Sign of the times

Jenny Holzer Australian Centre For Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Until February 28.

Jenny Holzer Australian Centre For Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Until February 28.

JENNY Holzer is an American who has been a stalwart of the contemporary art establishment for more than three decades, and she's done it all with little more than a clever use of slogans. If you Google her, you come with endless examples, but one of the most telling images is of a girl wearing a T-shirt declaring that "Abuse of power comes as no surprise".

This says almost everything you need to know about Holzer. She started by putting up posters and LED signs with short sayings that appeared part-plausible, part-ironic. Sometimes they were the received opinions of our time, such as "A sincere effort is all you can ask"; sometimes they were ideological, such as "Inheritance must be abolished"; and sometimes they were ideas you presume she disapproves of but suspects others may harbour: "Morals are for little people". She called this series Truisms. The idea, apparently, is to make us think: not infrequently, the principles that govern our behaviour are rather different from those we think we live by or even openly espouse. To state these unacknowledged principles as though they were values that we affirmed openly may provoke a certain shock, and perhaps reflection: Is this true? Do I secretly believe that?

Putting these slogans up in public places among the barrage of advertising was meant to subvert the systems of commercial power - in the touching way that artists of the 1970s used to think possible - but like so many things in contemporary art, it ends up being grist to the voracious mill of the media and advertising industries. After I had been to the Holzer show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, I saw a BMW billboard that made the point with deadly and coincidental effectiveness: "Joy is efficient and dynamic."

Although nonsense, it was as thought-provoking as most of Holzer's repertoire. The trouble with herproject is that it is ultimately condescending to its audience.

Whether you tell people that "Just believing in something can make it happen", with the subtext, "Poor suckers, you believe this", or, on the contrary, "Low expectations are a good protection", with the corresponding subtext, "That's how you actually live your miserable lives, in spite of your kitsch beliefs", you are positioning yourself on a plane of privileged insight and of moral superiority.

Such a posture is never very attractive. Look at the T-shirt I mentioned earlier: "Abuse of power comes as no surprise". While Lord Acton's famous dictum that "All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" is strong, clear and impersonal, Holzer's watered-down version is subjective, scolding and smug. Putting it on a T-shirt allows the wearer to share the self-satisfaction.

Holzer represented the US at the Venice Biennale of 1990. The show was brilliantly demolished by Robert Hughes in a review for Time ("A sampler of witless truism", July 30, 1990), which among other things suggested how deeply her work is rooted in the most banal aspects of American culture.

Demolition, however, proved no impediment to her career. Instead she has marched on to a series of awards, honorary degrees and exhibition after exhibition funded by a succession of foundations or large international art museums; books and catalogues have been published, establishing the significance of her work as an unassailable fact.

Why are official artists such as Holzer impervious to criticism? It's partly because the contemporary art establishment doesn't believe in criticism. Although it endlessly rehearses a vacuous rhetoric of opposition and subversion, directed at straw men of its own making, in reality it has forgotten how to say no.

Curators of contemporary art have never seen a piece of accredited contemporary art they didn't like. It doesn't matter if today it's an installation and tomorrow a hyper-realist painting; as long as they all agree that it's part of the new canon, it can be considered exempt from critical analysis.

Copious quantities of text are still required for the packaging of the product into expensive books and catalogues, but that is marketing, not criticism. The work is entrusted to a special class of intellectual eunuchs of either sex who have been trained in an ideological discourse taught in art schools and universities under the name of art theory.

Meanwhile the reality is that contemporary art has become an amalgam of big business and religious practice. When a city wants to build an impressive monument to advertise its culture to the world, it is not a temple or cathedral, or even an opera house, but a museum of contemporary art that is commissioned at vast expense.

Because contemporary art has been endowed with an occult spiritual and moral prestige, and because the new buildings are so impressive, corporations and the rich rush to join governments in offering support, in the hope that some of that prestige will rub off on them.

At the same time, all these museums and galleries come to mimic the paradigm of contemporary media: vast networks that need to be supplied with content.

Ostensibly, they exist to display art of outstanding merit; in reality they are institutions that must be filled, and art is manufactured to fill them. Like the media, the galleries are desperate for content. That is why, once artists achieve the status of accredited content providers, they will be recycled forever.

As for the exhibition at ACCA, it combines text in Holzer's familiar capitals with screenprinted documents related to the war in Iraq. For more than a decade, Holzer has employed a variation on her original signs. She projects moving texts, poems by other authors rather than her own compositions.

Thanks to her reputation in the contemporary art industry, she has been able to set up such projections outdoors in many places. Here the projection is indoors. You enter a longish rectangular room with a false ceiling sloping downwards to cut the corner at the far end.

The room is dark and there are several beanbags in which visitors may lounge while watching. The text of the poems - one that evokes the experience of living under the threat of bombs, for example - scrolls slowly along the floor, up the far wall, on the false ceiling and so on.

The brochure from ACCA assures us that "Holzer's interior light projections shape the words that enter or exit consciousness when reading, thinking or speaking into a communal space".

Are we supposed to think that this is a kind of device to help us read the poem more effectively? Actually, it isn't. In the first place, we enter the text at random, not in the way that most people would prefer to read a poem. Then the text spreads to the left and right-hand walls, so that in order to follow it you are continuously having to crane your head to one side and the other.

It moves at a predetermined mechanical pace: is this the way we read? Or is it rather the way we are obliged to watch television or other mechanical mass media? Reading is, on the contrary, an experience that allows us to stop and start, wander backwards as well as forwards.

At the same time, the beanbags, which promise the comfort of complete surrender, exacerbate the awkwardness of reading the mechanical text. Of course, someone will have composed a theoretical exegesis arguing that this is just the point, and that Holzer is in some way deconstructing the way we prefer to read, that is, at our own pace, taking the initiative, and attentively. Or maybe she just really is on the side of the mass media.

Next door is more recent work, inspired by her concern at injustices perpetrated by her countrymen during the Iraq war some years ago. These works are titled, with a perfectly straight face, Redaction Paintings, although they are screenprints.

She has obtained various documents relating to prisoner interrogations, appeals against acts of brutality, and email correspondence discussing whether or not "the gloves are off" in dealing with prisoners brought in for interrogation. They have been blown up and reproduced on an enormous scale.

In the final room is a barrel-like cylinder with rotating bands of text in coloured LEDs. There is a warning about the strobe effect, obviously meant to mimic interrogation techniques. The texts are bland records of interrogations. This large cylinder is titled Torso, and the brochure informs us that "it resembles an abstracted human trunk".

Viewers may wonder how something roughly the shape of an oil drum could be said to resemble a human trunk, but the brochure insists that it "emphatically addresses the private body enmeshed and lost in information and government operations".

Don't worry if you don't actually understand what that means; such texts are meant not to be picked apart logically but to wash over you, soothing the reader with the familiar murmur of its ritual incantations. "While the form suggests the endurance of the body, the streaming ephemeral light and language suggests [sic] that the body endures, as language supports and mangles it." Don't try to make sense of this; just let the language mangle your mind, too.

As for the overall rationale of the exhibition, Holzer is either naive or extraordinarily arrogant if she imagines that her work is going to bring various well-documented examples of unacceptable behaviour by the US military in Iraq to a broader audience.

Her contribution is rather to bring them to a narrower audience, and one in whom moral indignation is the default mental setting.

The one-sidedness of her approach to the war should indeed be a cause for reflection. Yes, crimes were committed by some Americans in Iraq, and they should be dealt with by the normal course of justice.

But it seems bizarre that someone should still be feasting on this particular collection of carrion when the violence in the region today is of a far more vicious character.

The daily mass murders committed by suicidal fanatics in Iraq and around the world are the closest we've had to a glimpse into the black hole of pure evil since the Nazi genocide; compared with this monstrous nihilism, Holzer's American war crimes are just the bungling and brutality of ordinary people caught in the fog of war.

But she loves her subject. It appeals to the strange guilt that is so deep a part of the American psyche. It is the pervasive neurosis that keeps psychoanalysts in business. In one form it feeds revivalist religion; in another it fuels the politics of the American Left.

And the truth is that neurotics don't really want to be cured: the secret of Holzer's work, for the artist and her audience, is that it feels good to feel bad. You feel guilty, but also morally superior. The work recalls what Charles Baudelaire so aptly said, in the Salon of 1846, of another sterile academic artist: Horace Vernet's pictures are not paintings, he writes, but "une masturbation agile et frequente"; Holzer's moral self-indulgence is just as futile and, sadly, just as inconclusive.