Spiral Jenny

Like the Hollywood suits behind Twisters, Jenny Holzer has decided to reboot a tornadic tour de force from the so-called End of History. Unlike that Glenn Powell vehicle, Holzer’s summer blockbuster is set not amid the flatlands of the Sooner State but in the spiraling rotunda of the Guggenheim. The artist first annexed the museum in 1989, wrapping a 535-foot LED signboard around the interior parapet and feeding it with the hundreds of uncanny non sequiturs from her Truisms (1977–79), Living (1980–82), and Survival (1983–85) series: LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL. PRIVATE PROPERTY CREATED CRIME. ABSOLUTE SUBMISSION CAN BE A FORM OF FREEDOM. CHILDREN ARE THE CRUELEST OF ALL. CHILDREN ARE THE HOPE OF THE FUTURE. THE FUTURE IS STUPID. SAVOR KINDNESS BECAUSE CRUELTY IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE LATER. SOMEONE WANTS TO CUT A HOLE IN YOU AND FUCK YOU THROUGH IT, BUDDY. A doomscroll avant la lettre, the installation established Holzer as the art world’s preeminent messenger of McLuhanite anxiety, and with her Golden Lion–winning US pavilion at the Venice Biennale a year later, she became an international star. As part of a wider survey of Holzer’s work, Light Line reprises her Guggenheim takeover, souping it up with quivering special effects and four hundred more feet of signboard: a twister of words which now soars to the oculus and plays on a six-hour loop.

Holzer was born, auspiciously, at Holzer Hospital, which was founded by her grandparents as the first general hospital in Gallipolis, Ohio. In her early twenties, she got a job in its claims department, typing patients’ maladies onto index cards. It was here that she first dabbled in text-based art, secretly collecting any cards with typos and pasting them in rows on a panel: a kind of Holzer hospital for language. A stint at the Rhode Island School of Design saw her begin to think about space and scale, with ranging success; juvenilia from this period include a half-mile canvas she left on the beach and a room painted totally blue. A breakthrough came in New York in the late ’70s, when she committed to language as her medium. One-upping first-wave Conceptualists like Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth, Holzer endeavored to dematerialize not only the art object but the artist as well. She conceived the Truisms—some three hundred one-liners, written with painstaking effort—as pithy translations of the continental philosophy she had been assigned at the Whitney Independent Study Program. Before her truisms ever appeared on sarcophagi, sushi platters, condoms, marquees, hats, cups, cash-register receipts, a BMW racecar, or camo hats sold in museum gift shops, they appeared as myopic memoranda wheat-pasted on street poles and telephone booths in lower Manhattan. Plastered under the cover of night, these shouty maxims heralded the arrival of a captivating new voice: ours. That is, the power of Holzer’s voice arose from the fact that it was not her voice but an anonymous, subvocal emanation of authority that belonged to no one, and therefore to everyone. Thousands of passersby took it upon themselves to variously vandalize, steal, skim, amend, or ignore Holzer’s lists, which informed us that ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY CONNECTED, that YOU GET THE FACE YOU DESERVE, and that RECLUSES ALWAYS GET WEAK.

The author function Holzer once so brilliantly undermined quickly engulfed her. She went electric in 1982, programming her aphorisms on the Spectacolor board in Times Square and on increasingly high-tech installations in galleries, museums, and biennials, where they no longer vied for attention with billboards, taxi tops, and Goodyear blimps. Today, Holzer’s work proliferates on the internet largely without her imprimatur, and her most famous quip, ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE, has become a refrain online and at protests internationally, a sigh in iambic pentameter. That Holzer’s early texts have gained such traction in the nonspace of social media is perhaps unsurprising given how they anticipate our world of virality and memes. Still, it is an ironic afterlife for this exoterica, which is, or was, meant to halt a moving body in a particular place, be it an airport, public monument, Caesars Palace, or the willful edifices of Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, or Mies.

Such site-specificity has led many to associate Holzer with a lineage of institutional critique alongside, say, Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke, both notably censored by the Guggenheim in 1971. Yet although Holzer is widely lauded as an activist artist, her work’s persuasiveness as art derives from the fact that it, as Auden boasted of poetry, makes nothing happen. Rather than “speak truth to power,” Holzer advertises the prodigality of meaning produced by language, sentencing her sentences to the limbo of Derridean freeplay. Unlike Buren and Haacke, her approach to Frank Lloyd Wright’s coiling void—a notorious bane of artists—is, now as then, almost defiantly conflict-avoidant on the level of content and form, the streamlined, space-saving screen accommodating the words’ insouciant flow. There’s something strangely refreshing about encountering Holzer’s messages in a semiosphere where everything is algorithmically targeted at you, personally; these taglines are addressed to no one.

Still, a nebulous topicality emanates from Light Line’s LED showpiece, which mourns the disintegration of consensus reality by offering hundreds of apothegmatic assurances, and whose sleek gyre evokes the crisis of “information overload” without burdening us with actual information. (Her rising sentences gainsay Shakespeare’s “Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”) Holzer’s truisms may talk the Orwellian argot of newspeak and doublethink, but they earn their prescience in a Huxleyan metaverse where the boot on the face is traded for the narcotizing media stream, our oppression lubricated by a steady trickle of dopamine hits and blinking distractions. Dizzy? Sit down on a truism-engraved bench, look up, and keep binging the feed: ILLNESS IS A STATE OF MIND. IT IS HEROIC TO TRY TO STOP TIME. IT IS IN YOUR SELF-INTEREST TO FIND A WAY TO BE VERY TENDER. PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT….

Holzer followed up Truisms with Inflammatory Essays (1979–82): hundred-word monologues inspired by the manifestos of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Emma Goldman, and Hitler, among others, and printed on bright-colored paper. Like the Truisms, these tracts were wheat-pasted around the city, but they traded the cool, detached address of that series for paranoid rants and vituperations. “REJOICE! OUR TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE,” opens one; “DO YOU WANT TO FALL NOT EVER KNOWING WHO TOOK YOU?” concludes another. The essays cover the walls of the Guggenheim’s first-floor gallery in a huge, vibrant grid. In a callback to the visceral responses the flyers once invited on the street, Holzer has, for a new work titled the beginning (2024), invited New York tagger Lee Quiñones to scrawl quotations of disparate provenance over the grid of Inflammatory posters in his signature wild style: “NOW THE CITY IS IN RUINS / ON THE STREETS LIE THE CORPSES OF RESIDENTS,” reads one. “I JUST STOOD THERE FOR AN HOUR SCREAMING MY CHILDREN’S NAMES,” reads another. Perhaps wary of taxing viewers with more reading, curator Lauren Hinkson has skipped traditional wall text. Only once you download the Bloomberg Connects app and scan a QR code will you, if Wi-Fi complies, discover the names behind these quotations, taken with permission from poetry and wartime testimony by residents of Iran, Haiti, Syria, the US, Israel, and Gaza. Stripped of context, the words sit confusingly atop the apocalyptic wallpaper of the Inflammatory Essays—which serve, not as a call to action or reportage, but as an experiment in how rhetoric manipulates feeling—and Holzer’s self-détournement fails to say anything at all.

Once interested in composing something like a collective unconscious, Holzer has in recent years leaned into her reputation for voicing the “conscience” of our divided Usonia. The change occurred when she quit writing, in 2001. “It’s hard to write, so I don’t do it anymore.” Re-presenting the words of others, she has said, allows her to expand her emotional range and subject matter. Unfortunately, this shift has narrowed her vision. At the Guggenheim, we find that she is now something of an engagé recent-history painter, trading the arch, agathokakological imagination of her early work for reminders that Democracy Dies in Darkness. (She has also turned to poetry, projecting excerpts from Anne Carson’s 2002 If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, as well as other works, on the Guggenheim façade as part of an opening light show.) In the atrium, Light Line commences with a series of big, gold-leaf paintings related to January 6: memos between Donald Trump and his chief of staff, a handwritten note given to Trump before he addressed a rally that day (“They are ready for you when you are”). Artistic aura is also conferred on Alice Neel’s FBI dossier, blown-up letters between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger regarding war crimes in Vietnam, FOIA’d documents about waterboarding in Iraq so redacted they look like suprematist monochromes. Do such smoking guns reveal anything in 2024, other than a curious naivete from an artist for whom the abuse of power should be no surprise?

Wright believed the Guggenheim could withstand an atomic bomb: “It would just bounce up and down in the blast, like a mighty spring.” Descending the ramp, one finds that Light Line has a ransacked, aftermath feel. A couple of benches have met with a sledgehammer, and the debris, titled broken (2024), lay scattered across the floor. Many of the museum’s bays for displaying paintings and sculptures are bare. A black granite sarcophagus inscribed with Holzer’s Laments (1988–89), a chorus of first-person accounts written in response to AIDS, obstructs the viewer’s path. Artworks cower in stairwells, corners, and other nooks. The peculiar curation captures something of the serendipity of finding Holzer’s words en plein air, but it lacks the audacious, alien beauty of the 1989 show, which consisted solely of the winding LED scroll and a ring of spotlighted benches in the lobby, transforming the museum into a somber shell. Peter Schjeldahl likened that iteration to “the last day of a closeout sale in a store that is going to be torn down,” Roberta Smith to “a vast darkened cave with glowing embers at its center.”

The light in Light Line fluctuates throughout the day. At times it matches the bisexual luminescence of Euphoria. In other moments, it gives you the feeling that it’s 3:00 a.m. and CNN has been kept running on mute, just for the company. The spectacle sometimes appears to be on the fritz, feinting glitch-outs and eerie, ghost-in-the-machine vellications. Such effects seem to foreshadow a looming breakdown or blackout, a wrench hurled irreversibly into the feedback loop that is Holzer’s oeuvre. But everything stays on script. One might expect an artist who focuses on the relationship between language and oppression to take an interest in the conceptual possibilities of deep-learning models, but Holzer and her studio confine their use of artificial intelligence to ornament, using apps like DALL·E and Runway to dream up flittering signboard backdrops that intermittently turn Wright’s “taruggiz” into an immersive mood ring.

The line in Light Line terminates at Cursed (2022), the show’s most glaring redundancy: a row of distressed metal defixiones (or “curse tablets”) of Trump’s tweets that trails to a heap on the floor, a pile of future relics that would make Daniel Arsham blush. Holzer wants to put her canonical aporias and incendiary essays in conversation with our “first postmodern president,” but her analog retweets elude fresh insight into Trump’s discursive patterns or her own. Sad! Moreover, all of this reheated covfefe overrides the strange, out-of-time ambiguity of the words flowing up Light Line’s luminous signboard, which begins to feel merely like the dispenser of more bad news, a teleprompter spiraling down to election night. It is bad news. From atop her crumbling Babel of mixed messages, Holzer might take cold comfort in the words of Yogi Berra, a fellow Midwestern-born aphorist: Even Napoleon had his Watergate.