Jenny Holzer, BLUE PURPLE TILT 2007. ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. © Jenny Holzer, member/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Jenny Holzer presents statements that force us to question the words and messages that surround us
Holzer’s work addresses the information overload and opposing perspectives we are confronted with daily. She asks herself: ‘How do you cope – within and without – when all these views are present, sometimes clamouring, sometimes fighting, sometimes murderous?’ Eye-catching and attention-grabbing, Holzer’s art invites us to read and interpret her messages for ourselves.
Early in her career, Holzer delivered her messages on posters and T-shirts so they would be seen in everyday contexts rather than in museums and galleries. LED signage, used for advertising and financial markets displays, offered another vehicle for her text-based projects. The scrolling electronic text echoes the way people encounter fragments of text in city streets.
BLUE PURPLE TILT shares the room with Joseph Beuys’s installation Lightning with Stag in its Glare. A large bronze sculpture, cast from a mount of earth, is suspended from a metal beam above our heads. It represents a lightning bolt striking the ground. Smaller sculptures symbolise animals surrounding it. The stag of the title is an ironing board balanced on logs, cast in shiny aluminium. This is a stark, petrified environment. Beuys was a performance artist, educator and environmentalist. He was concerned about modern society inclining towards ecological disaster.
Vlassis Caniaris, Image 1971
Here, Caniaris recreates a migrant’s environment: newspapers, addressing current affairs, are used as a floor covering, and packing cases are chairs. The suitcases can be read as symbolising not just the migrants’ living conditions, but the migrants themselves and their personal histories. Caniaris made Image after encountering the work of artists associated with nouveau réalisme in Paris (who incorporated real objects directly into their work). From the early 1970s, the artist focused on creating 3D installations that explored matters of national identity, social inequality, migration and displacement.
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artworks in Joseph Beuys and Jenny Holzer
Vlassis Caniaris, Possible Background 1974
This installation represents displacement, shedding light on the lives of ‘guest workers’. These were migrants who journeyed from southern to western Europe through transnational agreements intended to address labour shortages after the Second World War. Caniaris was displaced from Greece, only returning in 1976, two years after the fall of the Greek military junta. This installation was first shown in the same year, as part of the exhibition Immigrants at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London.
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artworks in Joseph Beuys and Jenny Holzer
Vlassis Caniaris, Untitled 1974
Untitled considers the moment of arrival of migrants to unfamiliar lands and the ways in which they are greeted and regarded in the countries they reach. Caniaris often made life-size dolls with wood, wire and plaster. Symbolically, he would dress them in his own and his family’s clothing. This standing faceless figure of a half-body is given presence by the trousers and shoes it wears. Caniaris lived in a number of European artistic centres – Rome, Paris and Berlin. A temporary immigrant himself, he was sensitive to the growing global crisis concerning migrants.
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artworks in Joseph Beuys and Jenny Holzer
Art in this room
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Joseph Beuys
Lightning with Stag in its Glare
1958–85
Vlassis Caniaris
Image
1971
Vlassis Caniaris
Possible Background
1974
Vlassis Caniaris
Untitled
1974