Word: holzer
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This gap -- more like a canyon -- between the Art World and the Real World seems particularly sad in Holzer's case, since the one thing she evidently yearns to do is make contact with a wide public by showering it with improving mottos, printed on posters, zapping from light-emitting diode boxes, and even carved in stone: EATING TOO MUCH IS CRIMINAL, for instance, or ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE. In the late '70s, after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, Holzer was smitten by an insight. To subvert the slow and, natch, "elitist...
...true, although it is hard to know how far Holzer's work succeeds in this agenda, there being no restaurant behind the U.S. pavilion. But short of building one, American cultural officialdom could not have been more obliging. The funding bodies, which included the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Information Agency and the Rockefeller Foundation, paid to have her thoughts chiseled on benches and, in four languages (not always perfectly translated), on the marble plaques with which the pavilion floor is newly paved. Electronics mavens set them moving across giant LED screens on the walls. Not since Cecil...
...more so than the content of Holzer's thoughts. Starting with Goethe, Pascal and Chamfort, the list of aphorists to whom she is inferior would be exceedingly long, but she does try. Not for nothing does she call her utterances "truisms." Their lack of wit is almost disarming. They have an earnest hortatory confidence that makes other kinds of word art -- Ben Vautier's in France in the '60s, for instance -- look semidetached. Holzer's trouble is that although she wants to use language alone as the stuff of visual art -- a dubious enterprise anyway -- she has no language...
Thus her Dictionary of Received Ideas seems to have tapped a main vein. Holzer is the modern version -- rewired, subsidized, eagerly collected, but still recognizable -- of those American maidens who, a century ago, passed their hours stitching improving texts on samplers: THOU GOD SEEST ME, ABC, XYZ. The main differences are that instead of using biblical texts, Holzer writes her own, and that instead of using needle and thread, she inscribes them in LEDs and marble. Once Old Nick made work for idle hands; today the art market does...
...seem odd that Holzer was chosen for the Biennale over artists like Susan Rothenberg or Elizabeth Murray. But one should remember that America is touchy about its lack of literacy; someone must have wanted to stress that American artists can write. Besides, elitism is an extremely dirty word in art circles these days, and whatever else she may be, Holzer is no elitist. Her work is so faultlessly, limpidly pedestrian as to make no demands of any sort on the viewer, beyond the slight eyestrain induced by the LEDs...