|
U2 Connections: Jenny Holzer
by Angela Pancella
 Imagine
walking in Times Square, looking up at a prominent electronic
billboard, and seeing "MONEY CREATES TASTE" displayed
in its lights. Or visiting Las Vegas and finding "PROTECT
ME FROM WHAT I WANT" written on an LED sign underneath
a neon Caesars Palace marquee.
Many people did see such things, all because of Jenny Holzer,
a conceptual artist based in New York. Holzer wrote a series
of statements she dubbed "truisms" -- "Abuse
of power should come as no surprise." "Murder has
its sexual side." "Stupid people shouldn't breed."
She displayed her "Truisms" everywhere imaginable.
Some were printed on T-shirts, others tacked up in flyer form
on bulletin boards. Grant money funded their display on billboards
or sides of buildings. They even appeared on baggage carousels
in a Las Vegas airport, on the side of a train in Hamburg, and
on the JumboTron in Candlestick Park. All this exposure in high-traffic
areas may mean her art has been seen by more members of the
general public than the work of any other living artist.
Holzer's work is not restricted to her "Truisms,"
though they are what made her reputation. Other projects have
included "The Living Series," ruminations on daily
life ("Some days you wake and immediately start to worry.
Nothing in particular is wrong, it's just the suspicion that
forces are aligning quietly and there will be trouble.")
placed on bronze or enamel plaques; "The Survival Series,"
similar to "Truisms" with provocative sayings on electric
signs ("What urge will save us now that sex won't?");
and "Laments," messages written both on LED screens
and chiseled into sarcophagi. Most of her artistic output has
three characteristics in common with "Truisms": it
involves words rather than images; it is shown in venues not
normally associated with art; and it appears in the guise of
something else recognizable to the culture. For instance, a
JumboTron screen in Candlestick Park has a clearly defined meaning
-- this is a place for sports scores and promotional slogans.
When the words "YOU MUST HAVE ONE GRAND PASSION" appear
there instead, it is as if the artist has launched a sneak attack
on the larger world using the larger world's own weapons.
Around the time of ZooTV, Bono talked often of "judo"
as a metaphor for what U2 was trying to accomplish by hauling
giant TV screens around the world and appropriating the style
of sleazy rock'n'rollers. In judo you use your enemy's strength
to launch your attack. Like Holzer, U2 used objects with a specific
meaning to the culture -- TVs, telephones -- and invested them
with new meanings, via satellite linkups with Sarajevo or prank
calls to the White House.
But there is a closer connection between Holzer and U2. This
is where things get uncomfortable. Brainstorming ideas for visuals
for the tour, Bono namedrops Jenny Holzer to U2 at the End of
the World author Bill Flanagan: "Bono points out that the
song 'The Fly' is full of new truisms ('A liar won't believe
anyone else') and when they play that song live he wants the
screens to flash all sorts of epigrams, messages, and buzz words,
from Call your mother to Guilt is not of God to Pussy."
And, indeed, this is what U2 does -- to Holzer's consternation.
An Entertainment Weekly article
from 1992 says that when Holzer first saw the video to "The
Fly" she thought they were using her pieces. In the video
phrases similar to the ones Holzer wrote (Holzer truisms: "The
Future is Stupid," "Ambition is Just as Dangerous
As Complacency"; U2 truisms: "The Future Is a Fantasy,"
"Ambition Bites the Nails of Success") are presented
in a way akin to how she exhibited her work -- the phrase "WATCH
MORE TV" runs across an LED signboard like her "CLASS
STRUCTURE IS AS ARTIFICIAL AS PLASTIC" ran across one at
the Palladium in New York. The article points out one of the
directors of the video, Jon Klein, co-produced a piece on Holzer
that aired on MTV in 1990. The other producer of the MTV Holzer
piece, Mark Pellington, worked on the ZooTV tour itself.
Ned O'Hanlon (who, as part of Dreamchaser, produced the "Fly"
video and "ZooTV Live In Sydney," among many other
of U2's filmed exploits) explained in a web chat in 1996, "Words
were always a part of ZooTV...In the video, Jon Klein came up
with some of the slogans, Bono with others, ourselves with others.
The show was Mark Pellington. Pellington took the word idea
and went mad. We all sat in an edit suite and thought up all
the words we could....Jenny Holzer was certainly an influence.
She wasn't the first person to use words as 'Art' and neither
were we."
But by using scrolling LED signs for the slogans in "The
Fly" -- and making some of the messages sound like truisms
-- were Klein, Pellington et al. coming too close to Jenny Holzer's
style? A news release on a recent Holzer exhibition says "she
contributed text and images to pop group U2's Zoo Station world
tour." So confusion was created. It's not a simple case
of copyright violation, but it can lead to bad blood between
U2 and members of the artistic community.
Perhaps the saddest part of this debate is that it may not
have had to take place at all. When U2 were launching ZooTV
they recruited visual artists to help them with the show design,
introducing such names as David Wojnarowicz (the man behind
the buffalo images in "The Fly") and the Emergency
Broadcast Network (who made the Bush-chants-"We Will Rock
You" tape played at the start of US shows) to a mass audience.
When they thought of adopting the "Truisms" style
in "The Fly," did they contact Holzer? With her interest
in art that appears in unexpected places, she may have embraced
the opportunity to have her "Truisms" flash on the
ZooTV screens. Imagine the pairing of her aesthetic with U2's.
Imagine attending a concert and seeing "MONEY CREATES TASTE"
morph into "TASTE IS THE ENEMY OF ART."
Back to U2
Connections
|
