We hold these truths
to be self-evident... —The Declaration of Independence
A single event
can have infinitely many interpretations.
A lot of
professionals are crackpots.
Disgust is the
appropriate response to most situations.
These days, when
civility in public discourse has plummeted to yet another low when accusations
fly like poisoned arrows from one ideological camp to the next, facts are taken
out of context and twisted, and half-truths and blatant lies treated as
equivalencies on nightly newscasts, I’ve turned back to Jenny Holzer’s Truisms
in search of some way, any way to get a handle on the
contrarian nature that seems to have infected our every attempt at conversation
of late.
Private property
created crime.
Any surplus is
immoral.
People who don’t work
with their hands are parasites.
Jobs lost, homes
foreclosed, surpluses squandered, wars waged, fortunes gambled, security
destroyed, health care ever elusive, far from the civil right it should be in a
country half as rich as ours—it’s easy to see how the power of any kind of
propaganda might seize a fretting mind in these less-than-best of times.
Worrying can help you prepare.
You are a victim of
the rules you live by.
Words tend to be
inadequate.
Jenny Holzer works
with text as her art. She finds, crafts, and then puts provocative, strange,
unsettling, at times enigmatic words and sayings and texts and documents—into
public spaces and leaves them, waiting for discovery, response, and reaction.
Sometimes the words make an obvious narrative, even a story, sometimes not;
more often, you the viewer/reader are left to construct a meaning for yourself.
Symbols are more
meaningful than things themselves.
Description is more
important than metaphor.
In the early days,
thirty-plus years back, Holzer put her words on posters, placing them pretty
much at random on New York City street lights and telephone poles; not long
after she moved to her primary medium, LED signs and displays often projected
in places as diverse as the façade of the New York Public Library, a JFK
terminal arrival/departure board, and on the Big Brother-esque electronic
marquees that now leer above Times Square.
Chasing the new is
dangerous to society.
Confusing yourself is
a way to stay honest.
Abuse of power comes
as no surprise.
Holzer’s Truisms
project, begun in 1977, gathered sayings that you may or may not have heard
before and then (maybe or maybe not) repeated some verbatim and turned others
on their tiny linguistic heads. The thing is: they sound authoritative, like something you ought to pay attention to and believe. They sound like they contain
the wisdom of the ages, like they are channeling the truth, like they might
offer a tidy little Zennish koan you can use to chant your blues away.
Categorizing fear is
calming.
Fear is the greatest
incapacitator.
Except many on the
list contradict one another. Cancel one another out. Fight side-by-side to the
death. Not unlike the screaming matches I can only imagine breaking out in the
chambers of Congress if decorum were really to be breached and the furious
tempers of misunderstanding and conflict let loose. Which for someone like me,
words and writing-obsessed and -possessed, just might be the unnerving point:
maybe it is impossible to ever hold any—let
alone these—truths.
Or is it?
