jenny holzer's retrospective in porto and her powerful use of words - Australia News Beep

Holzer’s work with street art

The image was then given to Porto-based graffiti artist Kilo to recreate in spray paint for Wrong Answers. This collaboration also manifested as an immersive graffiti-covered space in the alcove on the mezzanine level of the Serralves library. Together, they reference how Holzer has continually collaborated with street artists throughout her career.

In her address of the Trump administration, her work comes across as more visually literal, using the visage to fight a visage. It’s almost as if she concedes to the fact that this particular force can’t be brought to the table with words alone. The table must be gaudy, gold, and filled with his image like papal memorabilia.

Installation Views of Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers

Laments (1989) and working with stone

While paper has an ephemeral, nearly disposable quality to it, Holzer has also turned to more permanent mediums for her written works. For many decades, she has leveraged the format of the stone bench, which signals a resting point while also communicating a kind of ancient monumentality in the way it bears inscriptions. This is seen most notably in her work Laments (1989), featured in the show, which was created at the height of the AIDS epidemic. While iterations of benches appear around the exhibition in their original state—flat planes to sit on—they also appear in a new form.

Installation Views of Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers

bright, spinning LEDs

To create the snaking LED path that flows through the corridor and winds around the exhibition space, Holzer brought a sledgehammer to some of her stone works. These chunks, which emerged from the rubble, frame a trickle of blaring black-and-orange signs that flow down the hall like stones at the edge of a brook. They lead to a pile of nearly innumerable signs strewn haphazardly on the floor that contain an overpowering, overstimulating hodgepodge of colors, words, and wires.

Installation Views of Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers

In this site-specific retrospective, Wrong Answers collects the works, mediums, and techniques that have defined the American artist. There are spinning LED works, poetic self-devised slogans, and messages carved in stone. Her work has continually adapted, both in media and message, to the times in which she has lived while also revealing the story of Holzer herself.

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