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JENNY HOLZER: I like my pieces 
to be very short at moments

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and other times I want them to be sustained 
and capable of holding people’s interest.

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Time is an especially important 
consideration with the public works

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because I know people going 
by won’t have much time,

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so that’s why I tend to make very short things.

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When I’m working indoors I want 
to have bounty if you will,

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so if someone is willing to lie down on 
the floor, that they will be rewarded.

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It was more than a little intimidating to 
work in the van der Rohe building in Berlin.

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It took me a shockingly long 
amount of time to figure out that

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the building is a roof with glass walls.

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Once that came to me, I focused on the 
roof by putting the electronics there

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and then let the glass walls 
give me all those reflections.

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I want people to concentrate on the 
content of the writing and not who done it.

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I want the work to be of utility 
to as many people as possible.

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And I think if it were attributed 
to me, it would be easier to toss.

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There are lots of I’s and you’s 
in the inflammatory essays,

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but they’re not me, they’re many different 
voices on a host of unmentionable subjects.

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Somebody was kind enough to put top ten favorites,

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so let’s see if they’re ours.

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That color is less putrid, so how about 
“Fear is the most elegant weapon.”

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I’ll dig for the next one.

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“Rejoice, our times are intolerable.”

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Funny how that happens time 
and time again. (LAUGH)

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SPEAKER: Comes around.
HOLZER: There you go.

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HOLZER: “The end of the USA” 
is probably too vile, right?

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SPEAKER: Yeah.

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HOLZER: Okay. That even got taken down in Canada,
so I guess that’s not happening.

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HOLZER: David, they started 
out in the little size.

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Uhm, we also could use that cause those 
were the first ones in the ‘80s and uh,

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it would make kind of a different 
pattern if we’d go with the little guys,

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cause then we could make a 
really crazy patchwork thing.

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All right.

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Well let’s let them marinate in the 
basement and we can come back to them.

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DAVID: Okay.

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HOLZER: The TRUISMS were perhaps 
an overly ambitious attempt.

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I wanted to have almost every subject represented,

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almost every possible point of view.

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And then I did have to sort out what 
these sentences should appear upon.

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I stopped writing my own text in 2001.

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I found that I couldn’t say enough adequately

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and so it was with great pleasure 
that I went to the text of others.

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I was invited to make something 
for the lobby at 7 World Trade.

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And after much stewing, came up with 
the idea of doing a text in the wall.

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And not memorial text, but text about 
the joy of being in New York City.

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To make the piece I had to make quite a few 
site visits and not only stare at the space,

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but walk it and feel it.

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The space at 7 World Trade 
demanded that I fill the lobby,

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and in particular the glass wall.

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And so I thought that that text 
should flow by, should float by.

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And so it did.

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It’s never possible to know how things 
really will look until they’re up.

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So I’m as eager as anyone 
else to see how it will be.

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The poetics come from the poetry 
by others, not from myself.

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But what I can contribute is 
something like a visual poetics

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that can have to do with the color 
and the pauses, uhm the omissions.

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HOLZER: You know I thought maybe afterwards 
we could uhm work on the poem selection.

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So if you’re game, that would be really handy.

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Henri Cole and I were both fellows 
at the American Academy in Berlin.

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HENRI COLE: Jenny projected 
a poem of mine called Blur.

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It’s a sonnet sequence, on the 
police headquarters of Venice,

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which is across from the Peggy Guggenheim Museum.

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I guess it was a building of 
fear to Venetians during the war.

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And my poem was a...a very 
uh, kind of naked love poem

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and to project that onto this scary building 
was interesting and meaningful and beautiful…

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HOLZER: Substituting one 
kind of fear for another one.

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COLE: Yeah.

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HOLZER: Yeah we had two projectors, so 
the light crossed over the Grand Canal

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and so we would have the same poem on

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the Peggy Guggenheim as on the police station.

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HOLZER: I started doing the projections in 
1996 and have been working on those since.

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These are exceptionally powerful 
projectors and because they’re so bright,

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they let me throw text on rivers of 
some size and on giant buildings.

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It seems accurate to have the 
text legible and so knowable,

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and then a second later to disappear 
into fractured reflections in

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a form that’s almost unrecognizable.

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COLE: Can you imagine making art without words?

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HOLZER: I’ve done it a few times 
and it was a pleasure and a relief.

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Uh, or done it with very few words.

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HOLZER: Do you want to help me pick Orwell pages?

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We want to make a…

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a print of some of them and then 
also make some into paintings.

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So I would like your take on it.

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COLE: Uh-hm, I see.

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HOLZER: Cause I’ve looked at it a few 
times too many and I’m getting blind to it.

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COLE: Sure.

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HOLZER: Okay.

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HOLZER: The Redaction paintings include many 
pages that are almost completely blacked out,

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that before the documents were 
released the government blackened

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or excised portions for 
security or unknowable reasons.

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HOLZER: You know first I was 
just going to have these pages

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and I thought everybody would get it.

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COLE: These four pages.

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HOLZER: Yeah.

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COLE: I see.

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HOLZER: Yeah, but then I thought 
maybe including what was in the…

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the first of the file and then have 
a number of these dark to light

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that we have just a couple 
of pages with real content.

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You know that it says,

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“Orwell’s book is one of the few politically 
clear pictures of the complex situation

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during the first year of the war.”

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You know so there’s some reference to war.

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HOLZER: That’s more than 
I’ve said in twelve years.

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COLE: Yeah.
(LAUGHS)

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HOLZER: I’ve only worked with material 
that already has been released.

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I have not done any Freedom of 
Information Act request on my own

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because there’s so much to sift 
through that’s already out.

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HOLZER: I’m dedicated to having 
plans but then when I get here,

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about 50% of what I’ve schemed about 
pertains and the rest is news to me as I go.

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We often come thinking that a work 
will be a two-pager or a ten-pager.

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That, that tends to persist. What 
will change often will be colors.

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Now these are some of the 
more heavily redacted ones

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that’ll let us go from almost complete 
black down to just a single line.

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This was lifted from an...an 
early Renaissance painting.

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This is a little bit of the 
sky and you can see the...

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the merge from dark to light.

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Uhhm, and some of these paintings I 
think will have the dark part on top

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because it will be a little more 
ominous, a little more oppressive.

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And other times we will have the light uh, so.

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Yeah, that’s a...a bold one.

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This is a letter that’s a 
father appealing to the military

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so that the son isn’t charged criminally.

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So blue seems right. It’s dignified.

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Where’s the second page of that Mark?

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Let’s get on this part of it.

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MARK: You want me to flip it? See how it looks?

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HOLZER: Yeah, that looks like dark sky. Yeah.

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“I beg of you as a father for my son’s life.”

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Most of the paintings are 
only three times page size

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because I wanted them to 
refer to the actual documents.

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Other ones I made very, very tall so that 
they would be physically overwhelming.

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In addition to having all the paintings,

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all the still works if you will,

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I wanted to have one moving message piece so 
that I could include more text than I could in…

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in the paintings.

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So we had any number of the 
declassified documents transcribed

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and we showed them on LED’s 
so that this would stream by

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like more bad news than one can bear.

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I’ve always admired Goya’s black paintings.

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I’ve been walking up to the 
black paintings for so many years

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and couldn’t figure out what that meant to me.

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And when this material started coming out 
about the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq

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and the camps in the Middle 
East and in Guantanamo,

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Goya was at hand.

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I do tend to make work that focuses on 
cruelty and in hopes that people will recoil.

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My grandmother was a horse genius,

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so I always turn to the ponies to calm myself.

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HOLZER: Usually nothing too awful 
happens in the barn at night.

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And if it does we often can fix it.

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What could be more soothing?

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And then commentary. (LAUGHS)

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I agree, it was about worth that.

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I want to be able to continue to work,

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to pull from good and ghastly text,

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to offer these to people and to present 
them in ways that are lovely and exacting.