Bringing to light.

JENNY HOLZER: ARCHIVE

CHEIM & READ AND YVON LAMBERT

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

MAY 12-JUNE 17, 2006

JENNY HOLZER: REDACTION PAINTINGS

ESSAY BY ROBERT STORR

NEW YORK: CHEIM & READ, 2006

112 pp./$65.00 (HB)

Jenny Holzer is well-known for her projections, scrolling texts, and her pithy, dislocating statements collected in her Truisms (1977-present). Two of her truisms, "The abuse of power comes as no surprise" and "Opacity is an irresistible challenge," might frame the latest exhibition of her work at Cheim & Read and at Yvon Lambert in New York City. While projections--exhibited in the form of photographs--and a light-emitting diode (LED) device with scrolling text are present, large paintings of redacted internal government documents related to Iraq, the War on Terror, and domestic surveillance comprise the bulk of the exhibition. They were obtained through the National Security Archive, a private foundation intended to facilitate access to documents related to national security, and the Freedom of Information Act. These documents cover a fifty-year period, and include a range of subjects from the artist Alice Neel's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) file of the 1950s to memos from former National Security Advisor John Poindexter related to the Iran-Contra Affair. More recent documents include a plea for clemency from a soldier's parents regarding an impending court martial, and an antiseptic discussion of torture from the United States Army. If documentaries like The Road to Guantanamo (2006, by Michael Winterbottom) or a recent broadcast of the public radio program This American Life humanize detainees through interviews, Holzer takes a different but equally necessary tact by bringing to light the activities of bureaucrats, mid-level "technocrats," military brass, and White House officials.

"Bringing to light" is not a capriciously chosen phrase; it is the tension between the visible and invisible, the known and unknown, that is at the core of what this exhibition unearths. The U.S. has a shadow government in case of another attack: the country fights a spectral enemy, omnipresent but unseen, and the circle of legislators briefed on administration activities grows ever smaller. Similarly, recent Bush administration arguments before the Supreme Court regarding the right of unlawful combatants to have recourse to the federal judiciary asked the Justices not to recognize their right to due process, placing them in legal limbo. Recent revelations about the National Security Administration's warrantless spying on Americans underscores these concerns and calls to mind the history of FBI espionage activities that focused on artists and leftists like Neel. From the black hole of North Korea to the iron curtain of the Soviet bloc, it is authoritarian governments that are opaque, inscrutable, and dark, while democracies are transparent, accountable, and clear. Yet a letter from former Secretary of State Colin Powell's office displayed in Holzer's exhibtion, to cite one example, is completely redacted except for the letterhead, salutation, and closing--a mockery of the Freedom of Information Act and democratic pretense.

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Holzer's well-known LED displays and projections onto buildings have little to do with the contemplative looking or the measured reactions engendered by the ideal space of the gallery, or the careful examination that these blown-up paintings invite. Generally, Holzer's work cuts into the overwhelmed visual field of the pedestrian, jarring for a moment one's otherwise smooth intake of advertising signage that litters every public space, real and virtual, in our late-capitalist fantasy land. The paintings, by contrast, are taken in one at a time, frame by frame, page by page, which reconfigures their status as evidence. Rather than being postage stamp-sized reproductions in the margins of news magazines, flashed on the screen during an evening news broadcast, or exhibited at a Congressional hearing, these documents are giant, still images, hung on a gallery wall, meant for considered and extended looking. The blots, blotches, and telltale marks from repeated Xeroxing along with the crude redactions that look like they were done with a large black Magic Marker are indicators of the distance between the original and the public version, a measure also of the distance from the truth that the unredacted original might offer. These marks are indices of the various hands and bureaucratic processes the documents go through before they are released, but indices that say nothing about the logic, reason, or process involved. In passages where paint is thickly or awkwardly applied, the fact that these paintings are products of human hands is obvious. These passages reiterate the idea that the documents are also the product of human actions: someone crafted these policies, typed this letter, initialed this memo. Perhaps too, it suggests these actions can be undone.

The heavily blacked-out documents belie claims to openness, to oversight, and to an informed public, even if the ability to simply request them is a gesture toward these principles. The documents are also the paper trail of the procedural framework in which these insidious and horrific government actions and policies are carried out. The formal, businesslike tone--they are at one level banal memos destined to be filed away--shocks just as much as what these documents actually describe. Holzer has produced a powerful statement about transparency and opacity, visibility and invisibility, as metaphors for the profound constitutional and ethical dilemmas confronting Americans today.

JAMES GLISSON is a PhD student in the Art History Department at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.