Jenny Holzer

“I want to write about what needs attention,” Jenny Holzer once explained in an interview, and since “Truisms,” her series of one-liners displayed on posters and LEDs, first began appearing on the streets of New York in the 1970s, she has continually engaged with pressing issues, including consumerism, sexual violence, abuse, and war. Often disguising them as advertising slogans, Holzer juxtaposes the opposing viewpoints of victims, perpetrators, and witnesses in a mass-media context while simultaneously subverting it with controversial content.

For her current exhibition, “DETAINED,” which includes a large-scale LED piece and a series of paintings, Holzer engages with war crimes in Iraq—a subject surrounded by ambiguities and contradictions. Drawing on declassified US-government documents (memos, statements, e-mails), she creates a provocative war memorial that, instead of honoring soldiers and innocent victims, deals with the more uncomfortable truths of power abuse and the blurring of the fine line between victim and criminal. The LED work Torso, 2007, is the centerpiece of the installation. It functions like a visual magnet, seducing the viewer with the familiar polished and glamorous form of bright neon signage. The piece consists of ten semicircular tickers attached to the wall that display fast-moving streams of contradictory statements, reports, and e-mails from the case files of soldiers accused of detainee abuse. The detached official language forms a sharp contrast to the emotional accounts of abuse and humiliation voiced by victims, making it increasingly difficult to remain unaffected. Confusion grows as the layers of opposing viewpoints and accusations build up, and the words suddenly start merging into an undecipherable accumulation of flashing multicolored letters.

The simple black-and-white paintings on the surrounding walls offer a welcome break from the overwhelming experience of the mesmerizing LED display. Each painting depicts a black handprint (blotted out by the US government) of an American soldier accused of war crimes in Iraq. While making less of a visual impact than Torso, the doubling of the realistic presentation of handprints and the abstract texts on LED strengthens the framework of contrasts of the installation, which seems to force the viewer to form an opinion where no truth is to be found.