Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Jenny Holzer’s Unexpected New Canvas: The Boulders of Ibiza

One wouldn’t normally imagine Jenny Holzer hanging around Ibiza — but the prolific, text-based artist made multiple trips there in the late ’90s, during and after installing a show in the Guggenheim Bilbao. “I fixed on the island although — or because — I was post-disco by the time I arrived,” she tells T in an email. “I studied stone cliffs, watchtowers and surf pebbles. I saw smiley nude and half-naked old people, babies and hotties. There was much to love.” She returned the following year after showing light projections on the Spanish Steps in Rome. Referring to herself, she says: “That time, this nerd looked at sea-cut rocks with holes, and caves.”

Last year, the art collector Guy Laliberté asked her to fill up his Lune Rouge and Art Projects Ibiza spaces, in collaboration with Sprüth Magers, and to create a site-specific commission. “I was game,” Holzer says. “Musicians, writers and artists have touched down or wintered here because they found the island hospitable, or that corny word, ‘magical.’ Living was cheap, easy. And musicians, writers, artists come from Ibiza. The island’s pirate past, and the Carthaginian, Roman, Vandal, Moorish and Norwegian conquerors, to name a few, are fodder.” She also mentions the local contemporary art museum (“with Phoenician objects!”) and, of course, Laliberté’s contributions, as draws to the island.

For “ARE YOU ALIVE?,” opening today, Holzer brought along some old friends — her signature “Truisms” and her LED scrolls (albeit with fresh phrases) — and fabricated a series of aphorism-etched footstools and benches. However, the highlights have to be the carefully chosen cliffs, boulders and bedrocks that became canvases for engraving. Situated about 15 miles from Laliberté’s outposts, some of the rocks are in the sightline of the small, uninhabited isle Es Vedrà, reportedly the third-most magnetic place on Earth after the North Pole and the Bermuda Triangle, and shrouded in legend. It’s “said to be the home of the Sirens, a protrusion from Atlantis, the material of pyramids and certainly the location of multiple U.F.O. sightings,” Holzer shares. As such, “much writing on the outdoor piece is by those who perfected absurdity, namely Apollinaire and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.” She also selected lines of poetry in French, Spanish, Portuguese and English.

Her debut exhibition in Ibiza came with “the same biggest challenge as always, not to be a crummy artist,” says Holzer, herself not one to mince words. “I let myself be sensitive when picking boulders and their text, and I might survive that. I could try ‘sensitive’ again.”

“ARE YOU ALIVE?” is on view through Dec. 17, 2016 at Lune Rouge and Art Projects Ibiza, Calle Alcalde Bartomeu Rosselló Sala, 7 and 9B, lunerougeibiza.org and artprojectsibiza.com.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT