“Apolitical poems are also political”

In mid-August of 2004, I visited the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams with poets Kristin Prevallet, Roberto Tejada, Tonya Foster, David Buuck, Richard Deming, Nancy Kuhl, and my then 1 1/2-year-old daughter Sophie (all of whom have gone on to big things, including Sophie). We were there to check out the various exhibitions, including a great show of political art called The Interventionists, an installation set up as part of William Pope.L’s Black Factory tour, and a small exhibition of work by Matthew Ritchie, an artist I somewhat inexplicably really like. We then stayed for a concert later that evening with the “afro-baroque cabaret” band Stew.

MASS MoCA is located in a complex of former textile and electronics factory buildings. Inside the museum, itself the largest venue for contemporary art in the United States, is one of the biggest exhibition galleries in the world: a football field-sized room in MASS MoCA’s Building 5. The space has featured ambitious work by a number of artists, and back in 2004, Ann Hamilton was showing a piece entitled corpus. Along with some sound and light elements, the main component of the piece was a set of forty machines placed near the ceiling that was meant to steadily drop millions of sheets of paper on the floor during the course of the installation’s ten-month run, slowly filling up the entire space. After the local fire department caught wind of the plan, it was scaled back dramatically, and the paper was swept up each night, thereby eliminating the possibility for the installation turning into a gargantuan firetrap.
I’ve always regretted not seeing Hamilton’s installation at the U.S. Pavilion during the 1999 Venice Biennale, with its casting of excerpts from Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony on the walls in Braille. Unfortunately, her MASS MoCA installation was a bit of a flop. I went back to MASS MoCA last weekend with a much smaller posse—just the painter Anitra Haendel. There was a smartly curated environmentalism-oriented exhibition entitled Badlands, and some apocalypse-as-usual Anselm Kiefer on display. This time around, it was Jenny Holzer’s turn to use the huge gallery in Building 5, and she created one of the best art pieces I’ve seen recently.
Holzer’s PROJECTIONS featured writings by Polish poet Wisława Szymborska and playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek. Holzer projected their texts from both ends of the huge gallery so that the words started on the ground in front of each projector and slowly rolled along the floor, opposite wall, and ceiling. At first, the experience was completely disorienting, and only snatches of words and phrases could be read. But if you stuck with it, or better yet plopped down on one of the oversized beanbag couches, you gradually acclimated to the piece and could read most of the unfurling texts. When I was there, Szymborska’s poems were being used. Here’s one Holzer projected:
“Children of Our Age”
We are children of our age,
it’s a political age.
All day long, all through the night,
all affairs—yours, ours, theirs—
are political affairs.
Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.
Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.
So either way you’re talking politics.
Even when you take to the woods,
you’re taking political steps
on political grounds.
Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it’s a question, as always, of politics.
To acquire a political meaning
you don’t even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,
or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months:
Should we arbitrate life and death at
a round table or a square one?
Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.
Click here for a video of PROJECTIONS.
This video footage doesn’t give a good sense of the depth or scale of the piece. With walls, floor, and couches all neutral grey, and with the quiet hum of the two projectors the only sound in the space, the textual experience became completely immersive, while also interactive—it took a focused effort to read each slowly rolling line of text. While the sentiments were sometimes a bit vague and abstract, their effect was nearly visceral, and it wasn’t difficult for the viewer to in turn project her or his own meaning onto lines such as, “Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton, / in every other way they’re light.” On the day I was there, Holzer had chosen texts emphasizing indiscriminate violence done to others. Her set of paintings in nearby galleries that directly reproduce U.S. invasion plans for Iraq and a list of approved torture techniques gave a sense of just whom some of these others might be.