Jenny Holzer talks to Steven Henry Madoff - '80s Then - Interview - Biography

STEVEN HENRY MADOFF: I'm sorry, I'm just stuck in the present here for a moment. I mean, what your "Truisms" series makes me think about now is the swirl of confusion and anxiety around terrorism. Don't you think the "Truisms," with all their weird thoughts and different voices, have an eerie resemblance to what's going on in our heads today?

JENNY HOLZER: Well, the work with multiple voices from the late '705 and early '8os--the "Truisms" and the "Essays," for example--looks hopeful to me. I presented the voices more or less simultaneously, and weighted evenly, to suggest that the thoughts were true to somebody. It seemed like a comprehensive and clean way to present belief systems, since I wasn't choosing. I wanted to avoid polarization. Then a young artist pointed out that contemplation is fine when there's no crisis, but when there is a crisis, you may have to come down on one side or another.

SHM: What made you think of doing the "Truisms" anyway?

JH: I came to New York in the late '7os for the Whitney Independent Study Program. Ron Clark handed us an enormous reading list of serious and sometimes opaque books, everything from Marx to strucruralism. I wanted to sort out what I was to do, or what anyone was to do, with that much dense and sometimes contradictory information. So I rewrote his library. I did it as a self-help maneuver, and posted the result--the "Truisms -- in the streets.

SHM: They put you on the '80s map.

JH: What was important at that time was collaboration. It was a big part of those years for me and for many others who came to New York at roughly the same moment. Courtesy of the artists' group Collaborative Projects--Colab--I became aware that you could put work in front of the general public and that you had to think hard about what subject matter would be appropriate. Colab organized any number of artist-initiated shows in non-art spaces.

Tom Otterness, Kiki Smith, Robin Winters, Becky Howland, Colen Fitzgibbon, Jane Dickson, John and Charlie Ahearn, Mike Glier, and many more artists were part of Colab. Colen and I did "The Manifesto Show" in a storefront on Bleecker Street by the Bowery. I was trying to decide how to write what to whom, not to mention why and where, sol thought a study of manifestos would be helpful. That's what we did in the storefront with maybe a hundred artists and non-artists--anyone with something to say was welcome. There were manifestos in the window; printed tirades on the right-hand side of the room; visual manifestos--things that looked more like art--on the left; a platform for shouting in the middle; and we blasted speeches from a loudspeaker outside.

SHM: Even though you say that all of these different voices offered a plurality, it still feels awfully pointed to me, a political provocation.

JH: I wanted a plurality and I wanted provocation. Even though this is ridiculously imprecise, I'd like to split the '8os in half. I'd say that the first part of the '8os looked to the '6os and '70s, and I believe much of Colab's work and mine had the politics of the '6os in mind. The work was intended to be--and was fairly active as--protest. There was a habit of objecting then.

The late '8os were different. The national and the art economies were booming. People were heedless from sloppiness, happiness, or avoidance. That there was trouble around, from the AIDS epidemic to the country's domestic policy, was obvious, and though I recall many exceptions, I think Americans became less willing to recognize trouble. This showed up in the art--there was less critical work and more large, congratulatory painting.

The reawakening of the galleries in the mid- to late '8os did a lot to energize the art world, but the commercial emphasis killed or dimmed performance, alternative spaces, collectives, the mixing of street, film, video, magazine, club, dance, music, and art lives; and commerce neglected or starved sprawling, site-specific work in rough places. On the other hand, galleries and collectors helped many artists make a living, and the time off from plumbing, waitressing, sheetrocking, or black-market activities gave artists time to concentrate and expand, with mixed results.

SHM: Let's talk about that split down the middle of the decade in terms of your own work.

JH: I'm not sure there was a change in my subject matter. In my writing, I was more explicit as I became aware of a general unwillingness to look at distress. I wouldn't proffer hundreds of possible causes. I would talk about specific, terrible consequences regarding a few subjects, such as AIDS or attacks on women and children.

SHM: And what about the reception of the work? How did people respond?

JH: Maybe it's useful to keep the early-/late-'Sos split going. At the beginning of the decade in this country, there wasn't much of an official art audience for what I made. Then Dan Graham was extraordinarily helpful when he noticed what I was doing. Dan told Kasper Konig about my posters in 1978 or '79. Kasper sent me to Munich for a show at Galerie Rudiger Schottle in 1980, and then I was in the "Heute" (Today) section of Kasper's exhibition "Westkunst" in Cologne the next year. Dan's introduction was important because I've been able to realize public pieces in Europe more often than I have here.