Jenny Holzer @ RISD...

Going into artist Jenny Holzer's lecture at the Rhode Island School of Design's Auditorium last Wednesday I was not a fan of her work. I attended the lecture secretly hoping, deep down inside, she could make a believer of me. She couldn't, and I found that after her truisms, it's all downhill.

My main criticism of her work deals completely with its context. With so few components to her work there needs to be a greater connect between the content and the context (between the text and the site/object she places it). I see greatly varying degrees of success in even my favorite of her series, the truisms. For each poiniant example of her truisms (ie: placing the text "We should raise boys and girls the same," on the Jumbo-Tron at a Mets game), it seems there is a more confused, less thought out example ("Protect me from what I want," written on a BMW V12 race car).

Often times it is stated she uses mass communication devices in public spaces as a means to get a message to the viewer when they least expect it. I understand her use of modern advertising techniques to an extent, but there are times when it does not seem to communicate an idea effectivley. To cite an example specifically from within her lecture, her projections of various authors' writings onto multiple castles ("Because who wouldn't want to project onto a castle") fell short. Her explanation of a projection onto I.M. Pei's pyramid at the Louvre left me scratching my head in disbelief ("Because I couldn't believe they'd let me..."). Huh?

While watching her talk I also learned that in recent years she has stopped writing the texts that are projected as well as having ceased setting up the projectors. With this being stated how is she the artist? She defended her hands-off approach before her talk's conclusion claiming that when doing a bench for example, "there's placement of the text, size of the text, size of the bench..." In some instances I don't have a problem with an artist-free piece of artwork, but in this instance I feel a little jipped. Her art consists of someone else placing text that was created by yet someone else onto an object that is often times arbitrary. The importance of an artist's hand stops when the idea becomes great enough to stand on its own, but in this instance: where is the art?

Jenny Holzer presented the 31st Annual Gail Silver Memorial Lecture on October 11, 2006 at 6:15pm in the RISD Auditorium.