By Rochelle Oh

In November of last year I was lucky enough to find myself in London, sequentially visiting the never-ending string of extremely large, excellently curated, free exhibition rooms of the Tate Modern. Nearing the end of my journey and already thoroughly visually stimulated, a small blinking ticker filled with orange LEDs caught me off guard. “GOOD AND EVIL”, “NOTHING TO LOSE”, “SIGN OF MATURITY” declared the ticker. It was spouting Truisms, excerpts of a famous 1984 work by contemporary American artist Jenny Holzer [1]. These short, cryptic, subtly contradictory statements perfectly set the tone for ARTIST ROOMS: Jenny Holzer, the exhibition I was about to enter, which is full of iterations of the artist’s blunt, didactic phrases that engage, provoke, and confront.

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Words are the basis of Holzer’s work. While ARTIST ROOMS: Jenny Holzer shows these words on tickers, stone benches, plaques, maps, and condoms surrounded by clean white gallery walls, these same words we surrounded by 70’s New York air, eyes and bodies first [2]. Holzer’s work has been pasted and illuminated on buildings and worn on t-shirts [3]. By infiltrating the so-called ‘public arena’, Holzer invaded advertising’s domain while advertising was still figuring out how to exploit every square metre of a city [4]. Through the display of a diverse range of perspectives as in Truisms and Inflammatory Essays (1979-82), some of which can be confronting, truth-baring and uncensored, Holzer challenges and disempowers the manipulative jargon advertising employs when dominating urban scapes [5]. Holzer’s work, as often the case with street art, encourages you to react and think critically, rather than blindly agree as advertising would have you, reclaiming space and filling it with minority voices.

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Roaming a city is a lovely everyday reminder of a the soft-porn placement of femme bodies [6] in our social and cultural narrative. The most I see myself in inescapable urban advertising is as a thin white orgasmic woman, the painted picture of patriarchal perfection [7]. Holzer protests this by replacing such imagery with words spawning from the oppressed mind, texts pertaining to the female experience, among other harsh truths. One such work is a bronze plaque reading: “After dark it’s a relief to see a girl walking toward or behind you. Then you’re much less likely to be assaulted.” This piece is a part of Holzer’s Living (1980-82) series. For some reason this plaque is bronze rather than aluminium like the others, and the letters are a thinner serifed font, but this is not why it stood out to me. While I couldn’t understand or appreciate the context and nuances many of Holzer’s other statements referenced, the only context necessary to deeply connect to this piece is an existence as a non-cis-male. It physically manifests a deep-rooted, unspoken feeling I have every time I’m alone at night, even in my own home. It confirms the existence of a sad truth and empowers in its exposition of the female experience.

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Various plaques included as part of Jenny Holzer’s Living series (1980-82) for ARTIST ROOMS: Jenny Holzer at Tate Modern. These plaques in particular seem to speak to the femme experience. Photos: Rochelle Oh 2018.

Much of the success of Holzer’s work probably (and I could be very wrong, but hear me out,) is due to its presentation as factual and informative. Although the content is frequently feminist, she does not use ‘feminine’ design codes to execute this. Form and colour palette is appropriate to its medium, making it’s feminist/social justice content more subtle and perhaps surprising. She avoids the immediate dismissal minority work subconsciously receives by using clinical, informative and rational codes – all of which are associated with masculinity. In the case of After Dark it’s a Relief to See a Girl.., the bronze capitalised letter forms present a solidity and actuality to the female experience, which is often dismissed as fiction or too-overwhelmed-with-emotion-to-be-taken-seriously. As said by the Tate themselves, “In contrast to fast-moving LED signs and posters that can be torn down, bronze makes passing thoughts permanent” [8].

Overall, I found Holzer’s exhibition at the Tate highly enjoyable. I was educated on an influential artist, amazed by the modern history she has created, had the pleasure of being immersed in it, and let it shape my own work. And if that isn’t the perfect gallery experience, I don’t know what is.

ARTIST ROOMS: Jenny Holzer is on at Tate Modern until 31 July 2019.

1. Tate, “ARTIST ROOMS: Jenny Holzer”, accessed March 29 2019, http://www.tate.org.uk /art/research-publications/the-sublime/ philip-shaw-modernism-and-the-sublime-r1109219.

2. Ewens, Hannah, “Jenny Holzer’s Art Is Powerful on and off the Screen” VICE, Oct 10 2017, accessed March 29 2019, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8x8bd5/jenny-holzers-art-is-powerful-on-and-off-screen

3. Tate, “5 ways Jenny Holzer brought art to the streets”, accessed March 29 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jenny-holzer-1307/5-ways-jenny-holzer-brought-art-streets

4. Kalms, Nicole, “Hypersexualized media in urban space” Hypersexual City : The Provocation of Soft-Core Urbanism, Taylor and Francis, 2017. Accessed March 29 2019, https://lms.monash.edu/pluginfile.php/8323626/mod_resource/content/1/wk%206%20Kalms%20Hypersexual_City_The_Provocation_of_Soft-Core_Urba…_—-_%28Pg_64–84%29.pdf

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Tate, “ARTIST ROOMS: Jenny Holzer”, accessed March 29 2019, http://www.tate.org.uk /art/research-publications/the-sublime/ philip-shaw-modernism-and-the-sublime-r1109219.

by Rochelle Oh

Being part of various minority groups (queer, of colour, a woman), but privileged in so many ways (cis-gendered, able, living in Melbourne, etc.), means empowerment and education has become a core part of my practice, my goals, and my career path, before it’s fully taken form. I want to use my work to bring pressing issues and ignored minority groups to life, however this has to be approached carefully. It’s not enough to just be female, or queer, or of colour to make ‘progressive’ work.

One fantastically female artist I look up to is Petra Collins. Her dreamy, brightly coloured, filmic campaigns has greatly impacted my photographic style. Not to mention her insane career path- at the current age of only 26, Collins is an internationally renowned artist, photographer, art director and model. When coming into prominence, it was her photo series titled The Teenage Gaze that circulated magazine and blog headlines, coupled with words pertaining to “UP AND COMING FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHER” or “FINALLY, A FEMALE GAZE”. For being female, Collins’ work was speaking on behalf of a whole gender, and her work was therefore definitely feminist, right?

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According to Collin’s website, The Teenage Gaze is comprised of “intimate portraits shot from 2010-2015 of teenage life” [1].  The works in this series mostly presents teen girls in stereotypical dress, engaging in the gendered act of grooming [2]. It enters the female dominion of the bathroom and does not challenge any cis-gender expectations [3] that are set in that space: for girls to be pretty, for girls to be born with certain biology, for girls to be waiting, and waiting, but always pretty, because they’re waiting for a man. Collins’ early work, albeit probably unintentionally, has participated in the reduction and commodification of the female experience, just as we’ve seen in the yoga industry [4]. The patriarchally pleasing female has been abstracted from the feminist, just as the slim white privilege body has been pushed to the front of the ancient Indian practice [5]. In The Teenage Gaze, Collins takes an already idealised a version of life, one that repeats patriarchal and white-dominant imagery, romanticises it with a refined colour palette and a 35mm film camera and turns it into an item of luxury. It’s the idea that you can use your money to surround yourself with pretty things and look just as hopeless as they do in it.

Taking note of this, I have made it my mission to disrupt the gender claim on spaces and portray a more thorough understanding of youthful exploration. The photos below are from a recent photo essay for Esperanto Magazine called My Clothes Aren’t Telling You Who I Want to Fuck. I’ve borrowed Collins’ dreamy style, overlapping bodies and editorial tone, but used it to invade the white cis-female-dominated fashion sphere with queer, non-binary and coloured bodies with the aim to challenge heteronormative and homophobic codes of dress. When approaching this shoot, everything was deliberate: I chose five models instead of four to avoid binary associations (e.g. “those are two boys, so those two must be girls”), I demanded queer representation (the only straight person in the shoot is my boyfriend, who as a straight cis-male is rarely represented participating in the female act of grooming), and although I directed the models to sometimes lie passively, their eyes are armed with power, not hopelessness.

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Collins’ work, whether in a good way or bad, highlights the importance of nuanced representation in photography, whether artistic, editorial or commercial. The Teenage Gaze is selectively observative, rather than empowering, and neglects so many already forgotten narratives of teenagehood [6] (e.g. trans experiences, non-white experiences, Muslim experiences, girls doing anything other than getting dressed and undressed…). Four years since The Teenage Gaze and Collins has since reworked images from the series into a book titled Babe, where the images are sandwiched between works from artists of all colours and non-cis-male gender identities, presenting a much more thorough representation of femininity. Bringing her fine arts background to many a high fashion campaign and magazine cover, Collins has shown big names that there is a desire for her unique female eye (and gives me hope that I won’t have to make helvetica posters my whole career). One day, I hope to have the platform and prominence to make space for authentic minority voices as Collins has since done. But for now, I’ll use these lessons on representation and gender commodification for student magazines, and watch from afar as she does it for Gucci.

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1. Petra Collins, “The Teenage Gaze,” accessed 1 April 2019, http://www.petracollins.com/the-teenage-gaze/

2. Kirkham, Pat and Attfield, Judy, “Introduction” The Gendered Object Manchester University Press, (1996): 1-11, accessed 1 April 2019, https://lms.monash.edu/pluginfile.php/8323631/mod_resource/content/1/wk%208%20Kirkham%20and%20Attfield%20Gendered%20object.pdf

3. Ibid.

4. Juliana Luna Mora, “The yoga industry: a conscious luxury experience in the transformation economy,” (PhD thesis, Monash University, n.d.), 3-5.

5. Ibid.

6. Jane Argodale, “Soft power: Petra Collins and the problem with the female gaze,” The College Hill Independent, accessed 1 April 2019,https://www.theindy.org/1442