Monthly Archives: March 2009

Jenny Holzer – Alarm in Words and Light

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Art Review | Jenny Holzer

Sounding the Alarm, in Words and Light

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Jenny Holzer: Protect Protect, including “Red Yellow Looming,” and other Holzer works from the past 15 years, is at the Whitney Museum of American Art through May 31. More Photos >

By ROBERTA SMITH

 

Published: March 12, 2009

Basically, Jenny Holzer has spent the last three decades pelting us with unsettling and increasingly relevant portents of things to come.

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Times Topics: Whitney Museum of American Art

In tones alternately poetic or oracular, inflamed or numb, Big-Brotherly or tender, Ms. Holzer’s terse snippets of prose have warned of evolving threats to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She has tracked the inner thoughts of bereft lovers or shellshocked survivors and articulated the baser instincts unleashed by social chaos.

To do this, she has turned various user-friendly, pop-culture modes of public address into early warning systems, including posters, T-shirts, billboards, broadsheets, plaques, giant projections and incised marble benches. Electronic LED signs are her best-known, most spectacular method; they also reflect the military-commercial-entertainment complex that, bit by bit, her art exposes.

 
Sounding the alarm at the Ides of March – more …

The art of balance

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Any day is just fine for promoting women and children. Their contribution, especially in the arts and music has been the hallmark of every great culture since the beginning of the agricultural revolution. Today that contribution extends to science, medicine and beyond. Let’s make today special, but also link it to Mother’s Day and Earth Day and as many others as we can. Society honors men and patriarchal religious principles almost every day of the year, ignoring the fact that without women’s creative force, none of us would exist.

Balance in our understanding of culture is sadly lacking in many parts of the world. Balance, Buddhists say, is the key to understanding life.

IWD is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. In some countries like China, Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, IWD is a national holiday. The first IWD was run in 1911.
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