Fair warning: after you leave the Guggenheim's summer blockbuster, 'Jenny Holzer: Light Line,' words will misbehave. Basic signage may seem newly cryptic, ad slogans slacker. Pleasantries of the 'What's up with you?' variety may leave an unpleasant taste in your mouth...
The part of the show which will pry open your senses is called 'Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.' It is made of phrases, enough of them that it takes the words several hours to crawl up an L.E.D. spiral lining the museum's interior. Many of the phrases ('You have a sick one on your hands when your affection is used to punish you') are wacky...
A significant number made the same journey up the Guggenheim's ramp in 1989, for Holzer's first show at the museum, and all are taken from sequences of word art that she composed between the late seventies and the nineties. They add up to a single epic poem that is, by my count, Holzer's one and only gift to art history...
Most artists, even Guggenheim-fêted ones, make zero gifts to art history, so I'd like to imagine that Holzer would be O.K. with the assessment. In interviews, she seems O.K. with most things-if she's not a placid, polite, eerily normal person, she does a fine impression of one...
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