Jenny Holzer
"Jenny Holzer" by Edward Rubin, Summer 2009, pp. 81-82
Jenny Holzer began her career anonymously pasting offset posters on building walls, garbage-can covers, postal boxes and hoardings around New York City. Truisms (1977–79), her very first public work, consisted of hundreds of alphabetized statements that had been culled from her readings of literary classics and printed in lists of bold italics. Choosing statements such as MONEY CREATES TASTE, ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE and MURDER HAS ITS SEXUAL SIDE, she sought to provoke and to elicit public debate. Holzer’s writings, which followed in the wake of Truisms, took a more serious turn; in them, she began using different voices—original and borrowed, personal, authoritarian, journalistic and candidly confessional—to deal with pain and pleasure and the beautiful and grotesque in relation to sex, death, power and war. In recent years, Holzer, outraged by the tenor and actions of the Bush administration, has upped the ante and imbued her work with a mounting sense of political urgency, using electronic installations and giant Warholian screenprinted paintings to trumpet her humanitarian concerns.
“PROTECT PROTECT,” Holzer’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is proof that the passage of time can dim what was once novel and striking. It is not that Holzer’s often beautiful LED signs, which have been programmed to display the texts of declassified government documents, don’t have more than a bit of truth clinging to their bones, it is just that history—the technology that delivers it, and the people who consume it—has passed them by. Today, television, personal computers, handheld BlackBerries and iPhones bring us the news and issues faster, more effectively. It’s hard to compete with the lights and LED screens that light up city squares around the world, the shock-and-awe tactics of television coverage or the sheer grandeur of events like the opening ceremonies of Beijing’s 2008 Olympics.
Holzer’s silkscreened enlargements of declassified American government documents (heavily censored with black markers) are more engaging. Chilling, actually! Just reading these texts—many are personal accounts detailing prisoner abuse and homicide at Guantánamo Bay and other detention camps—is pain-inducing. It makes one feel like an accomplice to the crimes they describe. We are shown accounts of heads being wrapped in duct tape, shackling, gagging, the administration of low-voltage electrical shock, pierced lungs and one soldier’s report of having had to kill an Iraqi child in self-defence. Other works feature blown-up versions of the palmprints of American military personnel detained for various offences.
The most unsettling of all the works on view is from Holzer’s MAP series of 2007; Protect Protect deep purple is the government document from which the exhibition takes its title. This work proves how Iraq—with various sections of the country labelled Seize, Suppress, Isolate, Protect and Fix—was drawn and quartered long before the first tank rolled in. When asked if she had any feedback from the government concerning this work, Holzer answered, “Just silence. But who knows on what lists I now appear.”
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