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Breaking the Silence
John Haberin New York City
Jenny Holzer and Joyce Kozloff
Jenny Holzer has a way with words. She also has a way with silence.
For a time her crawl screens were seemingly everywhere—speaking for you, standing up to you and to power, and getting under your skin. Text art will never speak so forcefully and so elusively again. It made her not just the voice, but the voices of political and postmodern art. Were they never spoken aloud? It brought her to street posters in the 1970s, for Truisms and Inflammatory Essays, and to the ramp of the Guggenheim in 1989. This is not sound art, although that has its place, but it echoes once again through the museum. 
Now she recreates that work, but with additional words, because for her the same old words will never suffice. They ascend on LED along the rim of the ramp, facing outward onto the rotunda, with selected work from over fifty years in the bays by the wall, as "Light Line." It is a retrospective as a work in progress, her first in New York since 2009, and text keeps coming, apart from conspicuous gaps and silences. The empty bays and floors all but empty of art speak loudly, too. They allow her words to echo in the silence, and they bring out how much she refuses to say. As a postscript, Joyce Kozloff in paint keeps up with the news, too, with maps.
The shock of no surprise
You may remember Jenny Holzer for the crawl screens, and you could almost take in her show at the Guggenheim without ever leaving the rotunda. It does not have much in the way of seating, but then her art does not run to creature comforts. You might have to stand and crane your head, but it is hard not to keep looking as the words ascend. They emerge from the lobby wall, come into view, and come into view again as they complete the circle and move on to the next. Their terse messages are instantly memorable—and ever so easy to forget as new messages finish them, contradict them, and supplant them. It says something that a review in The New York Times misquoted one of her best known.
Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise, it goes, and you may have read it yourself on billboards, screen prints, and of course crawl screens. It has such an impact because it, too, may or may not come as a surprise. You are used, you may think, to politics as the abuse of power, and it may have driven you further to the left or to a protest vote for Donald J. Trump. The message can still come as a shock, though, if you expect "abuse of power" to end with something less banal, like a condemnation or an expression of pain. Truisms are often like that—temptingly obvious and temptingly easy to deride. In her hands, they are inflammatory all the same.
Holzer has perfected a voice that combines banality, truth, and lies. Which of the statements are hers? She is not saying, and none are so easy as you may have thought to dismiss. They speak of the need to lie next to someone and of the need to live apart. They veer into family, community, and politics, without distinguishing one from another. They could be personal confessions or the crushing voice of authority.
Her choice of LED works much the same way. It is the medium of advertising in Times Square, where she first took it up on commission in 1972—a medium devoted to gaining your trust and to taking you in. Yet it is also a medium of harsh whites and pixels, with the thrill and detachment of what was then the latest technology. I hope, though, that you will not end your trip in the lobby after all. Holzer got her start in other media, and more lies in store up the ramp. That includes the overflow of voices and silences.
The very year of her Guggenheim installation, she carved her truisms in marble benches and the dark stone of what might be a coffin. Do not expect comfortable seating or reverence for the dead. Media like these may last forever, but they, too, speak of transience. No one settles into park benches for long, and funerals are all about the brevity of life. The truisms began, though, as posters, and the exhibition proper begins with an Inflammatory Wall of them from around 1980. Make that four walls, on the full height of the two-story High Gallery just off the lobby.
It has room for nearly a thousand, in clashing colors and clashing messages. How an artist at age thirty accumulated so many in just three years is a marvel to itself. Still, they are not hers alone, regardless of who wrote them. She has invited another artist, Lee Quiñones, to scrawl right over them. It updates her presentation for street art while bringing out a crucial aspect of her work's anonymity. She is bearing witness and giving voice to others.
Voided
Holzer started with something less public and more obscure. Diagrams taken from science and engineering bear not quite appropriate titles. And then comes something surprising from so talkative an artist, emptiness. The show really does have empty bays. It becomes a collaboration with Frank Lloyd Wright and his museum, just as with Quiñones and countless others, but not without her usual defiance. 
When she first installed her crawl screen rising up, exhibitions started at the top and worked their way down.
Silence allows voices to linger in memory, and it asks, too, just who gets to speak. Sure enough, when the artist first moved past crawl screens and truisms, it was to censorship. Paintings in oil of official documents have more than just the names blacked out. They run to near uniform blackness. One document duly states that it never mentions George Orwell, but that is after censorship. His file, now "voided," once voided him.
Holzer's first New York retrospective had a heavy bias toward recent work, at the time the marks of the censor. So does this one. Blame it if you like on the curator, Lauren Hinkson, but this artist hears living voices, and she wants her work to live in the present as well. She projects more messages on the museum's façade at sunset early in the show's run. When she at last returns to lies and clichés, it is to the unchallenged master of both. Trump and his party gild the lies, and so does she in silver and gold leaf.
Trump's words appear on fragmented metal, ending in a loose pile on the floor, and her own marble lies up the ramp in fragments as well. Now if only he could be so easily consigned to the ash heap of history. One outburst portrays the January 7 uprising as an epic event, and more paintings capture the voices around him on the day itself. Trump-appointed judges are determined to see that courtroom testimony comes only after the election, if it takes place at all. Smeared paint may not show Holzer at her best, but it will have to do. When the crawl screen pauses its messaging briefly to flash in red, it could be sounding the alarm.
Text like hers would look good on t-shirts, and one can see their influence on Rirkrit Tiravanija and his freebies reading The Odious Smell of Truth. Never mind his political neutrality and pandering. They parallel, too, John Baldessari and his California irony, but without his glib detachment. They have an echo as well in the terse anger of Glenn Ligon—or the sheer excess of another African American, Adam Pendleton. I leave Holzer's influence on text art and her 2009 Whitney retrospective to earlier reviews. She has returned earlier to the Guggenheim, too, as curator of its collection, and you can check out the links for a far fuller picture.
The show's biases raise tough questions. What is the point of a retrospective anyway? How do the certainties and complexities of Postmodernism look today? Holzer's whole body of work explores biases, and even her squares of gold look like the marks of a censor. Still, the opening overflow of light, text, and color lingers longest and matters most. For once, the museum rotunda talks back.
Like a bomb
If you remember Joyce Kozloff as a founder of what came to be known as "Pattern and Decoration," you may wonder what she is doing with a show entirely of maps. They are contemporary maps at that, of regions torn apart by aggression and war. They are recognizably hers all the same, with overlaid patterns that might themselves have been torn away, but from vintage wallpaper. They just happen to land at the site of unilaterally or mutually assured destruction. For once, the decorative arts land like a bomb. What might once have served as the comforts of art and home is now just one more part of the show's "Collateral Damage." 
It may still leave you wondering. Like Miriam Schapiro and Valerie Jaudon, Kozloff came to the movement with a dedication to painting and a smile, not the anger of a world at war. Surely the decorative arts have a different time frame from the latest news in mind, whether the frivolity of fashion or timeless craft. While critics could easily dismiss such art as, well, feminine, Kozloff embraced the label. She appeared in "WACK" at MoMA PS1, then still P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, as part of a "feminist revolution." More than anyone might have guessed, she also anticipated patterning in art today, with its tributes to "women's work" as serious business. Entering her eighties, she may be struggling to keep up with the headlines, but she is also making them.
Kozloff has been interested in maps since the 1990s, and her sources range from U.S. government surveys to ancient Rome. Her maps appear, too, exactly as her sources would have it—with the West Bank and Gaza as, pointedly in one case, "status undetermined." They also reinforce her play between found imagery and the artist's hand. A pattern landing on Israel takes the form of targets, but as single brushstrokes like spirals, and one can feel the bombs or the paint landing. Other patterns echo a region's native culture. She is bringing her concerns up to date, big time, but with an eye to the past.
Maps have their own claim to the rigor of abstract painting and the flourish of patterns as well. Like both, they adhere to what critics used to praise as "flatness." How else to render a 3D world on paper? With due respect to a certain columnist for The Times, the earth is definitely not flat. (A flat earth makes a lousy metaphor for globalization anyway.) A reproduction is itself collateral damage, and so is a work of art.
Most maps here have the simplest kind of projection, with outlines that do their best to reproduce political borders. They approach the view from above like a child's drawing. As decoration, their tart colors put overt patterning to shame. The work based on the Roman empire, "Spheres of Influence" from 2001, addresses the problem directly. It adopts a mathematical projection that leaves its twelve panels in the shape of canoes, but flatter. Its care with geographical texturing is all the more striking for that—and closer to art.
Like it or not, Kozloff is still smiling in the face of disaster. Her art never spells out the damage, and that only helps it as political art. It runs from Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa to regions under Chinese control. Do not, though, come expecting ruined cities and refugees. Do come for the collision of subjective color and objective fact. Or should I say the subjectivity of fact in the arenas of art and conflict?
Jenny Holzer ran at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through September 29, 2024, Joyce Kozloff at D. C. Moore through February 3. The text links to related reviews of Holzer, who was also the subject of one of this site's first, in 1994, back when Soho still mattered.