Gaza looms giant over Jenny Holzer’s new exhibition Gentle Line on the Guggenheim Museum in New York. And but, the identify of the besieged strip isn’t talked about as soon as.
That’s simply how Holzer’s artwork is: truisms with out the express reality; political artwork minus the down-and-dirty politics. This aversion to figuring out her targets — barring riskless selections like villainous former United States presidents Donald Trump, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush — might very properly be the key to her institutional success for practically 5 many years.
Regardless of this, I discovered myself genuinely moved by elements of the exhibition, even in opposition to my will.
The present orbits round an expanded and up to date model of Holzer’s 1989 set up in the museum’s spiraling rotunda, with LED screens flashing dozens of aphorisms addressing energy dynamics (“abuse of energy comes as no shock”), males’s wars and bloodshed (“as a result of there is no such thing as a god somebody should take duty for males”), Massive Brother surveillance (“I see you, I watch you, I scan you”), and different existential anxieties.
The artist’s acquainted stone benches, onto which extra maxims are carved, and different earlier works criticizing the US wars in Iraq and Vietnam are additionally included. So is a sequence of malignant Trump tweets stamped onto patinated lead and copper plates, which might’ve felt trite if not for the upcoming hazard of his comeback this November. However the most effective a part of Gentle Line is the LED spiral, which has been touched up with new visible results.
As a father and a Palestinian, it was the traces about wartime youngsters that stopped me in my tracks and chilled my bones:
You wouldn’t understand it from strolling by way of the exhibition, however these shattering traces, written by graffiti artist Lee Quiñones onto wheat-paste posters of Holzer’s longer texts in a gallery on the primary flooring, are all from or about Gaza (alongside texts from war-torn Ukraine, Syria, and different areas). Provided that you obtain after which navigate by way of the Bloomberg Connects cellphone app would you uncover that the primary line is a Gazan father quoted in a 2023 Human Rights Watch report; the second is a Gazan baby chatting with a United Nations investigation into Israel’s 2014 struggle on town, which killed at the very least 2,251 Palestinians, amongst them 551 youngsters and 299 girls; and the third is from Kathy Engel’s poem “Life Help” (1982) within the 2007 assortment We Start Right here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon (edited by Engel and Kamal Boullata).
After which there are extra harrowing traces from Holzer’s personal writings, courting again to her residency on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork’s Unbiased Examine Program in 1977:
It’s unattainable to learn these traces and never consider the butchered, mutilated, displaced, famished, and traumatized youngsters of Gaza between them. The Guggenheim’s most capability is 1,400 guests. The Palestinian youngsters the Israeli military has killed since October 7 would refill the museum greater than 10 instances over.
Holzer not solely avoids addressing Israel’s aggression immediately, but additionally chooses to incorporate these traces by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai: “My baby wafts peace / After I lean over him.”
This juxtaposition wafts bothsidesism and secure play — however in my opinion, it doesn’t matter a lot.
It doesn’t change my rapid emotional and bodily response to the work. Grief is current within the present whether or not it was invited in or not. I don’t even really feel like wagging my finger at Holzer. I’m serious about these youngsters who, due to Israel’s unceasing bombings, don’t have any fingers left to talk of.
Jenny Holzer: Gentle Line continues on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1071 Fifth Avenue, Higher East Aspect, Manhattan) by way of September 29. The exhibition was curated by Lauren Hinkson, affiliate curator for Collections.