With her often cryptic truisms, musings, adages and aphorisms, Jenny Holzer has penetrated the deepest human fears, perversities and desires for nearly thirty years. She has taken these text-based pieces—beginning with stickers and posters and then in projections and, most famously, LED displays—well outside museums and galleries and into the public realm (not to mention flagships for the now all-but-defunct Helmut Lang). And currently, through October 9, Holzer is lighting up New York. Every night, For the City, a project in collaboration with Creative Time, will see several landmark Manhattan buildings awash in politically-charged reflections that are in tune with the times. Holzer will scroll declassified—and sometimes damning—government documents, as well as work by about twenty poets, across the facades of Rockefeller Center (through October 2), the New York Public Library (October 6-9) and New York University's Bobst Library (October 3-5) in light projections from dusk until midnight. We sat down with the disarmingly friendly artist in a midtown Manhattan cafe and got her thoughts on the state of world affairs, the fate of Helmut Lang and her obsession with death.
You did a similar project last year, projecting texts onto buildings in New York like the Cooper Union, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and others. That was timed to coincide with the presidential election, wasn't it?
I thought it was a good time to show people poems such as those by Wislawa Szymborska, who talks about refugees and torture and many things relating to politics or the aftermath of political decisions.
And what are some of the texts you're using this time?
Many poems are by Szymborska because she writes so beautifully and so clearly. We're also using ones by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and there's a selection that starts with Walt Whitman's Manahatta and goes through the poems of Henri Cole and others, speaking about life in this city. And then there are the documents.
Tell me about those.
They are declassified and other sensitive documents [from the National Security Archive and other sites] released courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act. Anyone can find them on the web. One that comes to mind is an FBI email. It notes that Defense Department individuals impersonated FBI agents at Guantanamo so that if something came out about torture tactics used there, the FBI would be "left holding the bag." The war has much to do with my selections.
How about the relationship between context and content? It can't be an accident that you chose two libraries and Rockefeller Center as your sites.
Rockefeller Center was built by a powerful family and it looks like power, and so having poems about power and the abuse of power seems logical there. And it is a place where people from all over the world assemble. The libraries are perfect because I can put what's inside them on them.
There's something funny, though, about an artist known for her truism, "Protect me from what I want," doing installations at fashion flagships, as you did with Helmut Lang. Was that kind of irony intentional?
That came about through friendship. I met Helmut, liked him and wanted to work with him, and also with [the architect] Richard Gluckman, with whom Helmut worked. If I'd been more disciplined, I would have liked to have been an architect. But the installation wasn't an ironic or a contrarian move. It was kind of a love move. I love Helmut.
It's really a shame what's happened with his company—or, I guess, the problem is that it isn't his company anymore.
Yes, it is a shame. He's good at what he does. But I think he's enjoying some rest because he's been working like a fiend for all these many years. He'll come back with something.
In using light and projections, your own work is somewhat ephemeral.
It's a pretty good metaphor for dying, right?
So you're saying your work is about death?
A lot of it is about unnecessary death and the nastiness that goes with it. But I also like the beauty of these projections as they envelop the buildings and then go off into the night sky. I simply like how they look and how they affect you emotionally.
Where would you like to take your projections next?
I'm happy with both libraries and Rockefeller Center because I imagine a lot of people will read these poems and see these documents. But I would also like to do this in Washington, D.C. And I can think of any number of white buildings on which the texts would be visible.
(end)
