Although Jenny Holzer’s writing has often been the main focus of critics describing her art, her new and literally brilliant show makes it clear that she is as much a colorist as she is a provider of weighty aphorisms. Perhaps a reading closest to the truth would see her as an inspirational maker of active intellectual environments, whose effectiveness is far greater than the sum of their parts. At this point in time, there is a tradition of political resistance among artists—a legacy Holzer herself is partly responsible for—in the face of our government’s excessive force and anachronistically imperial ambitions. Taking our involvement in Iraq as her cue, Holzer has produced a truly political show, in which blacked-out secret document paintings and darkened handprints of persons suspected of torture add up to a bleak disregard for our military excursion. At the same time, her use of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) show her to be aware of the medium’s remarkably beautiful color, which according to both artist and curators stem from such high-brow sources as Matisse and Rothko. It seems to me somewhat exaggerated to tie modernist painting to so demotic an idiom as the LED, which after all is a technology more than a material. But maybe that is not really Holzer’s point—she wants the diodes to reach as many people as possible, and, equally important, she wants to communicate as much as possible with her writings.
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