Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger:
Certain Terms, 1982–1986

The works included in this exhibition by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger deploy language as a catalyst. Three distinct generational voices who came into their own in 1970s and early 1980s New York, all three artists engage the assumption of the trustworthiness of text to question relationships and power dynamics—social behaviors, norms, and narratives.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

In 1980, the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) was publicly exhibited for the first time, in the “Times Square Show,” a group exhibition held in a vacant building at 41st Street and Seventh Avenue in New York City. The exhibition—organized by Colab (Collaborative Projects Incorporated), a Lower East Side artist collective, and Fashion Moda, a graffiti-based alternative gallery space in the South Bronx—also included John Ahearn, Mike Glier, David Hammons, Jenny Holzer, Lee Quiñones, Kiki Smith, and Robin Winters.

Basquiat’s inclusion over the next two years in the historic group show “Public Address” at Annina Nosei Gallery and in “Documenta 7” in Kassel, Germany, brought the very young artist’s work into context with more of a vanguard (Bill Beckley, Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, Peter Nadin) and established voices in contemporary art, including Joseph Beuys, Francesco Clemente, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol. Following “Public Address,” Annina Nosei became Basquiat’s primary dealer and, in 1982, published the “Anatomy” portfolio of 18 screenprints, created with master printer Jo Watanabe. As the largest print project of Basquiat’s short life, “Anatomy” was included in the 1996 exhibition “Thinking Print: Books to Billboards,” at the Museum of Modern Art. Those very same prints are currently on view at Krakow Witkin Gallery.

“Anatomy” serves as an expansive atlas of Basquiat’s practice and his source material. Following a childhood car accident, his mother had given him a copy of the highly detailed and canonical medical reference book, Henry Gray’s “Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical” (commonly known as “Gray’s Anatomy”). Basquiat spent hours poring over the book’s illustrations of the human body. Throughout the artist’s working life, imagery from the Anatomy appeared in his art—in the exhibited portfolio, it is the focus.

Originally published in 1858 as a dissection manual, the detailed illustrations of Gray’s Anatomy also made it an essential reference for generations of artists seeking to understand the structures of the human body. Having absorbed it over years of fascinated perusing, Basquiat appropriated the scientific and authoritative language of the work, as much as its information. Marrying his cursory graphic style, informed by comic books and graffiti, with Latinate terms and the rhythm of illustrated plates in a reference book, the artist sets up a striking dissonance between image and text that points to underlying structures and assumptions. A cartoonish bone-shape labeled “FEMUR” asserts a right to name and validates a Dadaist agenda while subtly undermining inherited hierarchies of information.

Throughout the portfolio, Basquiat alternates between sparse declarations (“MALE PELVIS, FRONT VIEW”) and dense lists of text, linked to the drawings with bold angular strokes that impart a professorial exactness to the loose urgency of the artist’s hand. In adding footnotes, rather than rendering details, Basquiat challenges the viewer’s expectation of an authoritative voice and conjures the reckless thrill of a child discovering new information.

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer’s medium, whether a T-shirt, plaque, or LED sign, is writing, and the public dimension is integral to her work. Starting in the 1970s with her New York City street posters and continuing through her light projections on landscape and architecture, her practice has consistently challenged ignorance and violence with humor and kindness.

Holzer’s contribution to the current exhibition is an early example of her use of LED signage. In commandeering a device associated with public address, marketing and official announcements, the artist delivers her subversive texts with a voice of authority that is at once revelatory and unreliable.

For the exhibited 1986 sign, Holzer juxtaposes three of her texts: Truisms (1977–1979); Living (1980–1982); and Survival (1983–1985). The texts unfold over a prolonged cycle, spelled out in red diodes that scroll, flash and dissolve from one statement to the next. The limited display space favors short, declarative phrases that invite passive agreement, but in fact require deeper thought. By including different texts on one LED sign, Holzer further questions conventions of truth, narrative, and point of view.

The “Truisms” series (over two hundred fifty single sentence declarations) was written by Holzer to resemble existing truisms, maxims, and clichés. The series was influenced by the reading list provided by Ron Clark at the Whitney Independent Study Program, where Holzer studied in 1977. Each truism distills difficult and contentious ideas into a seemingly straightforward fact. Privileging no single viewpoint, “Truisms” examine the social construction of beliefs, mores, and truths. When they are displayed in serial format, Holzer organizes the aphoristic statements in alphabetic order. “Truisms” first were shown on anonymous street posters that were wheat pasted throughout downtown Manhattan, and subsequently have appeared on T-shirts, hats, electronic signs, stone floors, and benches.

In the “Living” series, Holzer presents a set of quiet observations, directions, and warnings. The “Living” texts are written in a matter of fact, journalistic style, suitable for descriptions of everyday life. The commentaries touch on how the individual negotiates landscapes, rules, expectations, desires, fears, one’s own and others’ bodies.

“Survival” is a cautionary series where each single sentence instructs, informs, or questions the ways an individual responds to their political, social, physical, psychological, and personal environments. The tone of “Survival” is more urgent than that of “Living.” The “Survival” texts were the first to be written especially for electronic signs; the sentences are short and pointed, making them more noticeable to passersby. “Protect me from what I want” is a key “Survival” text.

Holzer’s writings appear elsewhere on hand-painted signs and cast bronze and aluminum plaques. The material reference to signage that often appears on historical buildings lends authority to the text. Included in this exhibition is a cast aluminum plaque from “Survival” that reads:

DANCE ON DOWN TO THE GOVERNMENT
AND TELL THEM YOU’RE EAGER
TO RULE BEACUSE YOU KNOW
WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU.

With the power of her artistic voice, Jenny Holzer presents her astringent ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public places and exhibitions worldwide, including the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Barbara Kruger

After graduating from Parsons School of Design in 1966, Barbara Kruger worked in graphic design at Mademoiselle magazine and, at the young age of 22 was quickly promoted to head designer. Kruger has described her time in commercial design as “the biggest influence on my work…[it] became, with a few adjustments, my ‘work’ as an artist.”

In the early 1970s, Kruger began exhibiting her own weaving and painting in galleries. In 1976, she quit making art as she felt that her artwork lacked meaning. A year later, she took up her practice again, this time using the tools of her day job—photography and collage. By 1979, Kruger had developed her iconic approach, combining large-scale appropriated images with bold text overlays that engage her social and political concerns. Since that time, Kruger has continuously addressed media and politics in their own authoritative, dramatic, sensational, and immediate vocabulary. The artist uses pronouns such as “I” and “you”, in such a way that the viewer is prompted to interrogate their own positions.

This exhibition features two key works from the 1980s, neither of which has been exhibited in many years. Both are presented in the artist’s signature red frames. The earlier piece, dating from 1983, displays the text, “We are the failure of ritual cleansing” with an image, seemingly of people frolicking in a body of water. This juxtaposition sets up a tension between the literal and figurative. The sequence of action is unclear: a woman in a bathing suit hangs in the air, and a man throws his arms out in a splash as if he has just launched her upward. The spray of water around the figures contrast with placid wavelets in the distance. The black text is enclosed in white bars that cut across the silver gelatin photograph, framing the woman’s body. The stripes echo and clash with the highlights of the water in the image, creating a dissonance—like the text itself—between positive and negative, surface and depth. Gender roles, power, violence and play collide in a moment of exuberance, undercut by the text’s sinister tone.

The later work, from 1986, showcases Kruger’s acumen for impactful pairing of text and image. The tightly cropped photographic image shows a group of fists clad in boxing gloves punching the face of man dressed in work attire. The text, “What have you done for me lately?,” explodes in rays like a comic book bang. The composition with its violence and acerbic language suggests a narrative of the disposable worker, or a person failed by the system. Yet, as in all of Kruger’s work, readings are contextual, biased, and unreliable — the line between statement and question is unclear.

Barbara Kruger’s continued relevance to contemporary ideas about consumption, social roles and personal identity speak to her awareness of the shorthand of visual communication, the primacy of the means over the message. In an increasingly cluttered attention economy, Kruger’s direct and powerful approach retains its power, drawing a tight frame while leaving room for further exploration and challenging the viewer’s awareness of their own assumptions.