Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Holzer has achieved international stature and will represent the U.S. in the 1990 Biennale at Venice. She adapts mass-marketing media--printed T-shirts, billboards, LED displays--with subversive texts that challenge the authority of these media as well as the messages they transmit; the artist simulates their language and form in order to dislocate her viewers (sample statement: ``The family is living on borrowed time''). This catalogue, which accompanies an exhibit at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, successfully demonstrates Holzer's varied settings: color and black-and-white photographs show her words emblazoned in unlikely areas, from Times Square to baggage carousels at airports. Unfortunately, Guggenheim deputy director Waldman's artspeak essay will generate no enthusiasm from the unconverted. Similarly, her interview with Holzer is more a showcase for Waldman's expertise than a forum for the artist. ( Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Waldman aptly decribes Jenny Holzer's work in terms of its art historical context. Her discussion of Holzer as both the heir and reinterpreter of Minimalist, Conceptualist, and Pop influences helps the viewer to understand the medium as well as the message of the artist's seemingly "anti-art" production. Using precious materials such as marble, or such mundane materials as LED display boards, Holzer aims cryptic platitudes at a mass audience. Her adagelike messages, sometimes mock but always enlarge upon the uses and meanings of language itself. Waldman addresses both the absurdity and the epic qualities of Holzer's work, but she gets off the track when she tries to connect the scale and grandeur of Holzer's work to quasi-religious connotations, or to the egoistic self-absorption of abstract expressionism. The interview section of this exhibition catalog is most useful; Holzer deflates some of the art historical pretensions of Waldman's essay by describing her art as intended for a general audience that does not care about art. Waldman's questions, however, are important and succinct, and Holzer's responses are articulate. Like many exhibition catalogs, this stands as a book in its own right, possibly more important than the Guggenheim show because it gives a chronology and a survey of the many facets of Holzer's work not included in the exhibition itself. It is thoughtful and well written. Highly recommended.

Booklist Review

Who would have imagined a visual art made of only words on handbills, T-shirts, bronze plaques, electric signs, and stone? Some may argue that Holzer is a poet, but her particular genius is for siting her work, e.g., as subversive propaganda stickers left around New York City or as flickering advertising signs above Times Square. It's such siting that secures her place as a visual artist. "Money Creates Taste," "Protect Me From What I Want," "The Beginning of the War Will Be Secret," "Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise"--Holzer's development has been from such pithy "Truisms" (her best-known work) into the longer, more personal, and eccentric "Living Series" cast in bronze plaques and "Laments" carved on stone benches and generally into more complex presentation via high-tech electronic advertising media. Many artists aim to be political, and most of those fail. Holzer succeeds by reaching people where they are--in the street--with haunting statements of piercing subversiveness. This catalog of her 1990 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum belongs in every contemporary art collection. List of selected exhibitions, projects, and reviews; selected bibliography. --Gretchen Garner