The Jenny Holzer exhibition opened at the Talbot Rice Gallery this week to a sceptical audience. Was there enough space to hold such physically powerful but also emotionally vast works? The ‘truisms’ were particularly pertinent, how knowledge can act as both a gift and a curse. Intelligence is different to being clever, or having common sense, intelligence is insight, not something that can be cultivated through learning. The ultimate desire for knowledge can break you down. Holzer’s art is a tool for raising social conscience. These sentences and slogans form mantras referring again and again to this desire for insight, the sacrifices to happiness and health that may come with.

“When something terrible happens people wake up.”

“Symbols are more meaningful than things themselves.”

There is something medical or indoctrinating about the notion of flashing words into your audiences’ eyes over and over again; reiteration through exaggeration forcing an indelible imprint onto your memory. It is subversion from within. Like the early video artists of the 60s - using the medium of video to explore this medium itself. Holzer uses this method as a political weapon to explore the politics of knowledge and oblivion. She talks in her documentary footage accompanying the exhibition about the moving message pieces as streaming by, “more bad news than one can bear.”

“The presentation of beautiful and ghastly in ways that are lovely and exacting.”

Short moments for people who don’t have much time.

Referring back to the book I’m reading Welcome to the Machine, there was a passage that I enjoyed after visiting this exhibition – the statement, ‘knowledge is claimed free of value’ is a false claim. “Have we ended history under the common denominator of capitalism?”