A Sampler of Witless Truisms

By ROBERT HUGHES

Jenny Holzer is the first woman artist to fill the U.S. pavilion at the Venice Biennale. For America to represent itself with a woman at the world's oldest festival of new art was a long-overdue gesture. But alas, the best thing to be said about it is that Holzer is a woman. Considered as art, the installation by this 39-year-old conceptual artist seems lavish but mediocre, especially when divorced from the feverish context of the Biennale's opening.

For a few days in late May, the whole international art set converges on Venice, jams Harry's Bar and the Corte Sconta, and migrates from one lavish party to the next. Briefly the choruses of "interesting" drown out the arpeggios of the singing gondoliers. This preserves the idea that the Biennale has some kind of following outside the art world itself -- an illusion. For everyone then departs, leaving the festival in a state of utter torpor with three months to run.

On a sunny Sunday morning in July, near the height of the Venetian tourist season, the public gardens are empty. Where is the audience for the new? The national pavilions, that whimsical collage of defunct official styles, are as deserted as the dream piazza in a De Chirico, populated only by young guardiani doing their nails in the humid silence. It reminds you of the old nursery rhyme:

Miss Smarty

Gave a party:

Nobody came.

Her brother

Gave another --

Just the same.

This gap -- more like a canyon -- between the Art World and the Real World seems particularly sad in Holzer's case, since the one thing she evidently yearns to do is make contact with a wide public by showering it with improving mottos, printed on posters, zapping from light-emitting diode boxes, and even carved in stone: EATING TOO MUCH IS CRIMINAL, for instance, or ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE. In the late '70s, after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, Holzer was smitten by an insight. To subvert the slow and, natch, "elitist" way in which art tends to find an audience, she started writing short slogans and leaving them in public places for people to read. "If you want to reach a general audience," she proclaimed, "it's not art issues that are going to compel them to stop on their way to lunch, it has to be life issues."

Too true, although it is hard to know how far Holzer's work succeeds in this agenda, there being no restaurant behind the U.S. pavilion. But short of building one, American cultural officialdom could not have been more obliging. The funding bodies, which included the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Information Agency and the Rockefeller Foundation, paid to have her thoughts chiseled on benches and, in four languages (not always perfectly translated), on the marble plaques with which the pavilion floor is newly paved. Electronics mavens set them moving across giant LED screens on the walls. Not since Cecil B. DeMille caused lightning to peck the Ten Commandments onto Charlton Heston's tablets had American culture spent so much on lettering. All this to tell the world it should not overeat. Tipicamente americano, one might think.

But not more so than the content of Holzer's thoughts. Starting with Goethe, Pascal and Chamfort, the list of aphorists to whom she is inferior would be exceedingly long, but she does try. Not for nothing does she call her utterances "truisms." Their lack of wit is almost disarming. They have an earnest hortatory confidence that makes other kinds of word art -- Ben Vautier's in France in the '60s, for instance -- look semidetached. Holzer's trouble is that although she wants to use language alone as the stuff of visual art -- a dubious enterprise anyway -- she has no language. She just rambles, and her linguistic poverty strikes people as "radical," as though it were the result of some exacting distillation. But it is thin and complacent, tarted up with costly materials for the audience of consumers whose pretensions it affects to despise. Its bathos (LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL) might have issued from the warm heart of some Midwestern creative- writing course. Her phrasing (IDEALS ARE REPLACED BY CONVENTIONAL GOALS AT A CERTAIN AGE) is like a Hallmark card rewritten in academe. Holzer may sometimes remind you of Seneca (EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID) and sometimes of Bakunin (PRIVATE PROPERTY CREATED CRIME). But down deep she is a homebody.

Thus her Dictionary of Received Ideas seems to have tapped a main vein. Holzer is the modern version -- rewired, subsidized, eagerly collected, but still recognizable -- of those American maidens who, a century ago, passed their hours stitching improving texts on samplers: THOU GOD SEEST ME, ABC, XYZ. The main differences are that instead of using biblical texts, Holzer writes her own, and that instead of using needle and thread, she inscribes them in LEDs and marble. Once Old Nick made work for idle hands; today the art market does.

It may seem odd that Holzer was chosen for the Biennale over artists like Susan Rothenberg or Elizabeth Murray. But one should remember that America is touchy about its lack of literacy; someone must have wanted to stress that American artists can write. Besides, elitism is an extremely dirty word in art circles these days, and whatever else she may be, Holzer is no elitist. Her work is so faultlessly, limpidly pedestrian as to make no demands of any sort on the viewer, beyond the slight eyestrain induced by the LEDs.