JENNY HOLZER

b.1950

Art Period: Post-modern artist involved in conceptual art. An art form in which the originating idea and the process by which it is presented take precedence over a tangible product. Conceptual works are sometimes produced in visible form, but they often exist only as descriptions of mental concepts or ideas. This trend developed in the late 1960s, in part as a way to avoid the commercialisation of art. Art as an idea rather than an object that could be bought and sold which only adds to commercialisation which art is currently against.

ARTIST

Born in the US in Gallipolis, Ohio in 1950. Holzer who originally trained as a painter graduated from a New York art school in 1977. She worked originally in surrealist artworks then found her passion in Dadism and politics.

She is very well read and many of her works reflect her very political and globally, aware and concerned, attitude.

Her interests lie in the world and its many issues she looks for myths and common faults in society and presents them as contradictions or parodies to highlight how they are wrong.

She is concerned with the power of language to distort and manipulate.

Her work is reliant on the element of surprise

World

Media and Politics are a major concern for Holzer who concentrates on questioning and making clearer issues to do with society, politics and family. Her early works of Sex, death, power and war continue to remain themes since they were brought out in with her first series TRUISMS. More specific issues explored in her art include political corruption, AIDS, unemployment, gender inequality, starvation, was and pollution.

Media and the extent of the power of words in modern society are of major concern for Holzer.

Influenced by writers and political leaders including Nazi Germanies Adolf Hitler, and Russia's Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

Her chosen style of conceptual art is a purposefully fighting the constant pressure of consumerism and materialism. "protect me from what I want" survival series (1985)

Her work was strongly influenced by the Dadaism which sought to create an anti-art and non-art often employing a sense of absurd. Their works contained strong political overtones.

FEMINISM:

1792 Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a "vindication of the rights of women". Foundation of womens rights movement some 200 years later.

Authors wroted femenist literary works including Linda Nochlin who wrote Why have there been no women artists?(1973) And Germaine Greer who wrote The Obstacle race.(1982)

Famous femenist gorups such as the suffragettes  and more art speific womens groups such as Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and the Guerilla Girls have influenced Holzer.

Contemporaries: Barbara Kruger, the Guerilla Girls and Judy Chicago.

AUDIENCE

Holzers intended audience is the public and a much broader audience than that of the other 3 artists. Her work is political and confronting so her aim is to reach as many people as she can.

Her art satisfies the Post-modern theory that art should not be an elitist thing, but rather accessible to everybody. Her work is displayed publicly. Audience is very important to Holzers work, which is just as much about audience response as it is about the physical work itself.

As she quotes she "wanted to translate them [her messages] into a language that was more accessible."

She intentionally provokes the audience.

WORKS:

"I started the work as a parody, like the Great Ideas of the Western World in a nutshell," to make "big issues in culture intelligible as public art."

Her main style is TEXT, TEXT, TEXT.

 She has completed 3 major series including 'truisms', 'survival' and 'Lamentations'.

Her works are mainly site-specific installations and involve the use of advertising mediums that are normally incorporated by the businesses and companies she is trying to degrade.

Her works are displayed in public spaces and popular locations such as Times Square New York

Her medium of production are taking on emerging technologies and have included T-shirts, baseball caps, electronic baseball scoreboards, small books, posters, walls, tombstones, stickers, billboards electronic signs, large xenon projections and her recent work is going to be aimed at mobile phones. All of her mediums are very public and accessible as well as being directly confronting and aims to make the audience uneasy by capturing them unaware.




 "I've been working on pieces for wireless phones, since every kid, at least in Europe and Japan, is SMSing."

·       "Raise Boys and Girls the Same Way." Selection from truisms (1987). Installation at candlestick park CA, USA. Examines gender issues and inequality.

·       "Protect me from What I Want." (1983-1985), spectacolour electronic sign, times square New York. This work is about consumerism and materialism being central to our society. It parodies the common consumer instruction "give me what I want."

·       "Abuse of power comes as no surprise" (1983) Message on pink T-shirt. Truisms. New York city. This work can be taken either as a feminist work since the message is worn by a female or can be seen simply as a political protest.

·       "War"(1992), LED signs, Installation, St.Peters Church. The work, which contains the words 'the roots', plastered down the sides of a traditional stained glass window which suggests with reference to the title war that religion is the roots of war. This is characteristic of Holzers controversial subjects as well as her ambiguous works, which provoke responses and contest from the audience.

 

 

A quick easy reference for you all to look at as a quick reference for our essays and the HSC. 

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

Kahlo’s confronting self portraits represent the extent of her suffering but they are more complex than a simple visual biography. Kahlo’s images are rich with symbols - monkeys like the attribute of a saint are a personal symbol indicating promiscuity – symbols of Mexico abound – her hair plaited and decorated with ribbons and traditional costume, butterflies a symbol of Aztec warriors – the lush foliage and animals record her connection to land and pantheist beliefs. The graphic representations of her miscarriages and numerous operations reflect the influence of Mexican retablo (graphic images inviting the intercession of the Virgin Mary) There are also symbols from European art in her iconic Broken Column Portrait – her injured spine is represented by a crumbling Greek column.

Background

-        Born in Mexico 1907

-        Contracted polio at the age of seven

Artist

Material Practice

-        Painter

-        Uses a slim sable brush

-        Kahlo’s images are rich with symbols

-        Her images incorporate symbols that reveal her intimate connection to traditional Mexican culture, the influence of Catholicism and the formal portrait photographs taken by her father Guillermo Kahlo.

Conceptual Practice

-        Adult artist

-        Extensive output of autobiographical self-portraits

-        Works are an exploration of identity and self-expression

-        Surrealist quality to her work

-        Works are strongly linked with her life experiences as well as relating to world events, politics and the wider art world

-        Paints on a personal level and uses it as a therapy for her life

-        Erotic imagery

-        Clothing plays a significant role in her self-presentation

-        Reveals the biological truth of her feelings

-        Sexual quality to her work

Artwork

‘Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird’ (1940) 


THE FRAMES

Structural

-        Oil on canvas, 62.5 x 48 cm

-        Unsmiling and sternly disturbing self-portrait

-        Unflinchingly staring directly at the audience from under the lintel of her graphic identikit like eyebrows

-        Monkey peering over left shoulder and black cat glaring over the right

-        Thorn necklace draped over chest in lower third of image

-        Fringed with tropical plants

Cultural

-        Painted in 1940

-        Surrealist quality to her work

-        Expressive of her multicultural background

-        Mexican and Hungarian/German origins

-        Both Native symbols and Catholic symbols converge in this painting

-        Draws from her Mexican heritage, referring to Aztec traditions of divinatory rituals involving self-mortification with thorns

-        Draws symbolism from her Catholic upbringing

-        Never represented as a single self but always a multicultural one

Subjective

-        Necklace of thorns alludes to Christ’s passion

-        Dead hummingbirds around her neck and butterflies in her hair are Aztec symbols that signify the souls of dead warriors

-        The monkey functions as a religious attribute and further accentuates the iconic quality of the image

-        The cat appears to be a more generalised symbol of death, imparting an ominous sense of doom

-        Physical proximity of both cat and monkey is disturbing

-        ‘This image is not a self-analysis but a self-invention’ – Sarah Lowe

Postmodern

-        Reproductions of artworks found on mouse pads, furniture and clocks

-        Image placed on a 34 cent post stamp for the US postal service in 2001

‘The Two Fridas’

Structural

-        Life-sized double self-portrait, 173.5 x 173 cm

-        Oil on canvas

-        Executed simply and realistically

-        ‘European’ Frida is seen on the left wearing a high-necked, white lacy dress

-        Alter ego is the Frida of darker skin on the right who wears the traditional dress of the Tehuana

-        Two Fridas joined by an artery attached at each heart

-        Heart of the ‘European’ Frida is severed while the heart of the alter ego is whole

-        An artery of the left Frida has been severed and blood drips through the surgical clamp and onto her white dress

Cultural

-        Completed in 1939 just after her divorce with Rivera

-        Surrealist quality to her work

-        Expressive of her multicultural background

Subjective

-        ‘They thought I was a Surrealist but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality’ – Frida Kahlo 

World

-        The details of Kahlo’s traumatic life often colour the interpretation of her artworks.

-        She contracted polio when she was six leaving her right foot permanently deformed.

-        Kahlo suffered horrific injuries in a car accident when she was eighteen sustaining extensive injuries to her spine, collarbone, ribs, leg, foot and pelvis.

-        A handrail also smashed into her back and came out through her vagina and as a consequence was deemed unable to bare children

-        Due to these injuries Kahlo underwent over 35 surgeries

-        Married Diego Rivera in 1929 at age 22

-        Rivera had an affair with Frida’s sister, Christina, putting their marriage to an end in 1939

-        Couldn’t draw during throughout the duration of the affair

-        Remarried in 1940

-        In 1941 her father died causing her to suffer depression and deterioration to her health

-        Forced to wear eight orthopaedic corsets to support her damaged spinal column from 1944 onwards

-        In 1951 she was confined to a wheelchair

-        Leg amputated in 1953 due to gangrene

-        Died in 1954 from pulmonary embolism

-        Passionate about support and for radical social and political change, the Communist Party as its agent

-        Mexican Revolution of 1910 was a cultural success

-        3 pregnancies – 2 miscarriages, 1 therapeutic abortion

-         

Audience

-        Works displayed in Museo Frida Kahlo

-        First works sold in 1938

-        Showed 25 works at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York

-        International Exhibition of Surrealism

-        Museum of Modern Art in New York