Confronting the Spectacle: Jenny Holzer's Critique of Consumer Society

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국일러스아트학회
· 수록지 정보 : 조형미디어학 / 14권 / 3호 / 13 ~ 20페이지
· 저자명 : 김희영

초록

Jenny Holzer's electronic sign boards are montages that combines digitalized fragments of words and time. Her computerized montage is inserted into the flow of advertising that has colonized urban daily life. By appropriating the 'spectacle' of the advertising, Holzer attempts to disrupt its powerful mechanism of circulation within urban cityscape. Her work disrupts passive viewing by penetrating the flow of advertising with the digitalized fragments of her words that move rapidly in time. The montages of words that have an irrational relation to one another are intended to force the viewer to call into question his or her passive consumption of the messages and the media-induced desires.
Holzer intends to recover the subjectivity of the consciousness of the audience, which she believes has been manipulated by the mass media. Her interest in art, which emphasizes impersonality, dematerialization, and public sites, relates to that of Situationists who had intended to change society by revitalizing the masses as an active participant in their reception of the spectacle by confronting it. Whereas the Situationists eventually abandoned art because they considered art unable to avoid being co-opted by mass media, Holzer replaces their distrust of art with her optimistic approach to art. She is not afraid of the fact that art is in constant danger of being assimilated into the 'spectacle.' In order to confront the system, she borrows the same institutional mechanism that advertising employs to induce the masses to desire to purchase.
Although Holzer's electronic signs look conceptual and impersonal, they contain emotional and intimate messages. They create constant tension between the permanent and the ephemeral, object and void, presence and absence, the public and the private, the temporal and the visual. By facing the risk for becoming part of the spectacle, Holzer's signs can be seen as counter-spectacle that talks back to the advertising world of late consumer society.

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