Hero Worship Can Be Strangely Satisfying

I’m pretty sure Marshall McLuhan’s most famous adage is wrong: the medium is not the message. Rather, the medium and the message do a dance, with one leading and the other following, the dominant party always in flux. On my way to the press preview of Jenny Holzer’s current retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I had a thought: Holzer is the type of artist who lets the medium lead. She is renowned for streaming her blunt and poignant truisms on LED displays, beginning in the 1980s. Her most famous piece is probably Protect Me from What I Want, a haunting phrase displayed in 1982 on the Spectacolor sign above Times Square. She saw the potential of a new medium, the programmable illuminated sign, back when it was genuinely novel. But in a world crammed with electronic messages, a world in which our cell phones have morphed into pocket-size Times Squares, Holzer seemed superfluous, the impact of her message dulled by the ubiquity of her medium. Later that day I left the Whitney with another thought: Jenny Holzer is my hero.

This is not my usual reaction to art exhibitions. Generally, I exit museums ruminating in long, multiclause sentences larded with ifs and maybes, but this insight was as succinct as a Holzerism. So why is she my hero? I think it’s partly the turf she has staked out. She owns that gray area between art and design, where formal aesthetics mingle with the vernacular. It’s a popular territory that other artists have occupied. Barbara Kruger and Edward Ruscha, for example, play with written language. And I admire their work, but they’re not my heroes.

Part of my reaction to Holzer’s show involves the formal beauty of her current work. When I walked onto the fourth floor of the Whitney, the piece directly in front of me took my breath away. It’s a river of LED light: ten gallery-long parallel displays run Holzer’s truisms, her greatest hits in acid-orange type. A phrase such as “You are trapped on the earth so you will explode” races by horizontally as you step off the elevator, and if you walk around and stand at the far end, the display becomes vertical. The splashes of orange light hitting the white gallery wall as each saying reaches the end of the display are like a series of tiny electronic sunsets.

Beauty isn’t enough, though. Holzer’s art often toys with or comments on sacrosanct works of architecture, affixing ornament, at least temporarily, to high-Modernist landmarks. The first time I truly appreciated her was in 1990, when she created an LED display that followed the contours of the Gug­genheim’s circular atrium. It was amazing to watch a phrase like “You are a victim of the rules you live by” whiz round and round. The installation made me fall in love for the first time with Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. I wish I’d been able to see her 2001 installation at Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nation­algalerie, in Berlin. “It took me a shockingly long amount of time to figure out that the building is a roof,” she told one interviewer. Once she’d come to that conclusion, she suspended all her LEDs from the ceiling. Visitors could lie down on the floor to watch the words go by, observing Mies from Holzer’s point of view.

In the Whitney exhibit, she can’t do anything quite so dramatic, but her art melds nicely with the building’s structure. Two intersecting pieces mounted in the corner of a gallery, Blue Cross and Green Purple Cross, are arranged so that the words on 12 long, thin LED displays appear to come out of one wall and disappear into the perpendicular wall, “as if the text in the piece is just passing through,” Holzer said during a gallery tour. Here the words are more poetic: “I smile. I talk. I touch your hair.” The piece is also positioned so that its glow can be seen from Madison Avenue at night, through what Holzer calls “the eye of the museum.”

Holzer’s truisms often have a political ring to them—“The poor you have robbed and ignored are impatient”—but they don’t address a specific circumstance. The “poor” and “you” in question could be anyone, and that’s the point. Much of the work in this retrospective, however, takes a moral stance on a single issue: the war in Iraq. Several of her LED pieces are texts taken from government documents describing the effects of the first Gulf War or atrocities perpetrated in the current Iraq war. In one gallery, she fills a wall with paintings of giant handprints. The hands were taken from military files and represent “the U.S. service people accused of crimes,” according to Holzer. “They’re literally the hands of the perpetrators.” Opposite the hands is Purple, a long, low, curved LED cascade of scrolling text from the same military files. There’s an argument to be made that Holzer is somehow aestheticizing war crimes, but I think she is altering the nature and purpose of her favorite medium to ambush us with historical facts. Here it’s not so much the medium as the message.

The Whitney exhibition takes its name, Protect Protect, in part from a purple canvas that you might easily miss as you’re drawn from one bright, seductive LED piece to the next. Holzer has re-created one of the slides from the United States Central Command’s 2002 presentation of how the Iraq war would be waged. When that slideshow found its way onto the Internet in 2007, it was almost a case study in how people in government and business often forget to question the seemingly authoritative view of reality they see in PowerPoint presentations. (OK, sometimes the medium might be the message.) The slide reproduced in Holzer’s painting is a map of Iraq with labels saying things like: “Shock and Awe,” “Exploit,” “Gain Control,” “Protect,” “Suppress,” “Fix,” “Isolate,” and “Seize.” Centcom’s use of language is blunt, like Holzer’s, but without her eerie sagacity. (The military’s graphic style—bold type used with crazy abandon—is more like Kruger’s.) Holzer’s motive for transforming war-related documents into art was straightforward: “People revere paintings. I noticed these documents just languishing.” Mak­ing them into art, she reasoned, would focus the public’s attention on them.

It’s a very elemental argument, almost childlike in its simplicity. But this is precisely why I admire Holzer. It’s her language, both the tabloid boldness of it and the utterly unpretentious way she talks about what she does. Most
of the time, the arcane language of the art world drives me nuts. It’s as if there were layers of jargon invented specifically to protect artists and critics from saying anything clearly, a codified discourse designed to bestow significance on art that either robs it of significance or masks its emptiness. Other areas of life, such as politics—and, yes, design—are similarly afflicted. So the ultimate reason Holzer is my hero: her stark and refreshing deployment of clear language. In her world, words still have power. Giant illuminated words have extra power.

I had another thought after leaving the Whitney: Jenny Holzer may be the only person on the planet who should actually use Twitter. It turns out that there is a Holzer Twitter stream; sign up and phrases such as “Good deeds eventually are rewarded” are sent directly to your cell phone. Only, she’s not the one transforming truisms into tweets. An assistant to Holzer tells me that the artist is aware of the pirate Twitter account and “is fine with it.” The fake Holzer, by the way, has subscribed to the Twitter stream of Guy Debord, the dead French theorist, and this ghostly Debord is subscribed to (wouldn’t you know it?) Marshall McLuhan.