How Truth is “Created”
This past Friday, I visited the Broad, a contemporary art museum in Downtown LA. It was my 4th time there within the past year. As you can imagine, I wasn’t expecting anything new this time. In fact, I knew the landscape of the museum to the point where I knew exactly which artist was shown in each room that we walked into, and I began to feel more like a tour guide than a regular museum go-er.
We got to my favorite room, the Mark Tansey room. Tucked away behind one of the walls towards the glass exterior of the building, was a wall plastered with colorful columns of short essays. This was artist Jenny Holzer’s “Twelve Inflammatory Essays”, which I had seen every time I’ve come to the Broad, and it has become one of my favorite artworks on display.
Each column on the wall was in a fluorescent color — blues, greens, pinks, each strikingly contrasting the next. The essays themselves were also striking — in form, they were presented in capitalized, italicized letters; as for content, they each followed a similar recipe of dictator-like, apocalyptic language, language that highlighted human insecurity and failure, and above all, imitated the voice of an authoritative figure, commanding in an extremely definitive, sometimes demeaning way. Upon conducting deeper research, I found that Holzer used quotes from infamous dictators such as Mao and Hitler in her essays, thus explaining the language and speaking to the historical significance of this artwork.
I wasn’t in a rush that day, so I took the time to really read each of these essays, one after the other. The first two or three affirmed my previous reaction to this artwork — that it fired me up, evoking such strong emotions from within. But after reading the rest in succession, the subject matter of the essays became more and more irrelevant. I began to realize there was no logical relationship between each of Holzer’s essays, other than their form and the use of definitive and provocative “truisms”.
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Even more than that, as I moved across each column, fixating on the text and the color it was cast upon, I noticed that my eyes were adjusting to the colors so that the previous lime green column I had read had become an orangey-yellow. As was with the words, I was no longer sure what to believe, or what was true anymore.
I think Holzer constructed her message in this way to convey the ever-evolving nature of “truth” and how it is consumed, especially when delivered in a top-down matter. In a time when fake news runs rampant in our community, Holzer’s essays serve as a passionate, provocative penetration of what we adopt as “truth”.
I think she is advocating for us to stand up against being force-fed, and encouraging political activism and self-awareness. Our human tendency to take the words of those in power can be extremely toxic if we are unaware of it.
Before moving to LA or knowing of the Broad’s existence, I had saved one of Holzer’s essays on Instagram. Middle school me was attracted to anything controversial, provocative, and radical. But now I realize my reaction was exactly what the artist seems to be mocking — blindly taking the truth for what we are told it should be. I realized I had been fired up by the language, simply engulfed by emotion without even knowing where it was coming from, what it was, and where to direct it.
The epiphany of having seen something countless times yet still being surprised by the revelations that I experienced past Friday was so cool. This experience not only revived my love for contemporary art forms but made me realize that the world of art and politics are not that far apart — both require us to look beyond the surface and refuse to take things as they are.
I recommend all of you to go take a look at Holzer’s work at the Broad.
