Art, In So Many Words

After three torturous years of algebra, geometry, chemistry and Spanish (which I still can’t speak a word of), I did what any sensible high school stoner would do and loaded up my senior year’s academic agenda with classes that were either a cake walk (music appreciation), a no brainer (typing) or just plain fun (art).

At least, I thought art was going to be fun. Turns out it was more hard work than I imagined. No one told me about perspective (there’s math in art?!) or that some mediums are more suited to an individual’s hand than others (papier måché is just gross). Maybe because I’m a writer, but pen and ink appealed to me the most. My fifteen minutes of Warhol-like fame came as the result of a p & i drawing of a firebird (inspired by the album art of Jefferson Starship’s “Blows Against the Empire”) that not only earned me an A+ but a prominent place in the annual art fair, held in the venerable school library.

If I had known about Jenny Holzer, perhaps I would have used that pen and ink to get my aesthetic point across using both words and media.

After bouncing around a few Midwestern universities, Holzer attended the Rhode Island School of Design (launching pad for many a great artist and musician, most notably The Talking Heads), but found her muse at New York’s Whitney Museum during an independent study program. With a reading list heavy on Western and Eastern literature and philosophy, Holzer had the simple yet brilliant idea that complex thoughts could be boiled down into phrases any average Joe could understand.

Calling the project “Truisms,” Holzer printed these seemingly random thoughts on white paper using black italic script and anonymously wild posted them throughout the city on building facades, signs and telephone booths (remember those?). Provocative phrases such as “A Man Can’t Know What It’s Like to be a Mother,” “Money Creates Taste,” “A Lot of Professionals are Crackpots” and “Freedom is a Luxury Not a Necessity” prompted passersby to take out their pens and write responses or their own “truisms.”

That was in 1978. Over the intervening years, Holzer ramped up her delivery system – metal plaques, sandstone benches, sarcophagi, LED signs, laser projections on mountainsides – for such projects as “Inflammatory Essays,” “Living Series,” “Survivor Series” and “Laments.” Through it all, she has held true to the belief that language is her art and semantics her aesthetic.

Since 2001, Holzer has stopped writing her own texts. “I found that I couldn’t say enough adequately, and so it was with great pleasure that I went to the texts of others.”

I still have my pen and ink supplies. Anyone got Holzer’s e-mail address?