• What do you make of this?

    By Hannah Flynn -

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  • Truisms, 1984
  • Jenny Holzer
  • © Jenny Holzer

In the late 1970s, Jenny Holzer devised nearly 300 slogans which play on commonly held truths and clichés. The Truisms are deliberately challenging, presenting a spectrum of often-contradictory opinions. Holzer hoped they would sharpen people’s awareness of the ‘usual baloney they are fed’ in daily life.

  • Truisms, 1984
  • Jenny Holzer
  • © Jenny Holzer

When phrases like this are looked at on their own, there’s a kind of challenge to the viewer to figure out a meaning for themselves.

  • Truisms, 1984
  • Jenny Holzer
  • © Jenny Holzer

It’s the same in Alice, where you are faced with phrases that perhaps don’t make sense without context (the circumstances which surround something are its context. Someone walking around with an empty plate might look odd, but if you know they’re on the way to the kitchen then the plate makes sense… and you should probably follow them. Maybe they’re having cake). And a lot of the time in Alice, the context isn’t right, or Alice isn’t right for the context… like the poems she remembers which go a bit wrong!

Curiouser and curiouser!

Who are YOU?

Begin at the beginning

A grin without a cat

 

  • Hannah Flynn
    Hannah Flynn is an Alice in Wonderland enthusiast who also happens to work at Tate on Tate Kids, Young Tate and the Great British Art Debate.

Discussion Area

  1. “Here’s an idea: TITLING. Many people title people, animals, books, or songs. But how many people think of titling doors (as seen above), hinting to what may lie behind them. What else can be titled? I would say the amount is somewhere in between two hundred and infinity. Almost everything can be titled save for the few sublime and surreal abstractions nesting themselves in between the lines of life. Everything else, then, by definition, can be defined and titled because they expose themselves right in front of our eyes throughout the pages of the book of life. I burst with curiosity every time that I wonder about what title I will come across when I turn the next page of the book of life. But most of all I seek to discover those subtleties which remain untitled and name them myself so that I can prove that I too can contribute my knowledge of the hidden truth in life, just like the great minds of the past.

    Brandon Boogaard - July 6, 2012