Documents in Jenny Holzer’s Art:

Authority in Impacting Collective Memories

“…the dialectic of inside and outside. Many artists have described insider/outsider-dom as a mental construct from experience.”

Guy Brett

“…archives are the hinge between the past and the future. They are prosthetic memories which are activated in the present.”

Sue Beakell and Victoria Worsley

“…are used to shape memories into narratives and to transform information and recollection from the individual to the collective.”

Laura Millar

“…creation of social memory,” such as our “creating, capturing,

preserving, and sharing the tangible objects: [these are] the

touchstones, vehicles, and triggers that help us to remember and to

know.”

“…do not gain access to the archive through the front door, equipped with proper IDs, a well-formulated research question, and full sponsorship. They enter like a virus and bring the archive down from within.”

Ulrich Baer

“…archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present,”

Hal Foster

…their works “can be seen as perverse orders that aim to

disturb the symbolic order at large,…”

“…archival art is rarely cynical in intent […] on the contrary, these artists often aim to fashion distracted viewers into engaged discussants.”

“…the fabricated or constructed archive, the archive of the unremembered, and the archive’s redemption for new life [which are] never fully distinct from one another.” Baer

“Poignancy lies in their resultant inability to communicate their intentions, [they] are […] available for insertion into new contexts, constructed by the artist or by the viewer. Such works play on the audience’s desire to find meanings and make connections: viewers try to contextualize the images or find them in a narrative.”

Alexandrina Buchanan

“There are challenges attending the display of archival material in an art gallery setting. One problem is what to put on the walls: items in frames tend to be understood as works of art, which can be misleading. Another challenge is how to present documents in vitrines, letting them function as evidence and context while ensuring they have enough visual interest to hold a visitor’s attention.” Amy Tector

“…refashion material from existing archives to tell new or alternative stories that may contradict or substantially revise a given collection’s original intentions.”

Baer

“…the opportunity to subvert and refigure existing orders and practices, a notion Susan Hiller has described as ‘orchestrated relationships, invented or discovered fluid taxonomies’.” Beakell and Worsley

“This inaccessibility transforms them into the most authoritative and powerful

testimony of actions. The archivist preserves the archive’s authenticity, which

goes beyond physical security, by intellectually preserving the organic

integrity of the interrelationships within the sets of paper, through the description

of their context.”Beakell and Worsley

…archives are considered “secure places” that are “isolated from contamination or corruption,” for:

“Archives have always been about power, whether it is the power of the state, the church, the corporation, the family, the public, or the individual. Archives […] can be a tool of resistance. […] They are a product of society’s need for information, and the abundance and circulation of documents reflects the importance placed on information in society. They are the basis for and validation of the stories we tell ourselves, the story-telling narratives that give cohesion and meaning to individuals, groups, and societies.”

Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook

“…in particular the fall of the Berlin Wall which brought into stark significance the future role of secret police files; issues of data protection and freedom of information are also common cultural currency.”

Buchanan

“…offer alternative ways of remembering and archiving experiences that have not been officially retained or chronicled, or that have been deliberately excluded from official versions of collective history.”

Baer

“…partially [as] a response to a lack of collectively agreed upon narratives of the nation’s or community’s past and dearth of institutions of communal remembrance.”

Michelle Woodward

“…the record had to be corrected”

Baer

“How much of a difference Holzer’s new works will actually make is, of course, hard to say. While opponents of the war and of Bush’s policies will have their beliefs confirmed, it’s difficult to imagine a Bush supporter being converted. But art doesn’t change the world all at once. Its influence spreads slowly like a subtle stain through the social fabric.” Ken Johnson

Thank you!