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.