What I have always liked, and been drawn to, about Holzer is her grass roots political activism, posters of political slogans and challenging statements inviting interaction and engagement with people on the street. Close to graffiti, encouraging people to wake up, think, act.
But I think she left this a long time ago, and her recent work/ since quite some time, is gallery based. Her work seems to operate through suggestion, putting ideas into your head, making you question, ask, think.
Personally I think her political activism is superficial, especially in a gallery context. I think it lacks depth.
The same criticisms can be levelled at my work with the grids – I would like to dig more deeply into each subject, especially politically. And I would like to engage with people and politics more.
Maybe I need to achieve this in other ways? Outside of art? Maybe art – especially in galleries – isnt the best place to do it?
UPDATE
Revisiting this subject – there are a lot of interesting analyses of Holzer’s work. I must research this in depth, but here are some good quotes:
“I was introduced to the term paper-clipping – which refers to those people online who initiate conversations yet never follow up on your response – I thought it perfectly described what I get from Holzer. She seeks to initiate a conversation by means of an endless series of banal appropriated phrases, redacted documents, and infographics with varying degrees of legibility— in other words, so much babble, but we never hear Holzer’s voice or thoughts – it as if she thinks that by merely re-presenting such materials in mass our political and cultural system’s duplicity, manipulativeness, its oppressiveness will be made self-evident…”
“it would appear that her neo-lib vision and “death of the author” strategy aren’t up to the task of challenging the dominant ideology’s socio-political narratives. Instead of revelation, all I get is the spectacle of her almost meaningless phrases projected onto the facade of the Guggenheim Museum at night. If anything, her work confirms Guy DeBord’s critique of capitalism’s ability to commodify dissent. As such, her work also becomes a prime example of Theodor Adorno’s critique of capitalism’s culture industry, where through commodification and appropriation, the most innovative and subversive art ultimately comes to be recruited into the service of the very system it was meant to undo. As such, political art such as Holzer’s becomes another form of distraction and pacification, an illusion of non-conformity that masks an underlying process of incorporation and conformity. In essence, Holzer’s work, like Cattelan, satisfies an artificially created need for critique, which lulls their audiences into a sense of opposition while actually reinforcing the very system of domination it is claimed to oppose. ”
https://artspiel.org/jenny-holzers-hypocrisy/
