Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer has made text the focus of her art for the last three decades, with a mischievous inclination towards the use of public spaces as part of it — her work has appeared on signs, stickers, and T-shirts.
One of her most famous works is her compilation of truisms — simple statements that she displays in various places, including the LED sign in Times Square.
Most recently, Holzer’s installation “Projections” is featured at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. In it, the artist projects words onto the walls, ceiling, and floor of the football field-sized gallery, while patrons are invited to lounge in giant silver bean bag chairs and take it all in.
Holzer is also showing a number of her silkscreen paintings of declassified government documents which were premiered at the 2007 Venice Biennale. These are Holzer’s first paintings in about 30 years.
SB: Using images and documents and general use of words in your work, one of the complaints of the current administration is the use of language.
JH: What I’ve been thinking about it is that Orwell nailed this a long time ago, that’s what I’ve been thinking. My work is a pale applause, but a real applause. Oddly enough, I found a number of documents about Orwell in the FBI files, including a bunch of heavily redacted ones that say at the bottom “There is no mention of George Orwell or any A.K.A. on this page.” After doing a number of the autopsy documents, interrogation ones, it’s good to go back to the sad, dark, funny of those.
SB: How long did it take you to go through documents and decide which ones interested you?
JH: I’ve been doing this rather constantly and compulsively for three years.
It started fairly innocently when I was asked by Wired to think about what I would put on the Google start page. I couldn’t come up with anything and then I thought ‘Oh, I’d like to see a secret everytime I log on.’ Or at least a recently revealed something or other. I started looking around for examples of secrets and stumbled across a funny document from Ken Lay to then governor Bush and some back and forth about some piece of western art work that one man had given to the other, I think it was Lay to Bush and then a thank you back. Those were funny secret documents about artwork. Then I started looking in the FBI archives for old ones about Viet Nam period things and things like the Orwell, and things like the FBI following Brecht around, spending tax dollars on noticing that he was often in his pajamas at his typewriter. Really good stuff that’ll keep us all safe.
A lot of the older ones seemed kind of funny now, though it was deadly serious then. Ones such as having Marian Anderson’s neighbors watch her to see if she would be okay to hold any official positions and the neighbors came down positively and said that she was humble and did housework when she came home. That was in her favor. That was the lighter stuff.
But then I decided to concentrate on material about the former Gulf War and this one, because many people are curious about what’s going on and why and how it came to be, so that became the concentration.
I thought the emails from the FBI about Guantanamo — the FBI was called in relatively late after a number of interrogations had already been done and they were taken aback by the lack of professionalism that included guys dressing up as FBI men so that when the torture techniques came out, the FBI would be left holding the bag. I found that extraordinary.
I looked at a number of documents from soldiers in the field — from trials and soldiers — policy documents, so on and so forth.
I thought it would be interesting to re-present them as paintings and as outdoor projections — we projected them on the library at New York University and also at the library at George Washington University because I thought it was interesting to show them in Washington — and the National Security Archives, which holds many of these documents, is in the library at George Washington University, so I thought it made sense to show them there.
SB: I imagine at this point there are documents about you floating around after doing these things.
JH: I don’t know — would you file a freedom of information request? It’s too self-involved for me to do it.
SB: I didn’t realize you did paintings – when I went back to look at your resume, it mentioned that early on, you did paint at the Rhode Island School of Design.
JH: I have a master’s degree in painting — I’m a masterful painter — not that I’ve done it since the ‘70s until recently. In theory I’m a qualified painter.
SB: What sort of work were you doing back then? Do the document paintings have anything to do with what you were doing all those years ago?
JH: Way back when, I started with rather conceptual pieces and then became an abstract painter, because that really was where my heart was. I had, at the time, an irreconcilable desire to have content and I would have like to have been Richter and figured out how to be a great painter and have fascinating content, but I couldn’t and didn’t. But now after practicing this and that for 30 years, I think I’ve found a way to have interesting and mysterious paint and useful content all in the same place.
SB: Had you done any painting over the 30 years privately or
to amuse yourself?
JH: I left it cold but kept looking with longing.
SB: With the documents, were you already thinking “Hey! I think I’d like to try painting again” or, as you looked at the documents, did it just come to you that way?
JH: I’ve been creeping up on making much more visual things — visual is shorthand for installation, atmospheric, what have you. A number of the larger LED pieces, such as the one at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin — or even the convention center in Pittsburgh — did things like color the air so that a fair amount of air would be amber or blue, and that softened me up and had me think of doing something like painting.
I was very lucky early in this painting quest to run into a fellow RISD grad with a really good hand, who was and is a good sport about trying to translate what I’m talking about when we make the backgrounds. He and I will go to a certain page of the Goya book and sample a tiny bit of sky from one of Goya’s black paintings and then enlarge it. Then I’ll silkscreen something, I’ll have something silkscreened on top of it, so we’ve had an interesting adventure.
SB: What’s the general process?
JH: I will choose a document, then I will think about what color or colors — because it is silk screening, it makes sense sometimes to make a couple of each, just because of the process and the medium. I will try to see how a certain document looks on a plain white background, how the document feels when it’s factual looking and how it changes on a horrible red or a hearbreaking blue, and so I’ll talk to Ben the painter and we’ll decide how streaky the background should be, how many layers, how many glazes, who we’re copying today — Goya or somebody else – and then away we go.
SB: When you look at the Goya painting and you look at the sky in it, who else have you looked at for that purpose?
JH: I’ve looked at Warhol’s disaster paintings. I was lucky to get an old catalog that had a number of them. I’d seen the electric chair and the car wreck and the tuna fish, but I hadn’t seen the suicides and so on. I hadn’t seen as many of the race riots as I have now and I thought that, well, this could be another disaster period in American history, so I thought that was a good place to look.
For the most part, I’ve left the flat grounds, the flat colors, and the disaster paintings. Most of the paintings are either white or a more emotional ground, as with the Goya black paintings.
SB: I mentioned that some of your stuff was on some guy’s blog — to describe what I’m looking at, I have your stuff in one column and then he has some ads. On one side, it’s four different watch faces and in pink letters it says “Real fake watches now available.” Lower, I see something like “Coffee exposed.” All sorts of things like that and it’s funny, because it looks like the world has moved in the direction of some of your work over the years — it looks perfectly natural together on a page.
JH: That’s startling.
SB: Is that something that had ever occurred to you at all? Looking at things like that, encountering things and saying “Oh, gosh, that’s something I was commenting on 20 years ago!”
JH: I want to think occasionally I’m alert, so maybe this is reassuring yet sad.
SB: So you may be visionary, but you hadn’t given it too much thought.
JH: Better not to think about oneself, it’s paralyzing enough to think about what’s around you.
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