Illuminated poetry delivers insights at ICA
Conceptual artist Jenny Holzer gave the main facade of the Institute of Contemporary Art a lively new look by projecting works of poetry onto it. (Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe)There are various ways you can enliven the exteriors of large buildings. You can plaster them with billboards, graffiti, murals, or even ivy.
Another solution — pioneered over the last decade or two by the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer — is to plaster them with projections of poetry. And not just any old poetry. How about Nobel Prize-winning Polish poetry?
Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, lately obscured from one angle by a giant circus tent, is hoping to stir and seduce people over the next three nights by projecting poetry onto the building’s northwest-facing facade. The work is by the Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, conceived and arranged by Holzer.
Holzer is one of the most acclaimed artists of her generation — “a huge figure,’’ in the words of ICA senior curator Helen Molesworth, “one of the most important voices of the 1980s.’’
Her signature pieces — scraps of text or poems displayed on moving LED screens, billboards, T-shirts, and elsewhere — are routinely discussed in art schools as well as in the more cerebral enclaves of the academy.
“She helped consolidate the idea that visual art could be composed completely of language,’’ says Molesworth. Indeed, she is one of those few living artists with a secure place in the contemporary canon.
A tone of modesty and cheery humility permeate a conversation with Holzer, and, in some ways, what Holzer does really is rather modest. She is an artist who traffics in words and, by and large, they are other people’s words.
But she finds diverting and often bewitching ways to display them. The meaning of the words remains of central importance; “she never uses language in fragments, always in whole sentences,’’ says Molesworth.
Holzer will be projecting poems by Szymborska — “my go-to girl,’’ as Holzer drolly describes her — onto the outside of the ICA between 8:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. The occasion is a collaboration between Holzer and the choreographer, dancer, poet, and performer Miguel Gutierrez, slated for Wednesday night. The details will not be fully worked out until the 11th hour, when the two get together in Boston.
Holzer claims to be “a dope about dance.’’ But she has worked with a dancer once before, in a 1984 collaboration with Bill T. Jones. On that occasion, projections of some of Holzer’s “Truisms’’ — urgent, random, and sometimes contradictory declarations such as “Everyone’s work is equally important’’ and “Exceptional people deserve special concessions’’ — were combined with Jones’s choreography.
Speaking over the phone from New York recently, Holzer acknowledged that many things about the ICA project remained “a little vaporous.’’ “Knock wood,’’ she said — “which I do hundreds of times a day. Superstition is helpful, I believe.’’Continued...
