Jenny Holzer, "Protect Protect"

For Chicago

Photograph: Attilio Maranzano, © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, commissioned through the generosity of the Edlis/Neeson Art Acquisition Fund

Whatever else one might say about the Whitney's survey of Jenny Holzer, it certainly provides plenty of bang for the 15 bucks you pay to get in. Holzer grabs viewers by the eyeballs from the very first installation, and refuses to let go. Titled For Chicago (2008), the work consists of ten long, narrow metal trays arrayed on the floor in rows parallel to the elevator. Each of these units takes up something like three quarters of the length of the darkened gallery, and all of them contain continuous strips of the LED signboards that have become Holzer's signature material—or more precisely, the signature conveyance for her signature material, which is, of course, language. The aphorisms here—ABSOLUTE SUBMISSION CAN BE A FORM OF FREEDOM; DUTY IMPRISONS YOU; MY MOUTH PROVIDES COMFORT—roll along on their respective tracks like postindustrial railcars hauling the freight of persuasion. Emanating a yellow-orange glow, the words sometimes traverse each other in opposite directions—a wonderfully literal evocation of the notion of double-talk. The phrases are pretty much the same as the ones she's been using for more than 30 years, but that scarcely matters. As in advertising, the meaning of Holzer's message is less important than the fact that it sinks in, though it's more of a bludgeoning with the optical version of shock and awe than a sinking in. And if the incandescence filling the space surrounding For Chicago reminds you of, say, the night sky above a blazing Middle Eastern oil-field fire, that would probably suit the artist just fine.

For in truth, the exhibition, while nominally looking back at a decade and a half of Holzer's production, is really of a piece: It juxtaposes the freneticism of her LED extravaganzas with the slower take of a series of oil-on-linen paintings that are based on redacted government documents about the Iraq War. The latter cover everything from reports filed by soldiers involved with civilian killings, to the rendition of suspects in the global war on terror, to a battlefield map of Iraq that forms the show's titular canvas, which also hangs in the first room. Featuring a purplish ground with the aforementioned diagram rendered in black, it spells out the objectives of the war's initial days—a circle around the region of Mosul, for example, is labeled SEIZE N. OIL. Most importantly, the word PROTECT brackets the country on its northern and southern flanks, indicating that job one at the onset of the conflict was defending Turkey and Saudi Arabia from Iraqi counterstrikes.

Monument

Photograph: Vassilij Gureev, © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Collection of the artist, courtesy Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Berlin and London and Diehl + Gallery One, Moscow

Asylum, or rather, the impossibility of finding it from the daily deluge of late capitalism, has always been a recurring theme for Holzer. After all, the most famous of her "Truisms" is "protect me from what I want." In her darkly ironic view, culture becomes a continuous loop of creating and sating desires that we barely know we have—or want to admit to. While her LED creations capture this process in miniature, her paintings reveal some its real-world consequences.

The Whitney, in its introductory panel, compares Holzer to Goya, and the artist herself has expressed affinities with the Spanish master. Nevertheless, putting the two on the same level as political artists seems misplaced. Goya may have painted unflattering likenesses of King Charles IV and family, but his most famous polemical exercise, The Disasters of War, was created in private and wasn't made public until long after his death. The luxury of officially sanctioned dissent simply didn't exist in his time, but it does for Holzer: From early on, her work has been embraced by the establishment. Perhaps like Goya, Holzer has fooled her patrons, or perhaps she's fooling herself. I suspect she understands that her good fortune is probably due to a little of both.

Holzer makes a number of shrewd allusions to art history's accommodations with history at large. The scribbles used to censor some of Holzer's source material recall the work of Cy Twombley; a pair of entirely blacked-out documents evoke Malevich or Ellsworth Kelly. Handprints of so-called enemy combatants remind one of Jasper Johns. In the sardonically titled Monument (2008), LED signboards bent into semicircles are stacked in a towering mash-up of the NASDAQ sign in Times Square and the work of Donald Judd. In all of these examples, Holzer seems to strip movements like Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism to their essence as imperial styles.

But Holzer's work likewise serves as court art for corporate statism. That she's aware of this is what permits her oeuvre to transcend the contradictions of its making. For her, anyway, submission is the royal road to artistic freedom.

Jenny Holzer's paper trail
In this TONY exclusive, the artist shows declassified and other sensitive documents about the US presence in the Middle East—along with the paintings she's made from those pages.

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