Jenny Holzer Shines New Light in Dark Places

Thirty-five years after she first set the Guggenheim’s rotunda ablaze with an electronic text racing along its spiral ramp, Jenny Holzer is reprising the installation, and turning up the heat. “Light Line,” a career-spanning exhibition, presents a newly updated LED sign which, together with other recent work, illuminates changes in political language and its modes of delivery unimaginable in 1989.

Her advice to viewers has remained fixed: Just read the art.

The targets of the texts Holzer wrote between the late 1970s and 2001 — variously excerpted and re-sequenced for the new sign — range broadly. Early on, she veered from laconic assessments of everyday injustice (“abuse of power comes as no surprise” is the best known) to puzzling propositions (“being happy is more important than anything else”; “it’s heroic to try to stop time”) and wry laugh lines (“having two or three people in love with you is like money in the bank”). In the newer, non-electronic work in this exhibition, she keeps a viselike grip on threats to democracy.

“Optimism is not my specialty,” Holzer, 73, freely conceded during a recent conversation at her river-facing Brooklyn studio, where one work after another bore witness to extrajudicial incarceration, “enhanced interrogation” and other governmental malfeasance. Her motivating question now, she said, is “how to represent lethal conflict” both in the United States and abroad. Yet her tone is imperturbably chipper. A Midwesterner by birth, born at midcentury, she is self-deprecating, plain-spoken and armed with a wicked gift for irony.

“Truisms,” Holzer’s first language-based work, emerged amid the Conceptual art of the late 1970s and its backdrop of post-Watergate political fatigue, financial disarray, urban blight and cross-disciplinary punk. The gentrifying Reagan years that followed gave rise to archly analytic work addressing institutional power. Holzer’s early choices reflected — and resisted — all these conditions.

She began to put her texts on electronic signboards in the early 1980s. Often scrolling too fast to read and then stopping for a few blinding beats to flash, they were sometimes installed in sensory-overloading proximity. In her award-winning 1990 Venice Biennale installation, the first solo exhibition by a female artist at the U.S. Pavilion, racks of high-colored signboards were mirrored in the polished stone floors.