Linguistic Interventions as Classroom Practice

JENNY HOLZER – “LINGUISTIC INTERVENTIONS, IDEOLOGICAL AMBIGUITIES”

CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS

Jenny Holzer’s body of work manifests what curriculum theorist Bill Pinar calls “curriculum as complicated conversation.” Her work unveils the hidden, obscured, and layered contradiction that permeates our private and public lives, complicating fixed realities by acknowledging the self in motion among many selves. In this way, complexity & ambiguity of our political state is negotiated through participatory text & image projects that don’t try to alleviate complexity but sustain and provoke it in the public sphere.

Ø MATERIAL

Use language as material; approach the sculptural, spatial, linguistic, emotional, social, visual possibilities embedded in language as a visual experience.

Ø INTIMACY

Consider intimacy of private language within public spaces; reveal secret, censored, classified texts in public spaces; focus on realities rooted in the psychic and subjective.

Ø MULTIPLICITY

Interrogate and expose multiple viewpoints, realities, perspectives, truths, feelings, facts.

Ø VIOLATION

Use text that violates “appropriate” public expectations -- questions, confessions, desires in public spaces, use of language that is ghastly, enraging, graphic, tender, difficult, sobering, humorous, absurd, and poetic.

Ø CONTRADICTION

Call attention to inherent contradiction through audacious language., highlighting unresolvable tensions existing within both the individual and the collective experience; uncertainties, anxieties, ambiguities, blurred realities define our current social moment. Pair soft text with hard spaces, or vice versa.

Ø COLLABORATION

Collaborate across disciplines to interrogate social issues; the notion of collaborative authorship trumps the individual voice. Decide to learn from other disciplines, exchange knowledge and feeling.


Ø RELATIONSHIP

Exalt relationship and public discourse. The self does not exist without other.

Ø POWER

Use text as image to challenge governing conventions, expectations, and hegemonic figures, sources, positions.

Ø PROVOCATION

Directly confront issues that go unaddressed: torture, disease, death, homophobia, racism, deprivation, alienation, abuse of power. Define this art-making by encounter and experience.

Ø INTERDEPENDENCY

Create unfinished work that relies on public to experience it in order to complete it. Create language that the reader must perform the work of critique, discernment, identification.

Ø UNCENSORING THE CENSORED

Give yourself and others permission to speak the ineffable, to magnify the quietest and least notice but still powerful feelings, injustices, desires, dreams.

Ø APPROPRIATION

Reassign meaning to familiar quotes/text by decontextualizing, uprooting, appropriating, and creating new mean through new generative tensions.

Ø RECLAMATION OF SPACE

Strategically use unwanted as well as hyper public spaces to change their function by manipulating its purpose.