How A Jewish Artist's Gaza Exhibition Changed My Perspective On Art

I was never a huge fan of art. I have always been more of a sports and music kind of guy. I guess music is an art but not in the traditional sense; It's always been easier for me to relate to.

Growing up my parents did everything they could to instill an appreciation for the arts and culture of foreign countries into me and my sister. With that came trips... lots of trips. Trips to The Louvre. Monet's Garden. Rijksmuseum. The Louisiana. You name it.

I don't say this to brag because the truth is I don't remember any of it. The one memory I retained was of eating a crepe outside the Louvre and telling my dad how disappointed I was at the Mona Lisa's size. It's fair to say I had no appreciation for traditional art, but can you really blame me?

My only other experiences with art came during my middle school's annual field trip to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, where I would make jokes with my boys about how anyone who considers a toilet flipped upside down "art" must have a couple of screws loose. While I stand by that statement, my recent trip to the Guggenheim opened my eyes to artwork as a form of communication and expression. Let me tell you how it went.

The Rotunda

Gaza is inescapable in the reimagining of Jenny Holzer's 1989 Light Line exhibition. Interestingly enough, the besieged strip isn't mentioned once by name. That's just the nature of Holzer's work though: truisms without the explicit truth.

Upon entrance, my eyes were immediately drawn to the museum's spiraling rotunda, where colorful LEDs flashed poetic aphorisms - none lasted more than a few seconds. "You are the one" was quickly followed by "You are the one who did this to me," keeping me in a state of apprehension as Holzer has been known to use romantic deception in her work.

Each phrase became progressively ominous. “I see you, I watch you, I scan you” and "Because there is no god someone must take responsibility for men” piqued my interest with their implicit condemnation of overly authoritative governments and war, respectively. At this point I was still ignorant of the exhibition's underlying theme, but that was all about to change.

The Beginning

The instillation that fascinated me the most was conspiciously situated in a colorful side room spanning two stories floor to ceiling. It was a collaboration with longtime friend Lee Quiñones, a puerto-rican graffiti artist.

Excerpts from Holzer's Inflammatory Essays series were repetitively plastered across the neon tiles in text small enough that it rendered the contents of said excerpts irrelevant.

As a result, my eyes were drawn to the heart-wrenching lines written in deadpan graffiti, all of which are in direct reference to the Palestinian-Israeli and Russo-Ukranian wars.

“I just stood there for an hour screaming my children’s names."

“I cannot sing anymore. I think of my dad and my sister who are dead"

You wouldn't know it unless you downloaded the Bloomberg Connects app but the first line is a Gazan father quoted in a 2023 Human Rights Watch report while the second is a Gazan child speaking to a United Nations investigation into Israel’s 2014 war on the city, which killed over 2,000 Palestinians.

Interestingly, Holzer also incorporated a passage from Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai's "My Child Wafts Peace." This juxtaposition creates a sense of false balance that I felt to my core. I have friends that are Jewish with family in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. I also have friends that are Palestinian with family directly effected by the continued violence. I'm sure there are many people in my situation but something about those feelings manifesting itself in the artwork felt so liberating.

Cursed

Elsewhere Holzer takes subliminal shots at Donald Trump in her "Cursed" installation, which sees a series of the former president's ostentacious yet ironic tweets stamped onto various toxic metals and hung in a straight line against the wall. As the end of the installation approaches, the mangled sheets start to fall, culminating in a pile of poisonous political rhetoric.

I'll admit at the time I had no idea those sheets of metal were "poisonous" so I spent a solid 15 minutes pondering what Holzer wished to express. Surely she didn't pick Trump's most grandiose tweets because she admires his undeniable arrogance? She must be trying to tell us something deeper here.

Turns out I was both right and wrong. Holzer was targeting Trump, along with Richard Nixon and George W. Bush in other installations.

But what if she wasn't? The beauty of art whether it be music or Twitter posts engraved in jaggedy metal slabs is that it is subjective. Artists are undoubtedly intentional with their work, especially neo-conceptuals like Holzer. But in the post-internet world of social media, with increasingly transcient news crowds, it can't be expected that everyone derive the same meaning from a piece of artwork.

Circling Back

If you told me two weeks ago that I would be planning trips into the city to look at art on my days off I'd have told ya you were NUTS. I wasn't even planning on hitting the Guggenheim at all. I was in Manhattan to see Soulja Boy; this side quest was a spontaneous, spur of the moment time-filler. Shoutout to my dad for suggesting I use my library's free NYC museum passes because I had $13 in my bank account that afternoon and wouldn't have had this experience otherwise.

If you leave here with one takeaway it's to get out of your house and explore something new.