Jenny Holzer
From CT4CT: Creative Tools for Critical Times
Jenny Holzer is a conceptual artist from Gallipolis Ohio. Working across a variety of themes including consumerism, war, torture, and disease, Holzer employs language as her medium to challenge and expose political and institutional power. Holzer was the first woman to be chosen to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale (1989).
According to Art21:
While her subversive work often blends in among advertisements in public space, its arresting content violates expectations. Holzer’s texts—such as the aphorisms “abuse of power comes as no surprise” and “protect me from what I want”—have appeared on posters and condoms, and as electronic LED signs and projections of xenon light. Holzer’s recent use of text ranges from silk-screened paintings of declassified government memoranda detailing prisoner abuse, to poetry and prose in a 65-foot wide wall of light in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center, New York.
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Artist Projects
Redaction Paintings
Jenny Holzer's Redaction Paintings are a series of silkscreen prints on linen. Working with declassified government documents, Holzer replicated and magnified them to shed light on the manipulation and censorship of information that takes place during war.
According to the Whitney Museum:
For these paintings, Holzer worked with materials from the National Security Archive, a nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization that collects declassified government documents and makes them available to the public, and from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which makes formerly classified information available to the public on its website. Subject matter deemed too sensitive for the public eye was blacked out, or redacted, by government censors during the declassification process. Under the landmark Freedom of Information Act passed in 1966, all are now public record, though some remain heavily redacted. When Holzer reproduces these materials, she includes them whole and verbatim. The various styles of marking and redacting give evidence to the number of individuals involved in both the execution of the war and the management of its information, lending a human presence to the blank face of bureaucracy.
Robert Storr describes Holzers Redaction Paintings as:
Beautiful in their own right, the works are also haunting reminders of what really goes on behind the scenes in the American military/political power system. Documents address counter-terrorism, prisoner abuse, and even the threat of Osama Bin Laden. Some of the documents are almost completely inked out, like Colin Powell's memo on Defense Intelligence Agency reorganization. Others are spotty enough to allow readers to try to fill in the blanks.
See also:
- Amazon: Redaction Paintings
- Art 21: Jenny Holzer Interview and Videos
- Cheim and Reid: Jenny Holzer: Redaction Paintings
Electronic Signs
Jenny Holzer appropriates LED lights, a mass media advertising tool to deliver her declassified documents as well as her series of 13 texts she wrote between 1977 and 2001.
According to the Whitney Museum of American Art
The artist carefully considers every aspect of the signs from shape, font, and color choice to the pace of the scroll and movement of the text. In some cases the intent of the work is to soothe; in others, to repel or make the viewer uncomfortable. Holzer’s light sculptures have both an intimacy and grandeur, and create almost force fields around and within the spaces they define, transforming the contemporary gallery’s “white cube” into an immersive environment.
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Lustmord
Jenny Holzer's Lustmord is a response to the raping of women as a strategic military tactic used by the Bosnian-Serb forces during the war in Yugoslavia (1992-5). Lustmord is the German word for sexual murder involving rape. The graphicness of this work is designed to make the viewer realize their own mortality and the innocence of people involved in war crimes. The piece is made up of LED signs, photographs and human remains (bones) inscribed with words and phrases.
According to Nancy Princenthal at BNET
The Lustmord inscriptions imply three voices - a perpetrator, a victim and an observer of unspeakable crimes. Their positions are of necessity radically opposed, but their words all share a peculiar cadence: it is awkward, primal. ("I am awake in the place where women die." "The color of her inside out is enough to make me kill her.")
According to the Whitney:
The Whitney’s installation consists of human bones, both male and female specimens, laid out like artifacts on a found wooden table. Some of them feature silver bands engraved with fragments of text that detail the rape and murder of women from the perspectives of victim, perpetrator, and witness. The circular texts cannot be read all at once, a metaphor for the variety of viewpoints expressed.
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