Fredrick Holland
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The best of Holland’s 16 antiauthoritarian works at Flatfile, part of a joint show with Dread Scott, raise pointed questions about power and are carefully, cleanly designed. Bill of Rights (Revised) is a large wall-mounted text with ten articles, at least some of which Holland agrees with: “Legislative members shall earn no more than twice the current poverty level,” for example. A flap at the bottom is marked “Lift to Reveal Author”–who turns out to be Timothy McVeigh. Holland says that in our rush to execute him, “we never really found out who he was. You kill the man and you kill the investigation.” Meet is a photograph showing an opened Torah in Hebrew next to an opened Koran in Arabic, each with a strip of bacon arranged like a bookmark. Playing on headphones is the song “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” which makes supposed cultural differences seem arbitrary and absurd. Hands Off is a reddish blown-glass model of a uterus with the word Private on it. In 1970, when Holland was 15, his girlfriend got pregnant. Abortion was legal in only a few states, and though friends pitched in to send her to Kansas for one, she feared she was too far along to qualify, so she induced one herself with a metal implement. She hemorrhaged and wound up in the hospital. “This is not a theocracy,” Holland says. “I do not like the assault on reproductive freedoms.”
In the current show, the visual appeal of Holland’s work modulates its provocations. The colorful print Flame On shows a grid of more than 100 different flags, set on fire at the bottom. The piece was inspired by congressional debate on banning flag burning and by Terry Riley’s liner notes for 1969’s A Rainbow in Curved Air describing a utopian vision: “National flags were sewn together into brightly colored circus tents,” Riley wrote, “under which politicians were allowed to perform harmless theatrical games.” The installation Wage Slave includes a gateway with metalwork at the top that reads “slave wage slave.” The design is copied from the entrance to Auschwitz, which read arbeit macht frei (“Work makes you free”). A large social security card in the center has been issued to “Noah Hope,” underscoring the point that the current social security system is also a lie. “If you’re going to fuck with somebody,” Holland says, “don’t fuck with their sense of hope.”
