Catherine Spaeth

What follows is a conversation with the artist Nicholas Knight, also the author of Eponanonymous, as we walk through the Jenny Holzer  show.  We step out of the elevator and:

CS: It’s the first time I’ve spent time on this side and had the words pointing at me.

NK: I think it’s a lot more effective from this side than from the end. The texts extend past your peripheral vision and make it a more encompassing view than down there, where they recede into perspective.

Jenny Holzer, For Chicago, 2008, Eleven electronic LED signs with amber diodes, 2 3/8 x 334 7/8 x 576 in. (6 x 850.6 x 1463 cm),  Installation view: Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, 2008,  Texts: Truisms, 1977–79; Inflammatory Essays, 1979–82; Living, 1980–82; Survival, 1983–85; Under a Rock, 1986; Laments, 1989; Mother and Child, 1990; War, 1992; Lustmord, 1993–95; Erlauf, 1995; Arno, 1996; Blue, 1998; and Oh, 2001; © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Photo: Attilio Maranzano, Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, commissioned through the generosity of the Edlis/Neeson Art Acquisition Fund

CS:  The floor almost vanishes completely from here.

NK:  All of the LED works have a really powerful way of dissolving space, it’s very mesmerizing.

CS: There is a painting in this exhibit that describes how the military was using strobe lights as a form of torture.  It’s interesting to watch people...

For the past 7 years Holzer has focused upon making these sculptural,  material works. After projecting on buildings, she explains that she felt a little frustrated by not being a sculptor, not being sculpture.

NK:  It’s kind of an odd thing to hear, since the work is so dependent on fabricators.

CS:  There is in her statement a worry about text, that  text can move from thing to thing without much consideration for whatever is supporting it.

NK:  That’s a myth.

CS:  It’s interesting to consider what it means for someone who does carry that burden with them still to not lay hands on the actual material.

NK:  Well, sculpture is really the catchall category of whatever doesn’t fit into the other categories.  These works are breaking down space in a classic Modernist way, there’s a definite type of touch in this work, and you move through this space with a feeling that each position you occupy is changing your relationship to it in a precisely honed way.  So it's clearly sculpture, even if she's not a sculptor.

Leo Villareal has an installation in National Gallery in the tunnel between the East and the West buildings, Multiverse, covering the hallway of the moving sidewalk with LEDs.  There’s programming code running it, it can run for 100 years and never repeat itself.  Villareal writes the program, turns on the lights, and is only indirectly responsible for anything that emerges from it.

Leo Villareal, Multiverse, commissioned by the National Gallery of Art, Fall 2008, 41,000 computer programmed LED's, photo courtesy of Hudson.

CS:  Like an Apple screen saver.

NK: Yes, it’s engrossing and a little gratuitous and decorative.  Here, I don’t doubt for a second that Holzer has really worked through how the texts and colors and sign forms interact with each other.  At the same time there is no way for me to spend enough time with it to decode it.  But I don’t think that type of decoding is what this work is about, even though the effects of the aesthetic strategies are similar in the end. 

Coming to this show the first time, I felt that there was a really wide gulf, and nothing in the middle.  The gulf is between the evocative, emotionally charged text and the explicit political text.  This floor piece is of a completely different sort than the redacted paintings.  I’m much more comfortable with these texts, with the evocative texts, than I am with the political texts.

CS: Holzer stopped writing her own texts in 2001 but the labels of these works as they appear on these museum walls do not give any credit to the words of others as the media. They do, however, appear in the catalog.

NK:  To take that even further, titles like “Purple,” Blue Cross,” “Red Yellow Looming” - it’s a false formalism. I can’t take it as ironic, since there is no humor.  It’s willful misdirection.  Take as an example, Lustmord. I think you see there a very highly charged way of using language, she’s sensitive to how the title is one of the ways language emerges from the work, and there she’s used it to grotesque effect.  

I think where the texts are emotionally evocative fragments, and they are broadly political instead of narrowly politicized, those fragments float to the surface, and then dissipate, and you are left with yellowhood and it’s great, you can’t really see your own feet in here and that’s nice, so you’re floating.  It doesn’t take long for your eyes to dissolve the connection between the reading side of your brain and just wallow in the visual sumptuousness of it.  We could paint some crows over there and call it a wheat field. 

CS: People often speak of sound installations as “cheating,” almost, that it captures and absorbs you…

NK:  The pace is so important to how you experience it.  Right now the text is moving sideways, and it’s going sort of slowly, you have to make some effort and go word by word, keeping in your mind the things that are disappearing beyond the edge, and I think that’s a really beautiful imposition on me as the viewer, I welcome that.  The form imposes a meaning on it that it wouldn’t otherwise have.

CS:  Here, as words go by you are drawn in by them, and her timing is perfect in terms of keeping you here. I have this feeling about the looseness of random thoughts that go through your head in daily life -  Buchloh wants to speak of the spectacle and ideology, there is too much poetry in there for me to speak just about that, but there is something about the technology. We are not just relating to technology, we are caught in it.

NK:  Technology is very carefully deployed, we’re used to seeing wires and all of that stuff but here it is so hidden.  Every LED just perfectly disappears into the wall.

CS: If something were off the littlest bit it would all fall apart.

NK:  In that way, formally speaking, the technology turns into sculptural form rather than having identity as technology.  It’s more like all-over painting, there being no composition, no center.

Jenny Holzer, Red Yellow Looming, 2004, Thirteen double-sided electronic LED signs with red diodes on front and amber diodes on back, 143 7/8 x 109 x 52 in. (365.5 x 276.9 x 132.1 cm), Installation view: Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, 2004, Text: U.S. government documents, © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Photo: Attilio Maranzano, Collection of Cari and Michael J. Sacks

CS:  One of the claims of the show that is coming across pretty forcefully in the presentation of it by the museum is an interest in that gap between Goya and Matisse, a gap that echoes your concern about the difference between poetry and political rhetoric.

NK:  That’s kind of laughable, frankly.

CS:  I get it.  There is something about the sensuality and evocativeness of color.  What are you doing when you specifically choose Goya and Matisse?  Political art and formalism.  The glow of the room is a more accurate way of addressing that without looking to a narrative of painting. Given these LED works, do we really need to go to painting for that?

NK:  I don’t know what those claims do other than be opportunistic, with a sense of having a little too much care for one’s legacy.  If there is going to be any political position, you have to occupy it steadfastly. 

CS:  It’s wanting to go back to the Academy and to become History Painting all over again.

NK: But later on when the texts are about torture I really take exception...

CS:  It’s a sinister seduction?

NK:  Yes, the aestheticizing of that text.  I don’t know what she thinks she is going to accomplish by using the torture documents in that way, because as far as I’m concerned the text is already damning, but this presentation drains meaning out of it.

CS:  What about the thought of being mesmerized by horror?  There is a lot of talk about "the violence of the image," but there is also a good deal of fascination as well.

NK: Well I think to be truly mesmerized by the horror of those texts you have to focus on the literal truth of what they say.  As far as I’m concerned the redactions are sexy images, but the documents matter more for what they say than what is covered up. As an artwork on the wall, it doesn’t function that way.  It becomes a picture. The original is too fraught, and you can misuse things the wrong way. 

CS:  Let’s say that Holzer in making these pieces is being very careful about what's outside and what’s inside, and the role of the Whitney Museum as an art institution is something important to her, and that foremost in her mind would be considerations of the aestheticization of the political, merely through the institution and its history. For example. Let's say that she's very well aware of the similarity and difference between these works and Gran Fury's The Government Has Blood On Its Hands.

Gran Fury, The Government Has Blood On It's Hands (One AIDS Death Every Half Hour), nd., courtesy of  the New York Public Library

NK: But I feel that rather than reflecting on the aestheticization of the political, she’s complicit with it.

CS: I wonder if one of the reasons there are such few pieces in the show - and people really are taking the time to look - mesmerized AND reading, and taking the time without effort to do that.  It’s a very seductive pull, and once you take that time, as people are, you are going to feel your flesh burning with some of this stuff (that’s an exaggeration, I’m not really going to write that...?)

NK:  That is true, but it's more true sometimes and less true other times.   Political speech that has no intention of being persuasive, I don’t know what its function is, and I don’t see being persuaded in this context.  A colleague of mine said that overtly political art is just sentimentality and I believe that’s true. How can sentimentality aid us in this situation?

CS:  Well, Goya is not sentimental.

Francisco de Goya, This is worse (Esto es peor), Plate 37 of The Disasters of War series, Etched about 1810 - 1820 (published 1863), Courtesy National Galleries of Scotland. 

NK:  Yes, but those atrocities have no meaning for us in a contemporary political sense.  The motivation that inspired that violence in the first place is lost to our personal experience - what’s left is the power of the image, and we understand it as a form of protest against those conditions, but those conditions aren’t affecting our lives.  You can’t say anything close to that about what Holzer is doing with her words.

CS:  She’s involved with history and what it means to represent those kinds of horrors in our time.  You know there’s so few...I think of Dana Shutz’s paintings of people eating themselves, there’s no way to represent the kind of violence that Goya was able to represent.  Lessing wrote that only text can show you what is disgusting and horrible, that paintings can never do that, that they have an attachment to medium...

NK: …and you revel in the beauty of the entrails…

CS:  Even if its a baby being ripped open.  Luscious paint.  So at the end of Lessing’s Laocoon he quotes from a description of the puss-y rags of a hermit, in order to show that words can arouse pain and disgust and horror to an extent that painting never can.  So I do want to argue that there is certainly a possibility for that here.

NK:  But what about the change of state that takes place when text is grabbed from its primary source and is reconstituted as an artwork?  The distance that imposes...I can’t follow the raw violence of it across that distance.  I’ve seen these documents online, and they were more powerful to me when the people who presented them were doing everything they could to put them into a context of persuasive speech, to argue from a close reading of their content that this is not what we ought to be doing. Holzer’s treatment fetishizes the document as an object, and separates the viewer from the content.  The change of state that occurs between taking this primary source and turning it into an undeniably high-end art product, I can’t follow the rage over that transformation.

CS:  That was initially a commission form Wired magazine, how do we play with Google searches?  And Holzer came up with these, wanting secrets to come up.  You are speaking of these as public, primary source documents. But they never really came up in the media, there was all of this subterranean noise going on that was never really made "public." Holzer's thought at the time was that each time you logged in one of these documents would come up.

There is something curious about the transition from that technology to the desire to put these documents into the museum.  What goes into the museum? Paintings go into the museums, and there is something too about wanting these documents to last in memory, that’s what museums are they are mausoleums, they are warehouses of memory.  That is the reason for the shift from documents that show up as the revelation of a secret to painting. 

NK:  Holzer deserves a lot of credit, in her career she’s demonstrated a willingness to bring a highly charged practice outside the confines of the white cube. Her outdoor work is politically engaged, in the narrow sense, but also broadly, throwing off the chains of the context.  So I take your point that her own history leads to these works here, but I just can’t follow.  As much as the LED work dissolves the architecture, it doesn’t dissolve the context of the architecture.

Jenny Holzer, Protect Protect deep purple, 2007, From the series MAP, Oil on linen, 79 x 102 1/4 in. (200.7 x 259.7 cm), Text: U.S. government document, © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Collection of Howard and Donna Stone

CS: To see such military language planted on top of earth.

NK:  What’s the military supposed to do?  It’s remarkably un-euphemized.  And it’s what we voted for.

CS:  I’m thinking of Goya’s bodies impaled on trees, this is such a different register of war.  There is something of interest to me about completely different sense of visual language for how we represent war.  Maps weren’t in Goya’s vocabulary at all.

NK:  The contractors’  bodies hanging from the bridge in Fallujah in 2004, that image was as raw as could be but still made onto the nightly news, that would be a great counter-image to Goya’s  bodies impaled on trees .

CS:  I have to say that sometimes the Warhol thing, I get quite frustrated at times, it gets very easy to pull this out as painting, they are opportunistic as paintings, clearly. 

That aside, I am not made comfortable with this, and I understand that’s "necessary" military language - fix, exploit, suppress.  Even so, in these same words it occurs to me that the opportunism in seizing upon painting is similar to the military's own conventions in seizing upon land.

And that monochrome that let’s you know that it’s painting, the touch of paint.

NK:  I can’t read the text without also "reading" these superficial marks that let you know “I'm a painting!”

CS:  Glamorizing the support of it to make it more historical, have a different context.

Jenny Holzer, MONUMENT, 2008, Twenty-two double-sided, semi-circular electronic LED signs: thirteen with red and white diodes; nine with red and blue diodes on front and blue and white diodes on back, 194 5/16 x 57 13/16 x 28 7/8 in. (493.5 x 146.8 x 73.4 cm); Installation view: Diehl + Gallery One, Moscow, 2008, Texts: Truisms, 1977–79; Inflammatory Essays, 1979–82, © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Photo: Vassilij Gureev, Collection of the artist; courtesy Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Berlin and London; and Diehl + Gallery One, Moscow

CS:  She describes a tilt-a-whirl effect, when you look up at this you get a little dizzy.  A person I brought here actually got so nauseous she had to sit down for a while in the painting room to recover from the sweat.

NK:  I love the dizziness, your eye looks for the wall, but the space is just dissolved.  And when I first saw this one I thought there was a cylindrical backing to it, I couldn’t read it as empty space. 

CS:  It’s called ribs and it’s modeled after a torture case, rigidly and loosely at the same time.  But in doing that and calling it ribs...now you can see there is a blue beyond the pink, creating illusion.  At the press opening, Holzer was very pleased about this window, at night apparently the windows across the street reflect back the colors of this room.

NK:  To get back to painting, the way that Donald Judd had to work his way through painting, Judd’s Plexiglas and the color - it’s off-base to claim an affiliation with Matisse, it’s more like Don Judd. Rich, yes, but still within an industrial vocabulary developed for different reasons than fine art.

CS: As a column, it’s a kiosk at the same time, you can’t get away from other mass media, either.

NK:  The more time I spend, the more the formal qualities of these objects really become the experience.

CS:  It’s not just the light, but the lightness, being off the ground.

Photo from exhibition catalog, Jenny Holzer: Redaction Paintings, Published by Cheim & Read (2006), Essay by Robert Storr, image courtesy of Cheim and Reid.

CS: Here are the redacted paintings. Just that tilt offers quite a bit about the armature of laying documents.

NK:  The entire subject of it becomes a multiple reproduction.  It’s very loaded, but to me these are purely aesthetic. 

CS:  Dull pinks and yellows.

NK:  Stretched and stacked. 

CS:  There is something about the way dates appear on these paintings, there are multiple dates of classification/declassification.  These dates do something to historical memory, if we are to consider these as historical paintings, what came to my mind was Gerhard Richter’s October 18th 1977 series, which he did ten years exactly after the event, with photographic images.  It seems that if one is to make history paintings today there is an involvement with the registration of time, operating on or as public memory.  Even in saying that I know that I am giving credence to the art historical authority that these paintings are hooking themselves into, very determinately, but nonetheless I think it’s worth thinking about.

NK:  Well we’re in a moment now in the transition to the new administration, and Obama’s people are attempting to make their stance clear.  To the extent that I can judge it they are doing admirable things, more documents are being released, people in Washington actually use the word “torture,” they describe what happened as torture, which is announcing what we are culpable for.  If some of these things that are presently blacked out see the light of day...Do they copy it, black it out and then release it?

CS: Is there an original somewhere that was never doctored?  I don’t know!?

NK:  If you’re going to block it out what’s the value in keeping it?

CS:  Right this is only what you get in the mail if you ask for it.

NK:  Originals exist somewhere in a non-blacked out way.

CS:  There’s a vault somewhere...

NK: So what happens to these paintings when documents are released?  I mean, I don’t need to be personally convinced that the Bush administration were a bunch of assholes.

CS:  It’s one thing to go for actual fact, "Where is the original?" and "What would it mean to have the original?".  But when we’re standing here the experience of that is really thrown back to us.  To think about what these things are, going back to the thought about being mesmerized by horror, to our own unconscious, and to how these are meant to be a site for our own mesmerization. 

That’s corny, but when you put an art historical frame around it there's the ambition for it to have real purchase, to be anything but corny.

Jenny Holzer, Bench 16 in the sculpture garden at the Israeli Museum, photo courtesy of theo-ethical interrogations of a stone.

CS:  The benches are also cemetery garden benches, they belong to public space differently, and we are intended to sit on them.

NK: I like them a lot, it does put you in a confrontation that is unexpected, you have to read it before you sit on it.

CS:  And you’re still going to be thinking about it. It’s different than the LED’s,  it’s a monument and a support for your body, a place where you are commemorating death.

NK:  I have the sense that if I sit on it, it’s conferring my agreement with the sentiment of the text.

CS:  They’re going to cut into your skin.

NK:  Yeah, I’m going to be complicit with that if I sit on it!

Jenny Holzer, Thorax, 2008, Twelve double-sided, curved electronic LED signs with white diodes on front and red and blue diodes on back, 104 1/4 x 58 5/16 x 37 1/8 in. (264.8 x 148.1 x 94.2 cm), Installation view: Cheim & Read, Armory Show 2008, New York; Text: U.S. government documents, © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Photo: Christopher Burke, The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica

CS:  This is Thorax, part of our anatomy.  A lot of these are emails, xxxx’s are redactions.  I like the play with redacted and reductions. 

Really each light piece that we’ve seen is doing very different things, in some you have permission to read the back, in Thorax you don’t, it's jammed in to the corner so we can't know what’s on the other side, at all.

NK:  I suppose that’s symbolic.

CS:  This is the story of an Iraqi civilian who was killed, and we are reading the testimonies of the Americans who surrounded that death, they are all trying to document that it was no one person’s fault that he died.  One could say the interior represents the blood and all of the elision of the text wrap around the surface.  It does make me wonder where all the other texts are really from, there’s something about being informed, you have to be informed already about this piece, she is not going to give you that.

NK:  And I object to that.  This is historical information and she presents it in such a way that I can’t read what it means.  I feel like it’s a gross misuse. I’m all for the symbolic use of text that plays with a philosophical slippage between different demands made on a text, in a general theoretical way, but not these.

CS: Let’s say Holzer’s assuming that everyone who is coming to the museum is coming here for an aesthetic experience and they know that it’s Jenny Holzer, do you think that there’s anything in the gesture of asking people to take the extra step?

NK:  No I’m not convinced by that all.   I think that the energy and time it takes to read is 99% of the engagement.

CS:  So people are really going to walk out of here with color and light and Andy Warhol.

NK: And poetry.

CS:  “I can sleep with people I don’t like.”

Installation view of Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT(March 12, 2008 – May 31, 2009) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, Copyright 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Photo: Lili Holzer-Glier.

CS: Documents, statements, time... but what they say means nothing in this beauty.

NK: Canceled hand prints, 40 or so of them, and 40 strategies for canceling them.

CS: By hands.

NK:  Jasper Johns prints, that’s what I do with it.  Between Warhol and Johns, the aesthetic strategies are so persuasive, but so difficult to de-couple from their original intentions.

CS: This is again the dissonance between violence, documentation, and the mark, romantic and formalist, and the mark is a violent mark.  The print is the mute index of a body, layered with another hand - there is individual expression, a signature, you have these bureaucratic plebes sitting behind desks and marking things, and you want to identify the people who are making these marks, there’s that person and there’s that person...

NK:  To go back to what you were saying about Thorax, there’s nothing available to us about the story, the offense, am I supposed to look up the answers to the questions myself? 

CS: The catalog explains that the prints of the detainees are postmortem.  How do you tell the difference between the corpse and the killer?  Not all of the forms are the same.  There is a writer’s impression, so the living signs their own name, and then there is an official of some kind signing another’s print, perhaps this is a corpse.

NK: I want to be generous but I can’t see any real meaning in those distinctions.  I can’t stop thinking about the money it takes to produce these, I mean, they are really fancy. I don’t object to people spending money to make their work.  Except it does come to the fore for me.

CS:  In her interview with Buchloh she wants us to know that hand-rendered oil grounds seemed right for the Middle East.  But there's also a whole language about production, I mean you can make as many of these as you want.

NK:  It’s a whole economic system of production, "stretched" thinly over symbolic excuses.  There’s an object that ended up here as a painting. I don’t object to the existence of that system, but this exhibition goes to show that some kinds of content don’t work within it.

CS: All of these paintings are listed as a single work, according to the wall text.

NK: All of the material production considerations don’t confront me as much in the LED pieces. For one thing, there’s no alternative. Also, the LED pieces are so “worked out.” Really, the electronic signs are just one element in a whole toolbox of strategies and techniques for making those works, and Holzer has really refined a method for using them to great effect.

CS: It’s also not burdened by the history that we know of Warhol and everybody after. 

NK: Right. Instead of standing on the shoulders of giants, the paintings are buried by this burden they can’t hope to live up to, because they’re just conceived and executed, and not worked through in the same way as the LED's.

Jenny Holzer, Left Hand (Palm Rolled), 2007, Oil on linen, 80 x 62 in. (203.2 x 157.5 cm), Text: U.S. government document, © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Collection of the artist; courtesy Cheim & Read, New York; Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Berlin and London; and Yvon Lambert, Paris