Anyone gazing up at the Janiculum Hill last night may have been perplexed to see illuminated words scrolling across the Aqua Paola, one of Rome’s most elegant seventeenth-century Baroque fountains.
The projection was the first in a series of four illuminations by the contemporary American conceptual artist, Jenny Holzer. Best known for projecting texts onto urban spaces and onto architecture, Holzer’s publically broadcast words are meant to be comments about the environment in which they are displayed. Reading the messages, Holzer hopes, will stimulate us to become aware of the ways we are conditioned by our everyday landscapes. To this end, her trusims have appeared in such public venues as movie marquees, baseball scoreboards, as well as in and on museums.
In projecting on Rome’s historic monuments, Holzer achieves two ends. First, she reminds us that ours is not an ordinary cityscape for it is puntuated by majestic ruins that are often thousands of years old. Yet, but projecting words that are as grand in scale as the architecture itself, she turns the monuments into stage sets, making them merely the pages upon which an altogether new (but temporary) text is inscribed.
Holzer has received international acclaim for her work. Her work has been shown worldwide at such places as the Venice Biennale, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
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