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Jenny Holzer
Xenon for D.C.
Internationally acclaimed artist Jenny Holzer came to Washington, DC to
launch her first public art project in the District. The project consisted of one of
her first xenon projections in the U.S. Jenny Holzer's stirring xenon projections
have captivated audiences around the globe from Buenos Aires to Paris to Berlin.
Read the Washington Post review
The Xenon for D.C. projections were held in two Washington, DC locations and
ran for three nights before the elections.
On Saturday, October 30 and Sunday, October 31, from dusk until midnight,
the words of poets Wislawa Szymborska, Yehuda Amichai, Henri Cole, and others
swept the surface of 1515 14th Street, enveloping it with beauty and power.
Revealing these powerful poems to the public in a clean and temporary distillation
of light, HolzerÕs work continues to affirm the wisdom of the unobtrusive. Location
and projection fused to imbue the environment with the compelling language, and the
language with intoxicating physicality.
On Monday, November 1, 2004, at the Gelman Library on the campus of George
Washington University, Holzer projected poems, as well as declassified
documents made available through the Freedom of Information Act and the work of
the National Security Archive.
For information on Jenny Holzer's Xenon Projections and Airplane Banners in New
York City also during the pre-election 2004 week, please go to
www.creativetime.org/programs.
View project images
Holzer has made poetry and formerly classified government documents the basis of these projections. The words of Wislawa Szymborska, Yehuda Amichai, Henri Cole, and others, will sweep the surface of 1515 14th Street on Saturday, October 30, 2004. Revealing these powerful poems to the public in a clean and temporary distillation of light, Holzer’s work continues to affirm the wisdom of the unobtrusive. On Monday, November 1, 2004, at the Gelman Library on the campus of George Washington University, Holzer will project poems, as well as declassified documents made available through the Freedom of Information Act and the work of the National Security Archive. More projection dates at these two locations still are to be determined. The projections begin one hour past dusk and continue into the early morning.
Since 1996, Jenny Holzer has used xenon projectors to cast text onto
buildings, mountains, rivers and assorted public sites in Europe, Mexico
and South America. During the xenon event, a powerful lamp creates a procession
of text; the writing is in constant motion, like credits rolling at the end of a
film. The flow of light and text over the shapes of buildings, land and water
transforms the night. Spaces appear to be enveloped, but what reemphasizes the
lines of architecture, or dictates a path in the reflection of a river, is the
scrolling language.
"Seen and absorbed rather than read," much like advertising and
public announcements, xenon text has ambled the Spanish Steps in Rome,
slid along the Olympic ski jump in Lillehammer and lit the Louvre's courtyard
and facade in Paris. In Rio de Janeiro, Holzer threw text onto the beach and bay.
Words rose on the backs of waves only to fall into foam; location and projection
fused.
For more than twenty-five years, Jenny Holzer has presented her astringent ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, the Reichstag, and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao. Her medium, whether formulated as a t-shirt, as a plaque, or as an LED sign, always is writing, and the public dimension is integral to the delivery of her work. Starting in the late 1970s with the posters that Holzer pasted on buildings in New York City, and up to her recent xenon projections on landscape and architecture, her practice has rivaled ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, and moral courage. Holzer lives in Hoosick, New York.
Wislawa Szymborska was born in Kornik in Western Poland in 1923. Since 1931,
she has been living in Krakow, where during 1945-1948 she studied Polish Literature
and Sociology at the Jagiellonian University. Szymborska has published 16 collections
of poetry and also has translated French poetry. Her poems have been translated
(and published in book form) in English, German, Swedish, Italian, Danish, Hebrew,
Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Bulgarian and other languages.
They have also been published in many foreign anthologies of Polish poetry.
Wislawa Szymborska is the Goethe Prize winner (1991) and Herder Prize winner
(1995). She has a degree of Honorary Doctor of Letters of Poznan University (1995).
In 1996 she received the Polish PEN Club prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Yehuda Amichai was born in Wurzburg, Germany, in 1924 and emigrated with his
family to Palestine in 1936. He later became a naturalized Israeli citizen. Although
German was his native language, Amichai read Hebrew fluently by the time he moved
to Palestine. He served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in World War
II and fought with the Israeli defense forces in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Following
the war, he attended Hebrew University to study Biblical texts and Hebrew literature,
and then taught in secondary schools. Amichai has published eleven volumes of
poetry in Hebrew, two novels, and a book of short stories. His work has been
translated into thirty-seven languages. Proclaimed the “the greatest Israeli
poet of the modern era,” Amichai received the Israel Prize for Poetry in
1982, and he became a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters in 1986. He lived in Jerusalem until his death on September 25, 2000.
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He was reared in Virginia and
graduated from the College of William and Mary. He holds graduate degrees from
the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and Columbia University and is the recipient
of fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment
for the Arts. He has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, the
Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the
Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin. In 2001 he lived in Kyoto as
the recipient of a Creative Artist Fellowship from the Japan-US Friendship Commission.
Hailed by Harold Bloom as "a central poet of his generation," Cole’s
poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker,
The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He has published five
collections of poetry: The Marble Queen (Atheneum, 1986); The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge
(Knopf, 1989); The Look of Things (Knopf, 1995); The Visible Man (Knopf, 1998);
and, most recently, Middle Earth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), which received
the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a Finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize
in Poetry.
The 1515 14th Street Arts Building is dedicated to contemporary art and culture.
The new gallery building is being developed by Furioso Development Corporation
and is located in the Logan Circle area of Washington, D.C. Xenon for D.C. at
1515 14th Street is realized in cooperation with: Curator's Office, G Fine Art,
and Hemphill Fine Arts.
The National Security Archive was founded in 1985 by a group of journalists and
scholars who had obtained documentation from the U.S. government under the Freedom
of Information Act and sought a centralized repository for these materials. Over
the past decade, the Archive has become the world's largest non-governmental
library of declassified documents. Located on the seventh floor of the George
Washington University's Gelman Library in Washington, D.C., the Archive is designed
to apply the latest in computerized indexing technology to the massive amount
of material already released by the U.S. government on international affairs,
make them accessible to researchers and the public, and go beyond that base to
build comprehensive collections of documents on specific topics of greatest interest
to scholars and the public.
Coordinated and Facilitated by:
Andrea Pollan, Director of Curator's Office and Independent Curator
Nora Halpern, Independent Curator
Special Thanks to Our Sponsors:
Furioso Development Corporation
Metropolis Development Company
G Fine Art