wired interveiw with jenny holzer
by Burr Snider
Jenny Holzer Wired interviews the artist and self-described "multidisciplinary dweeb." By Burr Snider In 1979, Jenny Holzer began posting random aphorisms and broadsides bearing cryptic messages all over New York City. Since then she has employed language for a new kind of art, creating a large body of work whose apotheosis was a flexible moving signboard touting brain-tugging truisms that spiralled up the tiers of the Guggenheim Museum. Holzer's current project is a virtual reality installation for the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, sponsored by Intel and programmed by Sausalito-based Sense8. WIRED: Your evolution has been from static words on paper to kinetic words rendered electronically to virtual reality. Why VR? What brought you to this medium? Jenny Holzer: I'm always trying to bring unusual content to a different audience - a non-art-world audience. I think this Guggenheim show is an aberration, though. I think Sense8 and Intel were maybe interested in seeing if this technology could live in the art world, and I'm running in the opposite direction. I'm trying to get out of the art world and go someplace else. WIRED: Like arcades? Holzer: Hey, I hope so. WIRED: How would you see an art exhibit evolving into something that somebody would put a quarter into to experience? Holzer: Maybe the arcade isn't really likely, but what is plausible is getting this stuff running on Windows. It's more likely that somebody might take these things home with them. WIRED: How did this piece come about? I looked at your "World II" with the head-mount on. It depicts the aftermath of a war, with villagers describing their experiences, often cryptically. You have said that the Bosnian atrocities made these things click in your mind. Holzer: It was clear that the strategies used in Bosnia are all-too-common techniques of war, so I thought about how to translate this sort of content into a VR world, and it seemed that it would be much more immediate if the material was spoken by men and women rather than printed out. WIRED: Even though the viewer is moving through space in this work, it's relatively static. The spoken words are more or less just waiting there in the buildings for you. If VR were evolved to the point where you could do anything you wanted, would you do it differently? Would there be a lot of people, for instance? Holzer: I think not. So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.
WIRED: Your artistic progression has been more or less from the ephemeral to the permanent, and now you're moving back toward the ephemeral with VR. Is this a zig-zag or a major step? Holzer: I'm always more at ease when something doesn't actually exist. [Laughs] That's my preference. I like things that are just electrical impulse and no more. Not necessarily neutral, but fleeting. WIRED: Was virtual reality intimidating for you, or was it something you were anxious to jump into? Holzer: Both. The old "both" answer. I'm always embarrassed to display my ignorance, even though I do it time and time again, and there's always that awkward period when I first meet someone and I have to whip out my ignorance and they have to look at it and we have to go on from there. So I was nervous about that, but I work in so many different ways that I'm used to it. For instance, for a project I'm doing in Germany, I'm working on a garden, and I didn't know diddly about plants, but now I know enough to get by. In VR, I now know enough to grunt and point. WIRED: You've worked with electronic processes before in your first Guggenheim show. Do you worry that the technology will become the master in place of the artist? Holzer: Not really. I think the problem is more whether you can start from zero and make sure everything you put in is right. I've never been particularly paranoid about a medium being overwhelming. I think the real problem is whether you're talking about the most important thing and whether you're doing it in a way that's accessible to almost everyone. And whether you can do it in a way that's not merely didactic - that what you're conveying is felt as well as understood. Same problem in any medium. WIRED: You're relying on the techies to help you program your work. Are the technicians going to take over and be the artists of the future? Holzer: Well, some already are. Not to sound like a multidisciplinary dweeb, but there really is an artificial line between someone who is a real artist and someone who's writing the software for the stuff. You know, some of us came in later, and I would fall into that category. WIRED: Your artistic forebears so to speak - the Duchamps and the Warhols - would they have had fun with this? Holzer: I think Warhol would've moved in and never come back out. I don't think he would've even been seen at parties if this (VR) had been part of his universe. WIRED: One of your goals has been to narrow the gap between life and art. Will VR help you to do that?
Holzer: Well, I think in trying to make life seem real enough that one is moved to do something about the more atrocious things. By going really far afield into a completely fake world, maybe there's a chance to make things resonant somehow - or in this case, truly terrifying. To make it as bad as the real stuff that's happening. WIRED: Now that you're jumping into this cutting-edge technology, do you think these machines are going to make our lives better in the end, or do they pose the danger of totalitarianism? Holzer: Of course there's a danger, because - after all - it's people who're making and using the machines, and people are the truly dreadful and frightening things as far as I'm concerned.
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