Jenny Holzer

September 29–October 9, 2005
NYU Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South; Rockefeller Center; New York Public Library, intersection of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
Photo: Attilio Maranzano © 2005 Jenny Holzer, courtesy Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.Text: “Safe House II” by Dana Goodyear.

In For the City Jenny Holzer’s light projections of poetry and declassified documents once again illuminated landmark New York City buildings. At the Rockefeller Center and The New York Public Library poems by Wisława Szymborska, Yehuda Amichai, Henri Cole, Mahmoud Darwish, and other celebrated writers moved across the nighttime facades, encompassing the reader with language’s power to educate and console. At New York University’s Bobst Library, Holzer projected recently declassified government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. Holzer’s presentation of these documents suggests the American society’s struggle to achieve an equitable balance between transparency and secrecy, public and private.

For nearly a decade, light projections have been a critical component of Jenny Holzer’s artistic practice. The moving projections, akin to credits scrolling at the end of a film, allow Holzer to work demonstratively with the ephemeral. The projections always involve the cityscape and surrounding architecture; spaces, people, and time are included in an affirming gesture. Linking Holzer’s early street-based practice to her long-standing engagement with mass media tactics and content common to the world of advertising and news, the projections enable her to access the public realm and the average passerby from an artistic perspective.

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Song Dong

September 26–November 30, 2005
Times Square
Image: Song Dong

In Broken Mirror, Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong destroys one reflective scene to reveal another, shattering the viewer’s conception of reality and juxtaposing China’s modern cityscape with its traditional landscape. Through a rapid succession of images, Song Dong exposes a rapidly modernizing China and explicates notions of transience and illusion in contemporary society. Watching Broken Mirror, the viewer is at first duped into thinking he is seeing nothing more than a foreign street scene and, like the passersby in the film, he too expects only to give the piece a momentary thought. Suddenly, a hammer wielded by the artist appears to smash through the busy street, in fact a mirror which was only reflecting the street scene. At the mirror’s destruction, the viewer is left with an image of a rural countryside. The opposing images are visually pitted against one another, demonstrating the proximity of the antiquated and the modern in our rapidly evolving cities and the vulnerability that lies beneath the facade. Song Dong’s act of destruction exposes the struggle of Beijing culture to maintain its traditions despite inevitable urbanization.

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As Four, Victoria Bartlett, Mark Borthwick, Susan Cianciolo, Lisa Jimenez, Brad Kahlhaner, Ryan McGinness, Steve Powers, Surface to Air, Kehinde Wiley, and dozens of others

September 10, 2005
Grand Street between Crosby and Wooster streets
Image Courtesy Deitch Projects

A riotous, flamboyant event, Creative Time’s Art Parade offered artists, performers, and designers the opportunity to create floats, placards, portable sculptures, kites, performances, and street spectacles for demonstration to the public on September 10, 2005.

The Art Parade was coproduced with Deitch Projects and Paper magazine.