Vagrants, night walkers and students alike may have noticed a strange eminence from the Rose Art Museum recently. The great panes of glass that make up the front of the building are usually curtained shut during off-hours, but this year the museum staff have elected to keep the two rightmost windows unveiled for the semester. At certain hours the installation manifests as solid bands of light, usually purple but sometimes red or blue. Other pedestrians might perceive a more aggressive display: flashing or undulating bands of light moving with the irritating perceptibility of an old-school television.
The Rose is not an institution that aggressively markets itself with neon signs or other bright outward displays. It pretty much never markets itself at all. The sudden appearance of this light display is vaguely unsettling, but it also invokes a pleasant nostalgia for the pre-mega corporation times, of the days before Apple and Google sterilized our perception of showcase halls, screens and the lights we consume every day.
Closer inspection reveals a very different message. The piece, called “STAVE,” is an LED display created by the artist Jenny Holzer in 2008. Holzer’s Wikipedia page describes her as a “neo conceptual artist,” but, as with all artistic denotations in recent decades, academic titles and descriptions tend to be as impenetrable as the pieces themselves. That Holzer works with “concepts” is very accurate. Her primary mode of expression is the written message covering a plethora of topics. These messages are in turn presented in a variety of ways, be they through painted signs, plaques or, most commonly, flashy light installation. Born in 1950, her career spans from the mid-70s to today, and her portfolio is immense.
“STAVE” consists of seven curved LED displays presented one atop the other like metal gills or ribs. Other LED works by Holzer from the same period have such names as “Thorax,” “Ribs” and “Torso.” The artist’s light displays from this period invoke a sense of the bodily midsection. Each bar or “rib” contains hundreds of blue and red LED diodes encased in a chrome-like metal. There seems to exist a blue or purple backlight that undulates at regular or irregular intervals behind the bars, but this phenomena might also be a result of reflected LED light—it is difficult to say.
The application of these LEDs mirrors the commercial application of LED displays that one might find outside a movie theater or stock exchange. Simply put, the viewer is presented with scrolling text. The text usually moves at a uniform, readable speed. Sometimes the text becomes more erratic, flashing in irritating ways or splitting into fast moving red text overlayed above slower blue text. In most of my observed cases the words are a neon purple. The seven bars appear to be synced up with each individual display programmed to present the same information at the same speed.
“STAVE” is very mysterious. The plaque at the Rose offers no information about the piece beyond its title, year of creation and artist. Holzer’s website, which lists a multitude of her light installations from the late 2000s, does not list this one at all, and general internet searches only reveal anecdotal references to it. The Rose’s Facebook page contains a short video showing the art piece in a state of mid-assembly, a pile of LED bars and tangled wires. A single post on Flickr contains an image of the piece at a Miami art exhibition called Art Basel 2008. I also found a 30-second clip of the piece in action at another exhibition called Armory Show 2008 on Dailymotion, but specific exhibit information from either of these events cannot be found. The plaque in the Rose claims that the piece was acquired by the Mortimer and Sara Hays Endowment Fund in 2008, but other pamphlets and magazines surrounding this semester’s exhibition make little mention of “STAVE” and reveal none of its secrets.
The text itself is telling. Out of the contextless scrawl of sentences, references like “Guantanamo,” “Iraq” and “FBI” call attention to the piece’s subject matter. The signs appear, for the most part, to be reading from excerpts and abstracts from government documents and interview materials relating to post-9/11 terrorist policy and the Iraq War. Names are never explicitly shown. They are replaced with a flashing “XXXXX.”
One message read formally: “ON 5/8/03 AND 5/9/03, XXXXX WAS INTERVIEWED AT GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA BY FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION SPECIAL AGENT XXXXX AND US ARMY LINGUIST SGT XXXXX […] AFTER EXPLAINING THE PURPOSE OF THE INTERVIEW XXXXX PROVIDED THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION.”
No explicit information is given. Instead, the procedure of the interview and the outward state of the subject of the interview is described in cold detail. Long segments like these are juxtaposed with descriptions of overt torture sourced from the ICRC: “ONE PERSON DEPRIVED OF HIS LIBERTY ARRESTED ON 21 AUGUST ALLEGED THAT HE HAD BEEN HOODED, BEATEN, AND PLACED NAKED IN FRONT OF AN AIR CONDITIONING MACHINE.” On one of my visits to “STAVE,” the LEDs told of soldiers invading the home of a woman. It describes how she was kicked relentlessly. Another told of internment camps.
I have never observed the exhibit repeat itself. It seems to draw from an endless database of articles and documents. It is easy to lose oneself in the scrawl, as the LEDs only allow five or so words to appear at a time, and they disappear as quickly as they appear. This representation is reminiscent of a modern news program, in which breaking news and other headlines will scroll, often unacknowledged, at the bottom of the screen. Some messages flash and others undulate, but whether or not this effect is the result of random programming or done with the intent to convey meaning is unknown. Whether or not strings of words are placed next to one another to create a meaningful juxtaposition is equally unknown.
A stave (noun) is a wooden staff, or sometimes the support of a building. To stave is to prevent or delay something, hence “to stave off evil.” Stave also means to break something by forcing it inward or piercing it. Does America stave off evil? Does our government support us? Are we systematically tearing apart bodies and hearts? The piece is well titled.
“STAVE” is a vexing commentary on the information age, created in the same years of the internet explosion and the iPhone boom. Or perhaps “STAVE” is the opposite, an attempt to give a permanent installation to accounts and atrocities that would be otherwise lost in the ceaseless vomit of information created in our dauntless conversion of the present into the past. Perhaps Holzer simply wishes to communicate stories from a specific time. Wanderers can sit with “STAVE” long after closing time, long into the night, absorbing the words beneath the nostalgic glow of the LEDs.
