NEW YORK — The truths, truisms and truthy aphorisms of Jenny Holzer scroll up the spiral ramp of the Guggenheim Museum’s central atrium, rising heavenward in a procession that feels both monumental and ephemeral. Holzer’s work, a reprise, expansion and updating of her 1989 LED installation for the museum, features a wide range of the texts she wrote from 1977 to 1996, and it is the literal and symbolic centerpiece of the exhibition “Jenny Holzer: Light Line” that surveys some six decades of text-based work by the conceptual artist.
Among the scrolling texts are the classic “truisms” that defined Holzer’s early career in the late 1970s, phrases that reduced the cruelty and cynicism of capitalism, empire and patriarchy to pithy one-liners, some of them becoming so familiar that they seem to be general maxims of modern life, not written by an artist but part of the free-floating wisdom of the culture.
“Abuse of power comes as no surprise.”
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“Everyone’s work is equally important.”
“Lack of charisma can be fatal.”
These were ideas hiding in plain sight, so blindingly obvious that one might not think they needed expression at all. Yet once expressed, they exposed chinks and cracks in the facade of power. Holzer came of age as an artist just as the country was lurching to the right, opting for the feel-good vibes of nostalgia and nationalism, while politicians from both major parties dismantled the social safety net, allowed inequality to grow to crisis proportions and committed the country to a foreign policy based on militarism.
End of carouselBy the 1980s, Holzer’s work felt as ubiquitous in New York as lampposts and fire hydrants. Printed on card stock, tacked to the refrigerator with a magnet, scrawled by hand on the wall of an alley, emblazoned on T-shirts, it captured the frustration and anger of an age of resistance, when memories of the old social contract were still vivid enough that people felt outrage as the new one, based on Darwin and drafted by oligarchs, was being quietly and inexorably enacted.
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So, how does Holzer’s conceptual work hold up today? Its intellectual vigor is undiminished. But the world has changed, and we have changed, which makes the Guggenheim’s survey both an intellectual challenge and an emotional journey. Getting the mind back to a place of raw receptivity isn’t easy. And a sustained confrontation with our failure to remake American society is gutting. If you came of age with Holzer’s work, as I did, the exhibition feels like both an indictment and a requiem. She has spent a career doing the Sisyphean work of placing what we already know directly in front us, polished into things so sleek and smooth they leave hardly any exit wound when they pass through the body politic.
Share this articleShareFortunately, her work has grown and developed over the decades as she negotiates the fundamental tension between monumental and ephemeral truths. And it has become more visual, too, more ocular as it strays from the core word-based origins of her early work. Among the most striking works on view is the 2022 “Cursed,” a collection of stamped lead-and-copper plates, ripped into fragments, bearing the image of tweets sent by President Donald Trump. Some of them are affixed to the wall, in a line that trails off into a heap of discarded texts on the floor, like leaden lemmings going over a cliff.
Tweets are by nature ephemeral; presidential tweets, however, are documents of power. The social media platform now known as X created a style of thinking and discourse that mimicked in a sick and debilitating way the pithiness of Holzer’s art. While her living texts are ascending on the ramps of the Guggenheim atrium, a heap of tweets falls to the floor, dead letters, evidence of Trump’s cruelty, stupidity and divisiveness. Reread the tweets, and you will confront your own powers of forgetting, what one critic has called the “unknown knowns” that are the crux of Holzer’s work.
“Cursed,” like other essential Holzer works, is about how we misconceive memory, monuments and truth itself. In the largest gallery, near the base of the Guggenheim spiral, is a collection of six truisms, carved into the seats of pristine benches made of white marble. In Central Park, across the street from the Guggenheim, one will find names on plaques affixed to benches, memorials to donors to the park and, if you think about it for just a moment, monuments to forgetting. So many names, so many people, so much anonymity. Many of them are dead and, like Holzer’s marble benches, the plaques are small reminders that we create memorials because we know we are going to forget what we feel we ought to remember.
Monuments embody the constant war we fight against forgetting, while truth isn’t eternal or immortal but rather a process of learning the same thing over and over. Another series of work is made up of tracings, smudgy texts of carbon on paper, that mimic a quaint and touching pastime that is mostly forgotten today: making images from grave markers or memorials by tracing over them with graphite. These are pictures of the world that are more immediate than photographs or video, the physical impress of truth on paper. Visually, they feel evanescent, reminding our eyes that tracing leaves only a trace, something scant, fragile and easily dissipated.
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Or is the trace more resilient and lasting than we think? If it’s all we have left, then it is all we will ever have, which makes it everything. The same might be said of Holzer’s redaction paintings, in which she reproduces archival documents, often redacted, of American militarism, torture and colonial ambition from our terrible adventures abroad, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was launched on false pretenses and ultimately killed, by some estimates, more than 200,000 people.
Some of these paintings use precious materials, gold and platinum, further monumentalizing them. All of these documents are easily available — if you look for them, and if you want to see them and know the truth. Among them, a sickening document labeled “Alternative Interrogation Techniques,” which includes things that “often call for medical personnel to be on call for unseen complications.”
Fun fact that isn’t included in this exhibition because it happened too recently: The Supreme Court just gave a green light for any future president, including those with a taste for violence and sadism, to do this without reservation or hindrance, not just in Iraq but at home, too.
We will never learn. That is certainly one message from Holzer’s show. But there is also humor and levity. Her early aphorisms included ironic and searing observations about love and sex. And laughter remains both a tonic and a strategy for shaming people into better habits. “It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender,” she wrote on a metal plaque in 1984, the same year she inscribed on another plate, “Laugh hard at the absurdly evil.” One of the last works in the show is a painting of various hues of gold on linen, perhaps another redacted document bespeaking things absurdly evil, from which only one word remains legible: “Thanks.”
We should say the same thing to Holzer. Thanks for reminding us. And again, thanks.
Jenny Holzer: Light Line is on view at the Guggenheim Museum through Sept. 29. guggenheim.org
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