Jenny Holzer in "Protest" - Season 4 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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.