Last year, Jenny Holzer gave away a slew of candy-colored condoms, available in the Guggenheim restroom at the top of the museum’s spiraling ramp, their shiny foil wrappers inscribed with new, urge-based riffs on her classic sloganeering, like “EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID” and “MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE.”
Holzer has spent the past half a century expressing much of the same: dissatisfaction with authority, freedom of sexuality, the hazards of womanhood, and uncertainties of the marginalized class, be they economic, racial, or just generally out-there. It’s a simple formula, and predictably effective. Illuminating “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE” on an electronic billboard in Times Square is a superlative example of the whimper W. B. Yeats envisioned. The type of loaded, impotent language that reflects its own passivity and still looks chic on white t-shirts.
It’s not that the artist is an idiot. It’s more like she’s too in touch with her project. When we howl at the abyss, we may be heard by those masters, insulated in lofty monuments to greed. Yet, like the echoes of coyotes as they erupt from the darkness, chittering and snarling, encircling addled prey, it’s almost frightening at best. And those privileged enough to discern this vague threat are too easily made aloof again. They remember their place, quite literally behind doors. The warning always secured by such buttresses.
Last week, Trump was reinaugurated president. And while Holzer’s prophylactics are more relevant than ever, they’re a little too whimsical, and I wouldn’t trust one to protect me from what I want. Rape and murder of women and children remain commonplace in Western war games. Prisons, military and otherwise, continue their traditions of unmitigated torture. The Middle East is still in turmoil. And sex differences are as perilous as they were at the height of AIDS. Words can buy a lot. But not as much as money. Holzer would know. In addition to the freebies, she sold jars of her condoms for $5000 a pop.
-David Fishkind