ARTS In deadpan mottoes that scroll across electronic tickers, in secret government documents silkscreened on to canvas, in the idiosyncratic marriage of poem and cliché that yields a stream of glaring signs, you can see the conflict between Jenny Holzer and herself. Holzer manipulates the most impersonal of media, the authorless strip of headlines formed by LEDs, funnelling emotion through technology and language. She is an ardent soul who filters her message to make it more immediate.
The Whitney’s spare, potent retrospective of Holzer’s work paradoxically highlights its elusiveness and deep engagement in the issues of our time. Political art so often dilutes its power in polemic. Holzer not only evades the pitfalls of the rant: she also eschews easy irony. Her work radiates hopeful rage.
Which doesn’t mean that Holzer neglects the eye. She cites Mark Rothko, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd and the invocations are apt. Her message may be encoded in words, but the medium is light – Holzer’s illumination floods rooms with colour, basking them in blood red for guilt and yellow for betrayal.
Facing viewers at the show’s entrance is “For Chicago”, a masterpiece whose components crawl across the floor in pulsing rhythms. The words either flow vertically like a waterfall’s spray, or horizontally in great wedge-like chunks, encompassing most of the writing Holzer has done over the years, from the “Truisms” of the mid-70s to “Blue” from 1998.
The piece includes the sound-bite sermons she started pasting on street corners in 1977 and later transferred to blinking screens. “Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise” barked one. “Romantic Love Was Invented to Manipulate Women” screeched another. The early work toggled between these sincere pronouncements and a succession of soggy clichés: “Children Are the Hope of the Future” for instance, or “Knowing Yourself Lets You Understand Others”. Holzer had an unerring ear for pop vapidity. She left it to viewers to sort the wisdom from the prattle.
Even now, Holzer’s prose ranges from wittingly banal to bluntly poetic. But away from the page and pulsing through her spectacular theatre of confrontation, polemic and elegy, it feels weightier and more passionate. “Arno”, for instance, addresses an unnamed lover who might also be a rapist – it’s hard to tell. “You Are the One/ You Are the One/ Who Did This to Me/ You are My Own . . . I Run From You/ I Sleep Beside You/ I Smell You On My Clothes”. In her maturity Holzer has mastered the dark-hued palette of ambiguity. The “you” of her soliloquies could be victim, murderer, partner, sadist or mother.
After years of generating her own words, Holzer has turned to the public record for her latest source material. The “Redaction Paintings” come from the declassified documents dealing mostly with torture and the Iraq war. Holzer hasn’t done much to alter her raw material. The pages – heavily blacked out by government censors – have been transferred to canvas by a painter/technician named Ben Snead. Holzer specifies the colours and “level of smeariness”; Snead does the rest.
Holzer hasn’t painted in decades and she acknowledges that a strong sense of political urgency drove her to it: “People study and preserve paintings and take them seriously, whereas the information wasn’t always noticed or taken seriously,” she has said. In the 1960s, Andy Warhol used a silkscreen process to transform newspaper photos of car crashes into monumental paintings; a generation later, Holzer is working a similar metamorphosis on reports of mangled metal and crushed bodies. But while Warhol kept a cool distance from the appalling images he chose, Holzer’s impassive use of bureaucratic words hides her boiling sympathy. She doesn’t exactly take sides, but gives voice to the losers on all edges of the conflict.
In a handwritten account, a soldier confesses to killing a child who (he claims) picked up an AK-47 and aimed it in his direction. There are autopsy reports on a prisoner who died shackled to a doorframe with a gag in his mouth. A government memo includes a “wish list” of interrogation techniques, including “Phone Book Strikes”, “Low Voltage Electrocution” and “Muscle Fatigue Inducement”. Without comment or marginalia, Holzer insists that no one can emerge unscathed from the conflagration.
She makes eloquent use of the passages that government censors have shielded from view by obscuring single sentences or entire pages. On canvas, these voids become rich fields of black or red, abstract shapes buzzing with secrets we can only intuit. These portraits of withheld information resemble paintings by Mark Rothko, who insisted that great spiritual mysteries lurked behind his rectangles of solid colour. Holzer’s enigmas are more concrete but no less riveting, particularly because we sense the urgency of her desire to bring those buried words to light, to emblazon them in bands of rolling luminescence.
