In Guggenheim exhibition, Jenny Holzer grapples with the post-internet world she helped encourage

Because the invention of the web, certainly one of its items to civilization has been a brand new financial system of language. Over the past twenty years, Twitter (at present often called X) has turned all of us into haiku masters, whereby brevity and wit turned social foreign money. Regardless of predating Twitter by almost 30 years, Jenny Holzer’s text-oriented apply can be essentially reliant on stated foreign money. Evaluating the 73-year-old Holzer in a post-internet world is subsequently a precarious ordeal. Her newest exhibition at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Gentle Line, is sadly a half-hearted monument to pithiness, encumbered by an age when cynical brevity not strikes us, no matter how it’s introduced.

This conundrum is considerably paying homage to Wolfgang Tillmans’s 2022-23 Museum of Trendy Artwork exhibition To look with out concern. Instagram had been part of our lives for greater than a decade by the point the present opened, and Tillmans’s as soon as distinctive type of pictures had not solely been co-opted however turned the aesthetic norm for sharing visible updates of 1’s life. Because of this, pictures that when could have learn as groundbreaking of their rejection of classical composition and formalist teachings have been now on a regular basis to the purpose of inconsequential.

If the quippy and cynical modern-art adage of “I might try this” versus “however you didn’t” not holds true—if we’re all, in reality, “doing it”—can artists like Holzer and Tillmans survive the scrutiny that their institutional exaltation invitations? Our ever-refreshing social-media timelines actively current us with content material that effortlessly competes with the aesthetics, if not the sentiment, of Boomer-era artists. The aphoristic prowess of Holzer is now shared by youngsters and Millennials alike.

Presenting a Holzer present 35 years after her Guggenheim debut might have been a implausible alternative to introduce a youthful technology to the historical past of political, text-based and digital artistic endeavors. However relatively than functioning as an academic train, the exhibition’s sparseness and cynicism can really feel, at occasions, concurrently half-hearted and overbearing.

The star of Gentle Line is the resurrected LED work Set up for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1989/2024). Spanning the long-lasting spiral of the museum, the prolonged display (almost twice the size of the 1989 set up, which solely went up three storeys out of the six accessible) was as soon as revelatory however now showcases phrases we’re all too acquainted with, solely that includes higher graphics. On this iteration of the piece, as soon as once more we’re introduced with poetic and oftentimes disjointed phrases that slide upwards within the museum’s rotunda. “You’re the one” and “You’re the one who did this to me” crawl after each other to maintain first-time readers in a perpetual state of apprehension, unable to find out if they will belief the romanticism that’s so typically each misleading and short-lived in Holzer’s works.

The textual content crawls are divided into a number of sequences marked by a quick darkish pause throughout which the screens don’t show something, and when new textual content flows there’s a completely different typeface and animation type. Probably the most pixelated of typefaces presents among the extra ominous phrases: “I tease you” is adopted by “I tickle you”, then “I look ahead to you” and “I scan you”, progressively changing into extra predatory but in addition shifting shortly sufficient to disclaim guests an opportunity to linger on particular person sentiments for too lengthy. Though the earlier set up additionally had shifts in typefaces, this iteration creates a point of confusion. The exhibition textual content additionally mentions that Holzer used synthetic intelligence (AI) on this new model.

For anybody unfamiliar with Holzer’s iconic phrases, it’s pure to assume that among the textual content is perhaps AI-generated, or that the pixelated typeface, for instance, is supposed to suggest AI responding to her sentences. It’s a letdown to find that a number of AI instruments—ChatGPT, Dall-E and Runway—have been used solely to create among the ornamental animations behind the phrases. Given the extraordinary potentialities Holzer’s work holds for AI experimentation and dialogue, these beauty interventions are so cursory and secondary to the textual content that one wonders why she went via the train of utilizing AI in any respect.

Whereas the museum assertion heralds Set up for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as a big archival venture that concerned reverse-engineering the LED screens utilized in 1989, the whole exercise appears to eschew any sensible consideration in favour of laborious reverence… or maybe a form of insistence on authenticity. Like a VHS-tape filter on a TikTok video, regardless of mimicking the type of the older set up, the brand new and improved LED screens really feel lacklustre of their nostalgia. In 1989, utilizing inherently industrial LED-screen expertise to reimagine the Guggenheim’s exhibition capabilities was refreshing and modern. This time round, the {hardware} is neither classic sufficient to be quaint nor cutting-edge sufficient to be a commentary on expertise or capitalism in the present day.

Whereas the digital textual content crawl dominates the exhibition, it’s restrained in its political commentary, in contrast to the remainder of the items in Gentle Line. Traversed from the bottom ground up, the present leads the viewer via a vibrant facet room containing an set up aptly titled the start (2024), with repeated variations of Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays collection (1979-82) printed on neon-coloured posters plastered all the best way as much as the ceiling. What the wall textual content refers to as a collaboration on the set up feels extra like an intervention, with extra textual content graffitied over the posters in giant, old-school graffiti font by Holzer’s collaborator and good friend Lee Quiñones.

The collaboration/intervention incorporates quotes akin to “I JUST STOOD THERE FOR AN HOUR SCREAMING MY CHILDREN’S NAMES”, and the spectres of present-day conflicts linger within the room, although one thing about deadpan graffiti feels relatively callous. Regardless of the long-lasting typeface that adorned many a subway automotive within the Nineteen Eighties, on this very brilliant, neon-coloured room within the Guggenheim, the vanity is skinny.

The identical corridor incorporates Holzer’s ubiquitous benches that includes textual content, a few of that are a part of the LED-screen textual content crawl, though the sheer quantity of vibrant neon pages adorning the partitions doesn’t permit for the comparably extra poetic marble benches to shine.

In the meantime, in Cursed (2022)—a set of tweets by the previous president Donald Trump—every tweet is stamped on metals akin to lead and copper, thus memorialising a type of digital self-expression that’s paradoxically fleeting but archival. That includes Trump’s tweets years earlier than, main as much as and throughout the 6 January riot, the set up might be described as an train in posterity, if not accountability. Given Holzer’s continued commentary on fascistic rule and abuse of energy, her deal with the previous president comes as no shock. Nevertheless, there’s something to be stated about immortalising Trump’s presumably unplanned on-line vitriol—the identical vitriol that has garnered him a lot of his energy in the present day.

There are a number of extra benches on the best way up the rotunda, together with some which have seemingly been smashed, presumably an indication of the artist’s personal impermanence. One of many extra tender stone items from Holzer’s bench period, a sarcophagus constructed from Nubian black granite, Lament: The brand new illness got here… (1988-89)—in regards to the Aids disaster—is introduced intact, nearly as if to suggest that some issues are sacred. Or, on the very least, exempt from destruction. Even when stated destruction is a meditation on mortality.

The following works embrace large-scale work of redacted and declassified paperwork, akin to an FBI surveillance report of the artist Alice Neel and her suspected Communist affiliations, in addition to inside memos and emails from US navy officers on the usage of “enhanced interrogation strategies” after the terrorist assaults of 11 September 2001. Enlarged work of clip-art-esque infographics on battle techniques observe, together with one depicting plans to invade Iraq.

The exhibition culminates in a collection of large-scale, glowing canvases created utilizing a wide range of gold, palladium and platinum leaves. The latest works introduced within the present, they might even be essentially the most intriguing items, regardless of their latent Lalique aesthetic. One such canvas reads “SLAUGHTERBOTS” (SLAUGHTERBOTS, 2024), that includes a minimalist rendering of an summary M above a shorter W form, evoking architectural drawings of brutalist constructions. This piece incorporates AI as nicely: the form is conjured utilizing Dall-E, which was fed the phrase slaughterbots. How such minimal, asymmetrical bots will come to exist, and the way they might be used as weapons, just isn’t revealed.

That the work is neighboured by the same piece that includes a painted gold-leaf keyhole, with the phrase “The distant future is seen to the bare eye via the keyhole of historical past” (The distant future, 2024) overlaid on prime of it, is relatively unlucky and heavy-handed. It reduces the politics of the exhibition right into a cynical warning of Terminators to return. Given Holzer’s proclivity for cynicism, such an ominous sentiment is probably to be anticipated. However the unintentional poetry of among the redacted declassified paperwork, and the intentional poetry of Holzer herself, all of a sudden turns into fodder for a looming future full of slaughterbots.

Holzer’s current work is a transparent indication that she recognises the post-internet panorama she treads. What’s perplexing is her resolution to fight the transience of social media by quoting traces of it, both anonymously or typically with an excessive amount of emphasis on one explicit writer. Holzer’s pithiness could have impressed among the financial system of language all of us navigate on the internet in the present day. However her new works in Gentle Line betray a thirst for a form of political accountability within the face of social-media timelines and information feeds that refresh sooner than her LED textual content crawls. It’s a form of reverse damnatio memoriae. A fixation on posterity that youthful denizens of the net could not share.

Jenny Holzer: Gentle Line, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, till 29 September 2024