In her thirty-year career, Jenny Holzer has explored the power of words in public spaces and their impact on individuals, exploring the relationship between truth, belief, bias, power and control. His highly anticipated and widely attended presentation at the Guggenheim reflects his deep engagement with signs and symbols and their social, political, and commercial impact. As the big show, “Line of Light,” ends Sunday (Sept. 29), it’s a good time to reflect on its importance in today’s complex social and political context.
In her shrill voice, Holzer speaks about pressing issues such as climate justice, women’s rights, political corruption and the violence of war. His return to the Guggenheim takes place in an increasingly polarized political environment and amid global instability, making the exhibition a timely examination of the bonds tied to power—whether exercised by governments or individuals. The exhibition emphasizes the constant flux between words and reality, which has been compounded by emerging communication technologies. Here, the artist adopts and uses mass communication techniques to address the politics of public space, using language as his primary means to respond to sociopolitical realities and reveal how we gain—or lose—information about the world around us.
Photo: Michele Perel © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
In 1982, the Public Art Fund invited Holzer to present his work on a large urban scale with a sign in Times Square, creating something akin to a billboard. Electronic signals have been central to his practice ever since. One of the highlights is his 1989 LED artwork for the Guggenheim, which has been reimagined for this new exhibition using the latest technology, including artificial intelligence, to create graphics behind scrolling text. Ascending all six ramps, the central installation includes texts from his “Truism” series (1977-1996) and is the result of a complex reverse engineering process carried out by the Guggenheim curators, raising interesting questions about the long-term nature of digital messages and words.
Holzer started writing to him The facts (1977-79) while a student in the Whitney Independent Study Program, thought of short, often idiosyncratic statements that mimic the language of advertising and propaganda to question the relative nature of reality. Playing between public and private, center and street, legal and illegal, Holzer used these sharp aphorisms with both temporary and permanent structures such as posters, electric signs, stone benches and paintings. By moving between existing claims and public comments on an urban scale, Holzer used language to explore how facts can be silenced, distorted or manipulated by people in power, the media and the government. His work reveals the communication techniques that lead people to internalize the ideas and opinions created by those who rule irrationally. Echoing the ideas of Paulo Freire on Pedagogy of the oppressedit addresses the ways in which people tend to uncritically accept responses from external authorities instead of engaging with complex ideas as multidimensional beings who exist simultaneously as individuals, family members, and community members.
This problematic relationship between language and media is evident in the first room, which contains The Burning Wall (1979-1982)—a series of dynamic, thought-provoking posters that cover every wall and create a chaotic, abstract and pixelated grid. Although the sharp assertion of the posters suggests a direct awareness that challenges the norms and ideas of society, the message is also immersed in a disturbing multi-color design, which creates a constant tension between the content and the context.
As one progresses through the show, the new version of The truth from 2023 it includes these curious and provocative statements carved into six Carrara white marble benches, standing as irreconcilable monuments to a shared failure to determine the truth. “A positive attitude makes all the difference in the world. Ambition is as dangerous as complacency. Confused is the way to stay honest,” read another. This statement encapsulates the core message that Holzer seems to be conveying: to embrace confusion and ignorance, in the spirit of thinkers like Plato and Susan Sontag, as a way to navigate a complex reality while remaining skeptical. Ignorance, rather than being a way of ignoring the truth, becomes a catalyst for deep learning and engagement.
Further up the ramp, which contrasts dramatically with the permanence of the solid marble, are about forty odd pieces of metal placed on the wall as part of Holzer’s. You are cursed series. Looking like defaced versions of ancient stones, these plaques feature tweets sent by Donald Trump during his presidency. With their wrinkled surfaces and frayed edges, they show their timeless, rusty appearance as soon as a tweet is sent—it’s only worth the fleeting attention they get from endless internet circulation.
One level higher in the rotunda, the exhibition expands to include a number of works based on political and military texts, reflecting Holzer’s deep examination of propaganda, factual information and misleading messages. Shredded government documents are transformed into ghostly painted versions of the originals, sometimes with a silvery sheen. The deliberate creation of original messages with inscriptions, leafy metal and moving watercolor elements complicates the viewer’s relationship with reality, resulting in a difficult process of recording the relevance of each piece, aided only by the scanning of QR captions. Upon closer inspection, these seemingly cryptic documents actually hide documents from US military records, post-9/11 detainee interviews and government reports on Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. Holzer’s interplay of color, paint and light becomes a trap and a test—challenging the viewer to allow a superficial appreciation of the work’s aesthetic appeal or take a more investigative approach.
As the show continues down the ramp, viewers encounter bronze and aluminum plaques created by Holzer in the early 1980s. Equipping the beauty of permanent labels on historical buildings, these works have the same authority as warnings, directions or silent observations while conveying an existing advice from him. Life (1980-1982) and Survival (1983-1985) series.
Amidst this endless mix of symbols, semiological traps and traces placed on the side of the Guggenheim ramp, the raw reality of violence suddenly emerges through a series of sculpted replicas of human scapulae attached to the wings of the building. As Heidegger might suggest in his “Being-to-Death,” these elements serve as stark reminders of death, confronting viewers with an inescapable philosophical and existential reality that no one can escape. In this way, Holzer’s work seems to be consistent with the Heideggerian belief that facing death is not just a personal concern but a fundamental ontological condition, revealing the nature of Existence as eternally imperfect and “questionable.”
By the time one reaches the end of the show, Jenny Holzer’s position becomes crystal clear: at some point, conflict with reality is unavoidable. This view is emphasized by three titled broken marble benches It’s broken (2024), lying crushed on the floor. The truth is always there, but only in different parts, showing a moment of rupture that reveals the weakness of any illusion. It suggests that the only truth we can hope to understand is the scattered puzzle of things we must carefully piece together to find meaning. Ultimately, Holzer also succeeds in provoking a dialogue about the nature of truth and its fragility—whether it is objective, dependent on, or entirely constructed by social power structures.
