| Jenny Holzer, like many young artists in the late 70s, early 80s, began her career pasting anonymous offset posters on building walls, garbage can covers, postal boxes, and fences around New York City. Truisms (1977-79), her very first public work consisted of 257 alphabetized statements printed in bold italic lists, culled and condensed from her readings of literary classics. With statements such as “Money Creates Taste,” “Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise and Murder Has Its Sexual Side,” her intent was to provoke and elicit public debate. “I am someone who likes to blurt things out desperately,” she once said in an interview. |  |
Edward Rubin
Jenny Holzer, like many young artists in the late 70s, early 80s, began her career pasting anonymous offset posters on building walls, garbage can covers, postal boxes, and fences around New York City. Truisms (1977-79), her very first public work consisted of 257 alphabetized statements printed in bold italic lists, culled and condensed from her readings of literary classics. With statements such as “Money Creates Taste,” “Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise and Murder Has Its Sexual Side,” her intent was to provoke and elicit public debate. “I am someone who likes to blurt things out desperately,” she once said in an interview. In the wake of Truisms, Holzer’s writings, taking a more serious turn, began using different voices, whether original or borrowed, personal, authoritarian, journalistic, or candidly confessional, to deal with pain and pleasure, the beautiful and the grotesque, in relation to sex, death, power, and war. In the last 15 years, Holzer, outraged by continuous war and the frightening direction of the Bush administration, upped the ante with a mounting sense of political urgency, and enhanced her artistic activism by using the Web, billboards, television, carved stone benches, electronic installations, and virtual reality videos to convey her everyday concerns. “I want to tell you what I know in case it’s of use,” she wrote in her Lament series of 1988.
Protect Protect, Jenny Holzer’s exhibition of LED signs, along with declassified and redacted government documents, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is proof that the passage of time can turn the early work of an artist, whose eye-popping messages flashed from walls, floors, and kiosks have been known to stop people in their tracks, into something of a robotic dinosaur, a kind of philosophical spouting, albeit stationary, R2-D2 with lights. It is not that Holzer’s work of often beautiful and intricately programmed LED signs, beamed up, down, and all around us for the past 27 years, doesn’t have a bit of truth still clinging to its bones. It is just that history, the technology that delivers it, and the people that consume it, have passed her by, by at least a decade. Today, television, and personal computers, hand-held Blackberries, even iPhones, with all those bells and whistles, bring us the same news, faster, more effectively, in visually and viscerally more exciting ways. Think of the eye-popping cacophony of flashing lights and LED screens that light up city squares around the world, the adrenalin-raising “shock and awe” televising of the last two Gulf Wars, and the triumphantly majestic opening ceremony of 2008 Beijing’s Olympics, which over two billion people watched at the same time, and you get the point.
While Holzer’s colorfully flashing LED installations, with running texts shooting every way, are of momentary interest, like the sighting of a juke box when entering a bar, which the Whitney has deliberately darkened its galleries to highlight, it is her photos of silk-screened blow-ups of declassified United States government documents, heavily censored with black markers, which ironically gives them the look of abstract paintings, that are most engaging. Chilling actually! Just reading these wall-poster texts, many personal accounts detailing rampant prisoner abuse and homicide at Guantánamo Bay and other detention camps, is pain-inducing. It definitely makes one feel—most likely the artist’s intent—like an accomplice to these crimes. These documentary blow-ups include stories of heads being wrapped in duct tape, shackling, gagging, low-voltage electrical shock, pierced lungs, as well as one soldier’s harrowing confession of having had to kill an Iraqi child in self-defense. Others feature large black palm prints taken from prisoners. The most unsettling on view, from Holzer’s Map series of 2007, is Protect Protect Deep Purple, a government document from which this exhibition takes its title. Here Iraq, handled like a piece of meat with various sections of the country labeled “seized,” “suppress,” “isolate,” “protect,” and “fix,” is already drawn and quartered, long before the first shot is fired. By making us so immediately aware of her sources and linking them close to today’s news headlines, Holzer realizes her blatant exposé is a bold move, perhaps even a dangerous one. When asked if she had any government feedback concerning this work, Holzer answered, “Just silence. But who knows on what lists I now appear.”
