JENNY HOLZER: I like my pieces
to be very short at moments
and other times I want them to be sustained
and capable of holding people’s interest.
Time is an especially important
consideration with the public works
because I know people going
by won’t have much time,
so that’s why I tend to make very short things.
When I’m working indoors I want
to have bounty if you will,
so if someone is willing to lie down on
the floor, that they will be rewarded.
It was more than a little intimidating to
work in the van der Rohe building in Berlin.
It took me a shockingly long
amount of time to figure out that
the building is a roof with glass walls.
Once that came to me, I focused on the
roof by putting the electronics there
and then let the glass walls
give me all those reflections.
I want people to concentrate on the
content of the writing and not who done it.
I want the work to be of utility
to as many people as possible.
And I think if it were attributed
to me, it would be easier to toss.
There are lots of I’s and you’s
in the inflammatory essays,
but they’re not me, they’re many different
voices on a host of unmentionable subjects.
Somebody was kind enough to put top ten favorites,
so let’s see if they’re ours.
That color is less putrid, so how about
“Fear is the most elegant weapon.”
I’ll dig for the next one.
“Rejoice, our times are intolerable.”
Funny how that happens time
and time again. (LAUGH)
SPEAKER: Comes around.
HOLZER: There you go.
HOLZER: “The end of the USA”
is probably too vile, right?
SPEAKER: Yeah.
HOLZER: Okay. That even got taken down in Canada,
so I guess that’s not happening.
HOLZER: David, they started
out in the little size.
Uhm, we also could use that cause those
were the first ones in the ‘80s and uh,
it would make kind of a different
pattern if we’d go with the little guys,
cause then we could make a
really crazy patchwork thing.
All right.
Well let’s let them marinate in the
basement and we can come back to them.
DAVID: Okay.
HOLZER: The TRUISMS were perhaps
an overly ambitious attempt.
I wanted to have almost every subject represented,
almost every possible point of view.
And then I did have to sort out what
these sentences should appear upon.
I stopped writing my own text in 2001.
I found that I couldn’t say enough adequately
and so it was with great pleasure
that I went to the text of others.
I was invited to make something
for the lobby at 7 World Trade.
And after much stewing, came up with
the idea of doing a text in the wall.
And not memorial text, but text about
the joy of being in New York City.
To make the piece I had to make quite a few
site visits and not only stare at the space,
but walk it and feel it.
The space at 7 World Trade
demanded that I fill the lobby,
and in particular the glass wall.
And so I thought that that text
should flow by, should float by.
And so it did.
It’s never possible to know how things
really will look until they’re up.
So I’m as eager as anyone
else to see how it will be.
The poetics come from the poetry
by others, not from myself.
But what I can contribute is
something like a visual poetics
that can have to do with the color
and the pauses, uhm the omissions.
HOLZER: You know I thought maybe afterwards
we could uhm work on the poem selection.
So if you’re game, that would be really handy.
Henri Cole and I were both fellows
at the American Academy in Berlin.
HENRI COLE: Jenny projected
a poem of mine called Blur.
It’s a sonnet sequence, on the
police headquarters of Venice,
which is across from the Peggy Guggenheim Museum.
I guess it was a building of
fear to Venetians during the war.
And my poem was a...a very
uh, kind of naked love poem
and to project that onto this scary building
was interesting and meaningful and beautiful…
HOLZER: Substituting one
kind of fear for another one.
COLE: Yeah.
HOLZER: Yeah we had two projectors, so
the light crossed over the Grand Canal
and so we would have the same poem on
the Peggy Guggenheim as on the police station.
HOLZER: I started doing the projections in
1996 and have been working on those since.
These are exceptionally powerful
projectors and because they’re so bright,
they let me throw text on rivers of
some size and on giant buildings.
It seems accurate to have the
text legible and so knowable,
and then a second later to disappear
into fractured reflections in
a form that’s almost unrecognizable.
COLE: Can you imagine making art without words?
HOLZER: I’ve done it a few times
and it was a pleasure and a relief.
Uh, or done it with very few words.
HOLZER: Do you want to help me pick Orwell pages?
We want to make a…
a print of some of them and then
also make some into paintings.
So I would like your take on it.
COLE: Uh-hm, I see.
HOLZER: Cause I’ve looked at it a few
times too many and I’m getting blind to it.
COLE: Sure.
HOLZER: Okay.
HOLZER: The Redaction paintings include many
pages that are almost completely blacked out,
that before the documents were
released the government blackened
or excised portions for
security or unknowable reasons.
HOLZER: You know first I was
just going to have these pages
and I thought everybody would get it.
COLE: These four pages.
HOLZER: Yeah.
COLE: I see.
HOLZER: Yeah, but then I thought
maybe including what was in the…
the first of the file and then have
a number of these dark to light
that we have just a couple
of pages with real content.
You know that it says,
“Orwell’s book is one of the few politically
clear pictures of the complex situation
during the first year of the war.”
You know so there’s some reference to war.
HOLZER: That’s more than
I’ve said in twelve years.
COLE: Yeah.
(LAUGHS)
HOLZER: I’ve only worked with material
that already has been released.
I have not done any Freedom of
Information Act request on my own
because there’s so much to sift
through that’s already out.
HOLZER: I’m dedicated to having
plans but then when I get here,
about 50% of what I’ve schemed about
pertains and the rest is news to me as I go.
We often come thinking that a work
will be a two-pager or a ten-pager.
That, that tends to persist. What
will change often will be colors.
Now these are some of the
more heavily redacted ones
that’ll let us go from almost complete
black down to just a single line.
This was lifted from an...an
early Renaissance painting.
This is a little bit of the
sky and you can see the...
the merge from dark to light.
Uhhm, and some of these paintings I
think will have the dark part on top
because it will be a little more
ominous, a little more oppressive.
And other times we will have the light uh, so.
Yeah, that’s a...a bold one.
This is a letter that’s a
father appealing to the military
so that the son isn’t charged criminally.
So blue seems right. It’s dignified.
Where’s the second page of that Mark?
Let’s get on this part of it.
MARK: You want me to flip it? See how it looks?
HOLZER: Yeah, that looks like dark sky. Yeah.
“I beg of you as a father for my son’s life.”
Most of the paintings are
only three times page size
because I wanted them to
refer to the actual documents.
Other ones I made very, very tall so that
they would be physically overwhelming.
In addition to having all the paintings,
all the still works if you will,
I wanted to have one moving message piece so
that I could include more text than I could in…
in the paintings.
So we had any number of the
declassified documents transcribed
and we showed them on LED’s
so that this would stream by
like more bad news than one can bear.
I’ve always admired Goya’s black paintings.
I’ve been walking up to the
black paintings for so many years
and couldn’t figure out what that meant to me.
And when this material started coming out
about the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq
and the camps in the Middle
East and in Guantanamo,
Goya was at hand.
I do tend to make work that focuses on
cruelty and in hopes that people will recoil.
My grandmother was a horse genius,
so I always turn to the ponies to calm myself.
HOLZER: Usually nothing too awful
happens in the barn at night.
And if it does we often can fix it.
What could be more soothing?
And then commentary. (LAUGHS)
I agree, it was about worth that.
I want to be able to continue to work,
to pull from good and ghastly text,
to offer these to people and to present
them in ways that are lovely and exacting.