Jenny Holzer

Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Through April 16

One rarely sees the building of the Neue Nationalgalerie transparent and completely empty, but this is exactly what happened for the Jenny Holzer retrospective. The artist—who became a celebrity in the ’80s thanks to expressions such as “Protect Me from What I Want” and “Money Creates Taste”—has installed a selection of texts—from the extensive number she has written since 1977—in the Neue Nationalgalerie. These derive from her various series, which include “Survival,” “Living,” “Inflammatory Essays,” “Truisms,” and “OH,” the last conceived during Holzer’s stay at the American Academy in Berlin (2000-2001).

Working with words, sentences, and short texts, her work is marked by a pseudo-religious and political-humanist resonance, a moralistic tone and the appearance of universal truth, which is often deliberately banal. Built in 1968 to a design by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Neue Nationalgalerie of Berlin looks like a parallelepiped of transparent glass, an open space in the city. Jenny Holzer uses it as a ready-made to support her texts, installing her characteristic scrolling electronic writings on the ceiling and along the thirteen longitudinal ribs which hold it in place.

At night, the architecture of the museum disappears and from afar one sees only the writings flowing past continuously. Unable to make out what they say, they appear to be simply decorations for some celebration or other. As one draws closer, peremptory phrases—such as "I Observe You," "Abuse of Power Comes as no Surprise," "Extreme Self-consciousness Leads to Perversion"—materialize and linger in the mind of the observer. The minimal changes that Holzer makes to the building become a part of the public space and contrast with the advertisements that dominate the area in which the museum stands, next to new Potsdamer Platz and the Sony Center, dense with advertising logos and slogans.




Marina Sorbello
Translation by Robin Poppelsdorff