainly presented her own writing in her early works, her recent projects often sample texts by other writers.  Her first piece to use this new method was realized in 1993 at the MAK: As part of her installation for the MAK Permanent Collection Empire Style Biedermeier, she drew from Viennese diaries and letters from the mid-nineteenth century.

In addition to the projections at the MAK Exhibition Hall, “XX” features documentary footage of Holzer’s work For the City (2005), a series of light projections on Rockefeller Center, Bobst Library, New York University and The New York Public Library in New York City.  This footage will be complimented by documentation from the Vienna projections, and documentations of Holzer’s past work also will be available to visitors.

Jenny Holzer is a key figure in the field of installation art.  Born in Ohio in 1950, she originally worked with abstract painting and printmaking.  While in New York, she discovered text as a medium and the public space as an ideal site for her art.  With the written word, Holzer aims to break open social and political structures.

In her use of language as visual art, Holzer has created a unique form of expression.  Throughout her career, the manner of presentation has changed with the technological possibilities—from posters, T-shirts and park benches, to electronic billboards and LED signs—while still remaining in the public sphere.  As the U.S. representative to the Venice Biennale in 1990, Holzer stirred international attention by spreading her messages throughout the city rather than limiting them to the American pavilion.  Regardless of form, she counters the intensity of modern media by employing its means in the realization of her ideas.

In the mid-1990s she added large-scale light projections to the list.  She realized her first xenon projection (named after the xenon lamp that was used at that time) in Florence on the Arno river and surrounding buildings (Xenon for Florence, 1996).  Among her most impressive xenon works are projections on the Jewish Museum in Berlin as part of Xenon for Berlin, 2001, and on the Louvre’s pyramid in Paris as part of Xenon for Paris, 2001.

Holzer is represented in the collections of the world’s leading museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.  For the MAK, Holzer designed the Empire Style Biedermeier display room, and in 2002, she staged a projection at the Arenbergpark Defence Tower, which houses the MAK Depot of Contemporary Art.  She has also developed an LED installation (as yet unrealized) for the CAT – Contemporary Art Tower project.  Holzer envisions a 90-meter-high LED-sign running up the side of the future media and supply tower.  Texts selected by Holzer will play on the electronics, thus turning the Defence Tower into a “transmitter of art”.

Visit The MAK at : http://www.mak.at/e/jetzt/f_jetzt.htm

Image Captions

[01]
For the City © 2006 Jenny Holzer VBK Wien, presented by Creative Time.
Text: "Ishtar Awakens in Chicago," from E-MAILS FROM SCHEHERAZAD, by Mohja
Kahf. © 2003 by Mohja Kahf. Used/reprinted with permission of the University
Press of Florida and the Author.
Photo: Attilio Maranzano

[02]
For the City © 2006 Jenny Holzer VBK Wien, presented by Creative Time.
Text: "Necessary and Impossible" from MIDDLE EARTH by Henri Cole. Copyright
© 2003 by Henri Cole. Used by/reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, LLC.
Photo: Attilio Maranzano