Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how people cope with the (inevitable) difficulties of life. This train of thought has been fueled by the experience of watching a dear friend endure a life-altering trial and seek to find meaning in her suffering. Since this is a blog about visual culture, I’ll keep my proselytizing focused on the therapeutic powers of art–although I’m happy to chat privately with readers who are looking for other sources of healing:).
For some time, I’ve noted with interest that one of my former students kept a quote by artist Jenny Holzer as his status on Gmail chat. This is a quote from a series by contemporary artist Jenny Holzer: IT IS IN YOUR SELF-INTEREST TO FIND A WAY TO BE VERY TENDER. This, incidentally, just might be the best practical marital advice I’ve ever encountered and I’ve seriously thought about having cards made up with this statement–ones that I could slip into wedding cards, pockets of young lovers, and so on. None of that lame “don’t go to bed angry with each other” kind of advice for me. Anyway, this “truism” comes from a series Holzer did in 1983-85 called “SURVIVAL.” As I reread some of these statements, I was struck anew by the power of her language, which alternates between the poetic and touching to the ironic and disheartening.
In the last few days, I’ve been posting some of these truisms as my Gmail chat status as a sort of sociological experiment. I’ve had several friends ask me about what I’ve posted and why, spawning conversations that ranged in subject matter from rampant consumerism and forbidden desires to ecological sustainability (and several started these discussions by asking if I was OK. Which I am. More or less.). So I want to post all of the truisms from this series, in the hopes that this will encourage a broader conversation about the form and content of these statements and what they say about the human condition and how we find ways to survive.
And P.S. It’s kind of fun–and disturbing–to see how some of these statements have been appropriated and commodified over the years . . . Google a few of them.