Image: Jenny Holzer. I re-photographed this from the ACCA Catalogue, 2009There are certain names and words that in more recent times when spoken or written, instill fear or loathing of the 'other', especially since they are synonymous with suicide bombers and the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. Some of these words - Mohammad, Islam, terrorism and war are included in the exhibition by New York conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, currently showing at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne. As much as these words evoke terror in those who may or who have already become victims of terrorism in its varied forms, Holzer's artwork also documents the terror experienced by those arrested, interrogated and tortured in government military facilities. Guantanamo Bay comes to mind and those prisoners who were sent 'off-shore' where torture was condoned. Indeed, Holzer has installed numerous black and white paintings of the hand prints of prisoners and texts from U.S. government documents that attest to the psychological and physical torture inflicted on prisoners behind closed doors. By bringing these documents out of a secret place and into the open, she asks that we consider the ethics of torture.
In 2008 prior to being elected, President Obama said “I believe that we must reject torture without equivocation because it does not make us safe, it results in unreliable intelligence, it puts our troops at risk, and it contradicts core American values”. However, according to Tim Dobson from the Green Left ' to date the same torture methods are being continued'. (http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/796/41006) Holzer exhibits the documents as she found them. The interrogation sheets are inscribed by black marker pens, which erase any names or information that might implicate a person in the atrocity. In doing so, this text becomes a document that represents present and absent bodies. Things and people silenced.
In another room Holzer has installed a constantly moving projection of poetry by the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. Many of the poems are from View with a Grain of Sand including: 'The End and the Beginning' (excerpt below).
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass. ...
and from ' Tortures'
Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.
Holzer's light projections move the words along the floor, over the heat-sensitive beanbags and upwards towards the ceiling. Their movement draws us into the dark and voluminous space and creates a shifting textual reality. The bean-bags looked to me like the body bags (cadaver pouches) that contain dead soldiers taken to morgues or transported back home. I placed both palms of my hands on one bean-bag and left a pink imprint - a trace, mark, identifier, like the traces of the prisoner's bodies and the personality reflected in the marks on their hands in Holzer's paintings on the wall. I thought of 'heat seeking' missiles and thermal camera's which detect body heat and the constantly rolling words that slowed down, but never stopped, just like war. This persistence of motion and text was reflected in Torso her large column structure with 10 curved LED displays with blue and red diodes that strobed words from US government documents. It too was like a body, but bereft of head and limbs, bereft of anything that might make it human.
Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.
Holzer's light projections move the words along the floor, over the heat-sensitive beanbags and upwards towards the ceiling. Their movement draws us into the dark and voluminous space and creates a shifting textual reality. The bean-bags looked to me like the body bags (cadaver pouches) that contain dead soldiers taken to morgues or transported back home. I placed both palms of my hands on one bean-bag and left a pink imprint - a trace, mark, identifier, like the traces of the prisoner's bodies and the personality reflected in the marks on their hands in Holzer's paintings on the wall. I thought of 'heat seeking' missiles and thermal camera's which detect body heat and the constantly rolling words that slowed down, but never stopped, just like war. This persistence of motion and text was reflected in Torso her large column structure with 10 curved LED displays with blue and red diodes that strobed words from US government documents. It too was like a body, but bereft of head and limbs, bereft of anything that might make it human.
I should say that I'm not sure what actual text Holzer used from Szymborska's poems in her installation - I just gave examples from two poems I found on the internet.
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