Jenny Holzer
Intimacy in Public Space / excerpts
The piece of Jenny Holzer was looking like a lost street plate on the white walls of the Mamco Museum in Geneva. I remember being surprised by it, by its way of questioning the concepts of interior and exterior. Not only through its shape and placement, but also and mostly through the engraving that it bears; which speaks about the penetration of the body by an exterior element/person, a lover, a doctor.
The penetration of the body is an act of extreme intimacy, since intimacy is that which we carry with us, in us, all the time; it is the most hidden and secret part of ourselves, and, like our soul, it can be broken.
But like the soul, intimacy is not something that lingers inside us, more likely it is something that envelops us, our bodies, it is our aura if you will, our pheromones, our smell. I see it functioning rather as a bridge between the interior and the immediate exterior, or as an invisible barrier/wall that protects the integrity of our bodies in their perpetual motion.
This immediate exterior realm is extremely subjective, and the physical distances that we try to keep from one another are deeply influenced by subtle cultural rules.
Like gravity the influence of two bodies on each other is inversely proportional not only to the square of their distance but possibly even the cube of the distance between them.
I would like to reflect a bit upon the construction “...for the first time.” Because we are all afraid when knowing that our bodies are going to be penetrated, when our frail carcass is going to be cut. But in the case of sex, this fear transforms itself into pleasure, excitement and joy, while the idea of surgery will always remain unpleasant. This aspect makes me think at the fabled boundary between the feeling of fear and the feeling of pleasure. The difference standing in the interpretation that our brain gives, or more likely was trained to give in a certain situation. Training, repetition creates automatism, instincts if you will. I have experienced this while writing more than 200 times the same thing during the making of I Miss You, but also in reference to the reactions towards Public Sleeper or Fire, in both cases the shape and image created being completely ignored leaving space for what it was trained to manifest.
I think that intimacy, this most secret and hidden part of our being, triggers fear instinctively while shared or touched. Maybe that’s the reason why we go so far in order to find out who we are, instead of searching right here or better said in here.I’ve chosen intimacy as a subject, because it was a concept that I’d started to explore in my practice since my days back in Bucharest. I thought it was interesting to push it further, to submit it to the tensions that built up in public space: in other words, to test it.
I decided to explore Geneva’s public space by creating three projects which have to do in some parts with the idea of intimacy, but not exclusively.
On the other hand, I thought that it makes sense, as a foreigner and, even more, as a newcomer to do it, signalling my presence in a way, appropriating the new space, the new city, the new society, thus exploring its territories and surfaces. Getting to know, living the place before inhabiting it.
I decided to split the notion of intimacy in three main layers according to each project:
1 the Outer Layer - Fire
2 the Inner Layer - Mi-e dor de tine/I Miss You
3 the Deep Layer - Public Sleeper
Installation view HEAD, Geneva, 2011
