Respond to Jenny Holzer work at Wexner center for the Arts 2019
Some artists play with paint, some with marbles, and someone like Jenny Holzer plays with texts. She uses texts, letters, and words to create her artwork.
As soon as, I walked into her installation room, I was engulfed in texts. Quotes were written from the very bottom to the ceiling. Even though they were prints, it looked almost one piece, like an enormous wallpaper. The texts were not only on the walls, but there were on the stone benches in the middle of the room too. The stone benches were cut in an elegant manner and had text engraved into them, like a tombstone!
There were two parts to her installation. One room covered with lines of separate quotes with a white background. In the other room, there were strips of different color papers with one-page poems. It was hard to comprehend the meaning of the poem like writings. In appose to the other room, the sentences were simple but meaningful and straight forward.
Spending sometime in the rooms, it felt like the walls were speaking. The walls had something to say. In fact, in the colored room, the walls were screaming. Some of the poems were cringey! As if someone had screamed it from the bottom of their soul.
In a way the rooms were like books and the walls were pages. I wonder if anyone have read all that was there to be read. Maybe it was not meant to be read as a whole and everyone just took a few sentences with them in their minds.
Her work is so far from a conventional art work. The boldness with her words and the fact that she taps into a lot of social issues like gun control surprised me. She puts complex ideas into words and combines art and language together, making the boundaries less distinguishable.
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