Truth Social?

By Krista Madsen–

Last week I concocted a word salad of swears with Monty Python + Shakespeare + whatever-the-f* emerged from the Insult Generator.

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This week, I’ll let artist Jenny Holzer have at the word generation game—the results much more polite if perhaps more provocative. Earlier this summer, I took a day off to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Guggenheim Museum, where I hadn’t been in many years, and a retrospective of Holzer’s career was the decor inside and out, where it will stay through Sept. 29 if you’re near.

Holzer’s lifelong medium is language, which she began widely distributing via old-school paper in the late 1970s in NYC. Now, as it did once before in the late 1980s, her world of words digitally winds up the unraveling pencil shaving rings of the atrium levels of the museum, fills every alcove in various mediums from posters to marble, and wraps the whole building outside by night. In one exhibit, my favorite part, she makes these sweet little word diagrams to mentally unpack, which I’ll intersperse throughout. In another, her words are mightily etched as if on tombstones.

Imagine a writing career where you publish your words (or those curated and reappropriated from others) on flyers all over Manhattan, and then in neon at Times Square, etched in marble, stamped in metal, and finally fully blanketing the grand Gugg. In this era of noisy disembodied “content” we live in, it’s interesting to experience all the many other formats available for expression beyond this echoing internet of things—actual things in various levels of tangibility. The “Light Line” exhibition, says the museum’s website, “presents a reimagination of Jenny Holzer’s landmark 1989 installation at the Guggenheim. Climbing all six ramps of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda to the building’s apex, the site-specific installation transforms the building with a display of scrolling texts, featuring selections from her iconic series, such as ‘Truisms’ and ‘Inflammatory Essays’.”

The sentences and phrases fly by, sometimes grasped, sometimes just a passing blur, sometimes muted by the conversation I was also trying to have simultaneously with a dear friend visiting from her expat home in Ireland. I’m not one of those people who can listen to music with lyrics while trying to write, nor, it turns out, can I read digital sentences with one side of my brain while trying with the other to catch up with my college friend on the momentous year we both turned 50. Outside, selected poems from other writers were projected on the entire structure come twilight but we couldn’t stick around that long with 20 blocks to walk to the train before our pumpkin hour.

We did take a moment to debate the worth of standing over a pile of Donald’s Trump’s vapid and vicious tweets imprinted upon piles of rusty metal sheets in the alcoves. Now run off Twitter (X), he has the Truth Social platform all for himself where both “truth” and “social” can be up for grabs, like anything else, and he can go as low as he wants.

In Tweet-like fashion, on rotation in the rotunda, Holzer’s Truisms (of 1978-1983) are also limited in character count, if richer in meaning and challenging the idea of truth itself. They are listed in full alpha order by the University of Texas, with some, in no particular order, I’ve selected to share here:

PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT

YOUR OLDEST FEARS ARE THE WORST ONES

YOU ARE A VICTIM OF THE RULES YOU LIVE BY

WORDS TEND TO BE INADEQUATE

UNIQUE THINGS MUST BE THE MOST VALUABLE

THE SUM OF YOUR ACTIONS DETERMINES WHAT YOU ARE

TECHNOLOGY WILL MAKE OR BREAK US

SOLITUDE IS ENRICHING

REVOLUTION BEGINS WITH CHANGES IN THE INDIVIDUAL

RELIGION CAUSES AS MANY PROBLEMS AS IT SOLVES

POTENTIAL COUNTS FOR NOTHING UNTIL IT'S REALIZED

PEOPLE ARE NUTS IF THEY THINK THEY ARE IMPORTANT

PEOPLE ARE BORING UNLESS THEY ARE EXTREMISTS

MYTH CAN MAKE REALITY MORE INTELLIGIBLE

IT'S BETTER TO BE A GOOD PERSON THAN A FAMOUS PERSON

FEAR IS THE GREATEST INCAPACITATOR

ENSURE THAT YOUR LIFE STAYS IN FLUX

DRAMA OFTEN OBSCURES THE REAL ISSUES

CLASS STRUCTURE IS AS ARTIFICIAL AS PLASTIC

BEING SURE OF YOURSELF MEANS YOU'RE A FOOL

BEING ALONE WITH YOURSELF IS INCREASINGLY UNPOPULAR

AUTOMATION IS DEADLY

AMBITION IS JUST AS DANGEROUS AS COMPLACENCY

AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE

A NAME MEANS A LOT JUST BY ITSELF

ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE

ABSTRACTION IS A TYPE OF DECADENCE 

ALIENATION PRODUCES ECCENTRICS OR REVOLUTIONARIES

Some resonate with me, others don’t, and that was the part of the point, as her Truisms, when read in full, don’t purport to assert any obvious line of thinking, but rather often only contradict and communicate with each other. Many Truisms from everyone in the mix, conflicting messages everywhere all at once. I love that “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT” once lived large in lights at the apex of advertising and consumerism in the dizzying triangle of Times Square.

The Museum of Modern Art’s website offers more history on the Truisms (also part of its collections):

Holzer began creating these works in 1977, when she was a student in an independent study program. She hand-typed numerous “one liners,” or Truisms, which she has likened, partly in jest, to a “Jenny Holzer’s Reader’s Digest version of Western and Eastern thought.” She typeset the sentences in alphabetical order and printed them inexpensively, using commercial printing processes. She then distributed the sheets at random and pasted them up as posters around the city. Her Truisms eventually adorned a variety of formats, including T-shirts and baseball caps.

In a similar grassroots distribution vein and style, the longer “Inflammatory Essays” (1979-1982) fill a side room with variously colored alternating sheets in all caps. As described by UCLA’s Hammer Museum:

Jenny Holzer uses language to interrogate the effects of rhetoric, engaging viewers in fundamental questions such as “Who is speaking?” “Where does this text come from?” and “What does it mean?” Yet her texts—whether directives, confessions, or observations—elide authorial intentionality and unlock a sort of societal subconscious, from which bits of ideology, desire, fear, humor, and hatred pour forth. Holzer has authored dozens of textual series that—while distinct in personality, tone, and subject—often resurface in various material forms over time. Originally presented anonymously on the streets of New York City, the mass-produced short texts that make up Inflammatory Essays cover a variety of subjects that have been ongoing concerns throughout Holzer’s career, including power, social control, abuse, consumption, and sex. Declarative and forceful in tone, they embody her distinctively crafted voice, one that is omniscient, detached, and yet enraged, shifting between multiple identities.

Rather than one liners, these amount to full single pages, still capped, and sharper-edged, such as (in text from the Tate):

DISASTER DRAWS PEOPLE LIKE FLIES. SPECTATORS GET CHILLS BY IDENTIFYING WITH THE VICTIMS, FEELING IMMUNE ALL THE WHILE! THIS IS A PARTICULARLY UNATTRACTIVE FORM OF VOYEURISM. THE DETACHED AND ALIENATED DWELL ON DISASTER; THEY RECEIVE THEIR QUOTA OF STIMULATION THIS WAY. THEY AREN'T SYMPATHETIC, JUST BORED. THEY ANALYZE THE LATEST MASS MURDER, THEY'RE MAUDLIN OVER STARVING BABIES, THEY FIND IMAGES OF TERROR AND REVOLUTION COMPELLING. THEY ADORE PATHOS. THEY CONGRATULATE THEMSELVES ON THEIR AWARENESS AND THEIR STRONG STOMACHS. A LITTLE REALITY THERAPY WOULD PUT THESE DILETTANTES TO FLIGHT. ALL THE "PITIFUL" AND "ENGAGING" PHENOMENA ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO COME HOME.

Or,

FEAR IS THE MOST ELEGANT WEAPON, YOUR HANDS ARE NEVER MESSY. THREATENING BODILY HARM IS CRUDE. WORK INSTEAD ON MINDS AND BELIEFS, PLAY INSECURITIES LIKE A PIANO. BE CREATIVE IN APPROACH. FORCE ANXIETY TO EXCRUCIATING LEVELS OR GENTLY UNDERMINE THE PUBLIC CONFIDENCE. PANIC DRIVES HUMAN HERDS OVER CLIFFS; AN ALTERNATIVE IS TERROR-INDUCED IMMOBILIZATION. FEAR FEEDS ON FEAR. PUT THIS EFFICIENT PROCESS IN MOTION. MANIPULATION IS NOT LIMITED TO PEOPLE. ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS CAN BE SHAKEN. IT WILL BE DEMONSTRATED THAT NOTHING IS SAFE, SACRED OR SANE. THERE IS NO RESPITE FROM HORROR. ABSOLUTES ARE QUICKSILVER. RESULTS ARE SPECTACULAR.

The thing that strikes me is I read more and more (alone, at home) of what I couldn’t fully absorb in person in public, is that Holzer’s “truths” are social, toying with what we are as a collective, politically, in society. Individual words bump into each other to form one-liners or terse paragraphs, both asserting and questioning. Who is this voice of authority who knows? Not she, who is only channeling, changing. The aggregating messenger.

From her bio on the Guggenheim site:

For more than forty years, Jenny Holzer has presented her astringent ideas, arguments, joys, and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including Times Square, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Her medium—whether a T-shirt, plaque, electronic sign, or stone bench—is writing, and the public dimension is integral to her work. Starting in the 1970s with her New York City street posters and continuing through her recent light projections on landscapes and architecture, her practice has rivaled ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, and courage.

Why is this show timely now? The update with Trump’s bullying tweets on the floor speaks volumes. Vis a vis that last line that does it for me: rivaling ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, courage. Words that might heal rather than separate. Ideas that bind rather than tear. And at the least: something interesting to talk about later with an old dear friend when we put the devices down and start communicating.