How Jenny Holzer taught the Instagram generation to speak in universal truths

Almost exactly a year ago when the notorious ‘rugby rape trial’ in Northern Ireland sent shockwaves through my native Ireland and beyond, outraged citizens took to Instagram and Twitter to express their horror that this woman’s story wasn’t believed in court. Like countless others, I sought to express my solidarity through the admittedly superficial channels of social media. Stuck for words, I posted the famous image of Jenny Holzer’s “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” blinking in Time Square on my Instagram. In its brutal and bitter honesty, it seemed to convey what I wanted to say better than I could ever say it.  Some 42 years after Holzer first presented her Truisms — a series of over 250 single-sentence texts of which “Abuse of power” is one — this statement’s stunning forthrightness continues to stop viewers in their tracks and make a chilling point at times of grave injustice.

Struck by the prevalence at which Holzer’s work crops up on Instagram and elsewhere, it doesn’t seem hyperbolic to say that the American artist is having a moment (or a renaissance, depending on you look at it). Currently the focus of Tate Modern’s Artist Rooms, which surveys her greatest hits including the Truisms, Inflammatory Essays and her LED sculptures, Holzer is now also the subject of a major new exhibition at Guggenheim Bilbao — her largest show to date. Entitled Thing Indescribable, the exhibition spans her four-decade career and includes a number of new, especially commissioned pieces.

Since the opening of the Tate exhibit last July (which will continue until 31 July this year), Holzer has assumed profound levels of new popularity, catapulted by the frequency at which her work is posted on social media. Long before Instagram existed, Holzer was plastering her jarring Inflammatory Essays on the streets of New York, but somehow their language of shocking honesty and contradiction has found a new home on the IG grid. Her stirring phrases like “Protect me from what I want,” “It’s in your own self-interest to find a way to be very tender,” “The future is stupid” and “Men don’t protect you anymore” reverberate with a generation hooked on authentic self-expression at the same time that superficiality, falsehoods and fakeness have never wielded so much influence. Holzer’s blatant aphorisms seem to shatter the surface, cutting to the heart of what we really feel and want to say.

Holzer is not the only artist whose use of language and text is particularly potent in the current era. At last year’s Berlin Biennale, for example, American artist Tony Cokes’ installation stood out on account of its searing clarity, hinged on a blazing use of language. Here, in the dank basement of  ZK/U in Moabit, large old-fashioned TV sets glowed cobalt and hot pink, flashing with lines of text pulled from interviews with famous figures such as Donald Trump, Kanye West and George Carlin. Headphones were wired to the screens, playing innocuous pop music on loop — a conscious clash with the interview fragments pertaining to difficult news stories from the past decade or more, such as the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, workers’ and women’s rights and US race relations. Divorced from image and context, the speakers’ words were proven to be more powerful or ludicrous than if pared with the corresponding images. Cokes, much like Holzer, reveals the white hot heat of words alone.

Meanwhile, the Spanish artist and Gucci darling, Coco Capitán, who is currently exhibiting at Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, follows in Holzer’s footsteps by emphasising the tender and emotive impact of words when deposited in public places or scrawled on IG feeds. Much like Holzer, Capitán’s work depends on the emotional explosion of witnessing painfully honest, even diaristic, phrases and mantras blown up and etched into the public realm (Capitán became a household name after her collaboration with the Italian fashion house saw her poetic statements scratched on to building facades). Aphorisms like “What are we going to do with all this future?,” “Common sense is not that common” and “I want to go back to believing in a story” illustrate in equal parts an adolescent despair and dreamy-eyed hope for the future.

Holzer’s brand of exposing the vulnerability of language is similarly recognisable in British artist Tracey Emin’s neon cursive outpourings of love and desire. Expressions like “Just love me,” “I woke up wanting to kiss you” and “The heart has its reasons” are almost gruesome in their clichéd familiarity but it’s precisely their squirming cringiness that makes them so memorable. Certainly it’s a technique borrowed by the confessional artist from Holzer’s Truisms  — boldly reminding us that a cliché is only as pathetic and embarrassing as much as it is true.

Increasingly not only is Instagram flooded with Holzer re-grams but more and more publishers are bringing text to their feeds. Loaded statements printed on blank black and white, or Holzer-style pastel backgrounds, culled from interviews infiltrate the image-stream, refuting the adage that a picture says a thousand words. In the age of images, Holzer’s declarations of human contradiction and vulnerability are luminous against the noise. In their brevity, they manage to say something fundamental, something that we might not have even believed we thought or felt until we see it printed. As Holzer has said herself about the series, “In the Truisms, I wanted to write clichés and I was successful. You only have a few seconds to catch people, so you can’t do long, reasoned arguments. They don’t make value judgments, but they express truth for their original speakers. I wanted the viewer to make his way through them and maybe gain some tolerance.” Ordinarily that might be a big demand for a line of text, or granted even an art work, but in the case of Jenny Holzer and her art, it somehow rings true.

Jenny Holzer: Thing Indescribable runs through to 9 September 2019 at Guggenheim Bilbao.