Virtual Worlds

Since the late 1970s, Jenny Holzer´s work has sought to reformulate many of the givens of traditional art, especially in the context of public spaces. Writing is the basis of Holzer´s practice. Although most of Holzer´s content is original, on occasion, she works with historic or archival sources (for example, in her several commissioned permanent memorial works). Holzer employs her texts singly or in combination in her permanent works, installations and xenon projections. Media employed in Holzer´s practice vary. Writing is programmed into electronic signs; printed on posters and t-shirts; carved in sandstone benches, marble floors and granite sarcophagi; cast as bronze plaques; or etched on silver. Further, her statements have appeared on billboards, movie marquees, automobiles, in news magazines, and on websites, as well as being projected onto facades, walls, water and mountainsides by laser or with xenon. Jenny Holzer makes use of the insistent appeal of modern advertising media for her own ideas.

In 1993, Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium, opened at the SOHO Guggenheim Museum, one of the first exhibitions to investigate new artistic directions in virtual reality. The show featured two virtual worlds by Jenny Holzer. The first, created in collaboration with engineer Ken Pimentel, was an untitled piece, inspired by one of Samuel Beckett's short stories, The Lost Ones. It featured a cavernous world in which souls alternately flee from and engage the viewer. If you catch them they speak one of Holzer's trademark truism phrases. Holzer collaborated with Jeff Donovan on her second world, offering a response to the violence against women in the Bosnian war. Here, you enter and find a vast patterned desert of striking color: bright orange earth and deep blue sky. As you travel across the landscape, a circle of buildings appears on the horizon. When you reach the village you see that each building is an identical cinderblock hut. Soon you reach another village. Again the same square, block huts, but these are lined up in double rows like barracks. The voices here have the same simple, flat tone, but the words are violent. Each hut harbors a different voice. Each village has a different story to tell. The silence of the desert seems to be watching you. jenny holzer

Comments

[masa]

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