Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021
Text: U.S. government document
Platinum and red gold leaf and oil on linen
203.2 × 157.5 × 3.8 cm
80 × 62 × 1 1/2 inches

USD 350,000 (excl. tax)
Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021
Text: U.S. government document
Platinum and red gold leaf and oil on linen
203.2 × 157.5 × 3.8 cm
80 × 62 × 1 1/2 inches

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021
Text: U.S. government document
Platinum and red gold leaf and oil on linen
203.2 × 157.5 × 3.8 cm
80 × 62 × 1 1/2 inches

Details
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Jenny Holzer researches U.S. government documents, many released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and often heavily redacted, using them as source material for works that expose the fault lines and sometimes transparency of American political power.

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021 (detail)

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021 (detail)

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021 (detail)

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021 (detail)

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Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021 (detail)

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021 (detail)

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021 (detail)

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021 (detail)

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Her redaction paintings meticulously reproduce the documents unearthed—originally concerning the global “War on Terror” and U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more recently related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Trump administration, as with Thank you (2021). The documents are traced onto linen and then covered in paint and swaths of metal leaf. By reproducing elements of these reports so carefully, Holzer can highlight the government’s revelations as well as the deliberate erasure and concealment of information. Thank you, with its gilded surfaces, zones of text and rectangular redactions, extends this body of work with its blend of historical reference and contemporary relevance.

 

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer, Thing Indescribable, installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, Bilbao, 2019. Photo: José Miguel Llano

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer, SOFTER, installation view, Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, 2017. Photo: Jack Hems

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer, SOFTER, installation view, Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, 2017. Photo: Ed Horder

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer, War Paintings, installation view, Written Art Foundation at Museo Correr, Venice, 2015. Photo: Philipp Ottendörfer

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer, Endgame, installation view, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2012. Photo: Collin LaFleche

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer, Jenny Holzer, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2009. Photo: Christian Cappuro

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Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer, Thing Indescribable, installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, Bilbao, 2019. Photo: José Miguel Llano

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer, SOFTER, installation view, Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, 2017. Photo: Jack Hems

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer, SOFTER, installation view, Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, 2017. Photo: Ed Horder

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer, War Paintings, installation view, Written Art Foundation at Museo Correr, Venice, 2015. Photo: Philipp Ottendörfer

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer, Endgame, installation view, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2012. Photo: Collin LaFleche

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer, Jenny Holzer, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2009. Photo: Christian Cappuro

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Text has always been Holzer’s primary medium. Since the late 1970s, she has presented both her own pithy phrases and the text of others in an array of forms, from posters and LED displays to stone benches and paintings. Holzer’s emphasis on the written word is balanced with her attention to visual form and allure. Her works demand to be seen.

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021 (detail)

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021 (detail)

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Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021 (detail)

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021 (detail)

Details
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Text has always been Holzer’s primary medium. Since the late 1970s, she has presented both her own pithy phrases and the text of others in an array of forms, from posters and LED displays to stone benches and paintings. Holzer’s emphasis on the written word is balanced with her attention to visual form and allure. Her works demand to be seen.

 

Below, Nick Morgan examines Jenny Holzer’s Thank You, in the context of her redacted paintings and silkscreens. Morgan teaches art history at Columbia University. His essays and criticism have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Artforum, Garage, Hyperallergic and the Financial Times Sunday Magazine, as well as scholarly journals such as ArtMargins and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.

 

Looking at Thank you—a 2021 painting by Jenny Holzer, which reproduces a page from a government transcript of the first deposition in the 2019 impeachment of Donald Trump—it is hard not to think of the disgraced politician’s own aesthetic predilections. The work is lavish: Holzer has crafted the image out of gold, platinum and a palimpsest of oil paints. Trump’s brand, meanwhile, is indelibly linked with gold: recall the gilded furnishings of his Fifth Avenue penthouse, or the glinting lettering of his name outside that and other Trump towers. Accounts of the Trump aesthetic, and how this aesthetic might reveal something about his politics, proliferated during his term in office.

If Trumpland endlessly dallied with the meretricious, Holzer looks to that glitter and tells a different story, one that has to do with the resonances and histories of materials as much as the hypnotizing if repulsive pull of the present moment. Put simply, the artist trades fool’s gold for real ore. I mean this literally: like Byzantine icon-makers, medieval manuscript illuminators and early Renaissance painters, Holzer here has turned to the precious material in leaf form. Within such earlier, religious paintings, gold introduced an experience of the divine as luminous, immaterial and intangible. A magpie instinct would have drawn viewers into the fold, something Holzer accomplishes here to different ends: the painting’s alluring aesthetic qualities capture attention and encourage the spectator to consider the content (or pointed lack thereof) in the bureaucratic source material.

 

 

Medieval artworks were sometimes characterized by the same palpable absence that drives Holzer’s painting: consider, for example, the Master of Heiligenkreuz’s Death of the Virgin, dated circa 1400. At bottom center of the otherwise busy gilded composition, an open zone of rectangulated blankness marked by an unused cushion provides space for the viewer to imaginatively enter the depicted scene, engaging in their own process of contemplation. In Thank you, the proliferation of such voids echoes the spectator’s own relationship to what the painting documents. The 360-page document from which the reproduced page is drawn transcribes an interview by House members and staffers with former U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker. Volker describes various interactions between Trump, Ukrainian President Zelensky, and Rudy Giuliani. The corrupt nature of those interactions was the linchpin of the impeachment investigation. But despite the highly visible nature of the impeachment proceedings, this and other early depositions took place privately, in a closed-door session in a secure area of the U.S. Capitol building. And the meeting was devoted to a discussion of interactions that themselves happened behind the curtain: just what did Giuliani do in Ukraine? Just what kinds of commands, promises and subterfuges underlay Trump’s conversation with Zelensky? Inviting us in, the painting’s metallic redactions give form to that epistemic limbo.

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Master of Heiligenkreuz, Death of the Virgin, c. 1400, The Cleveland Museum of Art

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Jenny Holzer – The Work

Master of Heiligenkreuz, Death of the Virgin, c. 1400, The Cleveland Museum of Art

 

Medieval artworks were sometimes characterized by the same palpable absence that drives Holzer’s painting: consider, for example, the Master of Heiligenkreuz’s Death of the Virgin, dated circa 1400. At bottom center of the otherwise busy gilded composition, an open zone of rectangulated blankness marked by an unused cushion provides space for the viewer to imaginatively enter the depicted scene, engaging in their own process of contemplation. In Thank you, the proliferation of such voids echoes the spectator’s own relationship to what the painting documents. The 360-page document from which the reproduced page is drawn transcribes an interview by House members and staffers with former U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker. Volker describes various interactions between Trump, Ukrainian President Zelensky, and Rudy Giuliani. The corrupt nature of those interactions was the linchpin of the impeachment investigation. But despite the highly visible nature of the impeachment proceedings, this and other early depositions took place privately, in a closed-door session in a secure area of the U.S. Capitol building. And the meeting was devoted to a discussion of interactions that themselves happened behind the curtain: just what did Giuliani do in Ukraine? Just what kinds of commands, promises and subterfuges underlay Trump’s conversation with Zelensky? Inviting us in, the painting’s metallic redactions give form to that epistemic limbo.

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Eustache Deschamps, Le Double lay de fragilité humaine/Lotario dei Segni, De miseria humanae conditionis, 1383, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

 

Absence permeates Holzer’s paintings, from her first silkscreens documenting the torture of suspected terrorists and other abuses of power in the “War on Terror” to the subsequent hand-painted works that have explored resonances between declassified documents and the history of abstract painting and, most recently, investigated newly released documents related to Trump’s presidency. The lack of content in heavily or entirely redacted documents can be as revealing, in its own way, as text. Absence implies the impossible and the unknowable. In medieval artworks such as the striking manuscript by Eustache Deschamps in the Bibliothèque nationale, “framed empty spaces offer an attempt to represent the unrepresentable: forces of death or sinful fruition, acts that can be witnessed but not experienced for themselves—and certainly not properly visualized,” writes art historian Elina Gertsman. In Holzer’s painting, these sites of unrepresentability are Janus-faced: they evoke the transcendent (as in an icon’s shimmer when seen by candlelight) as much as the unspeakable. The content of various of her paintings, starting with the torture documents and extending to records of Trump malfeasance, regularly exceeds the bounds of the thinkable or sayable.

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Jenny Holzer – The Work

Eustache Deschamps, Le Double lay de fragilité humaine/Lotario dei Segni, De miseria humanae conditionis, 1383, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

 

Absence permeates Holzer’s paintings, from her first silkscreens documenting the torture of suspected terrorists and other abuses of power in the “War on Terror” to the subsequent hand-painted works that have explored resonances between declassified documents and the history of abstract painting and, most recently, investigated newly released documents related to Trump’s presidency. The lack of content in heavily or entirely redacted documents can be as revealing, in its own way, as text. Absence implies the impossible and the unknowable. In medieval artworks such as the striking manuscript by Eustache Deschamps in the Bibliothèque nationale, “framed empty spaces offer an attempt to represent the unrepresentable: forces of death or sinful fruition, acts that can be witnessed but not experienced for themselves—and certainly not properly visualized,” writes art historian Elina Gertsman. In Holzer’s painting, these sites of unrepresentability are Janus-faced: they evoke the transcendent (as in an icon’s shimmer when seen by candlelight) as much as the unspeakable. The content of various of her paintings, starting with the torture documents and extending to records of Trump malfeasance, regularly exceeds the bounds of the thinkable or sayable.

Renaissance art theorist Leon Battista Alberti worried over the use of gold by artists such as the Heiligenkreuz Master, stating that “when done in gold on a flat panel, many surfaces that should have been presented as light and gleaming, appear dark to the viewer, while others that should be darker, probably look brighter.” For Holzer, this destabilization is an advantage. With its large scale, Thank you encourages an embodied mode of viewing that unleashes the capacities of Alberti’s oscillation. As the viewer approaches and retreats, different facets of the canvas come into and out of perceptibility. Gold leaf is manufactured in small squares, and from certain vantages the resulting grid of cubes knitting the overall composition of Thank you together becomes apparent. Agnes Martin mobilized a similar dynamic in the 1963 work Friendship. Holzer, like Martin (whose work she admires), reciprocates the viewer’s close looking with a meditative sense of underlying structure. Multiple layers of oil paint in yellows, oranges and burnt sienna resting underneath the leaf also sometimes shine through. Gentle abrasion of the leaf hint at murky depths below, like small interruptions of truth piercing an alluring veil. Seemingly oxidized patches of red ground at the margins and on the sides of the canvas recall Martin’s sgraffito in Friendship, suggesting hidden depths and submerged subtexts—and are just beautiful. This palimpsestic quality produces a sense of concealing and revealing, or rather of getting as much as you can from what is concealed and is going to stay that way. It’s a lesson in dealing with withholding and truculence (like that betrayed by some of the belligerent politicians recorded elsewhere in the transcript).

 

Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021
Text: U.S. government document
Platinum and red gold leaf and oil on linen
203.2 × 157.5 × 3.8 cm
80 × 62 × 1 1/2 inches

image/svg+xml
Details
Jenny Holzer – The Work

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021
Text: U.S. government document
Platinum and red gold leaf and oil on linen
203.2 × 157.5 × 3.8 cm
80 × 62 × 1 1/2 inches

Jenny Holzer
Thank you, 2021

Details
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Unlike many of Holzer’s earlier paintings, Thank you is not drawn from a declassified document. Rather, impeachment managers chose to release it to the general public about a month after the interview took place, with only minor redactions. The transcript was never classified, and indeed various officials throughout the deposition are at pains to clarify that none of what Volker shares—and that thus shows up in the transcript—is classified. This is important: that even a non-classified document bears the marks of redaction speaks to the opacity that characterizes governmental discourse in the very moment it declares itself at the apex of its own openness. The painting materializes a battle for control over information, optics, access and visibility. In this way it is similar to the full transcript, in which staffers and senators have it out over who has access to the record of this speech and what of that speech counts as real, as true. Top impeachment investigator Daniel Goldman, figuring in the transcript like a white knight for transparency, cites Obama’s Executive Order 13526, which replaced the Bush administration’s restrictive declassification policy (which had led to many of the redacted documents used in earlier phases of Holzer’s painting). Among the stipulations in EO13526, Goldman notes for the record, is that “In no case shall information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to conceal violations of law.”

 

My eye catches on one last detail: Goldman’s name, at bottom center, is gilded, while his transcribed comment, “Thank you,” is not. Perhaps this subtle disjunction is Holzer’s way of keeping the viewer on their toes, alert to the possibilities of interpretation, investigation and simple puzzlement. It keeps the minimal text from looking always as we expect it to, as in street art practice’s use of variation to hold the reader’s attention. The gilded inscription puts me in mind of an enigmatic artwork—or is it a redacted poem?—that Man Ray, another artist Holzer esteems, presented in an issue of Francis Picabia’s avant-garde magazine, 391. Like the gilded “Mr. Goldman,” Man Ray’s marks flirt with the decorative and treat words as concrete, as objects. Thank you couples austerity and sensuality; the painting is ravishing.

Jenny Holzer, Thank you, 2021 (time-lapse of details)

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Jenny Holzer, Thank you, 2021 (time-lapse of details)

My eye catches on one last detail: Goldman’s name, at bottom center, is gilded, while his transcribed comment, “Thank you,” is not. Perhaps this subtle disjunction is Holzer’s way of keeping the viewer on their toes, alert to the possibilities of interpretation, investigation and simple puzzlement. It keeps the minimal text from looking always as we expect it to, as in street art practice’s use of variation to hold the reader’s attention. The gilded inscription puts me in mind of an enigmatic artwork—or is it a redacted poem?—that Man Ray, another artist Holzer esteems, presented in an issue of Francis Picabia’s avant-garde magazine, 391. Like the gilded “Mr. Goldman,” Man Ray’s marks flirt with the decorative and treat words as concrete, as objects. Thank you couples austerity and sensuality; the painting is ravishing.

Jenny Holzer – The Work

 

Jenny Holzer (*1950, Gallipolis, OH) lives and works in New York. Selected solo shows include Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2019), and Tate Modern, London (2019), Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art, North Adams (2017–present), Blenheim Art Foundation, Woodstock (2017), Lune Rouge and Art Projects Ibiza (2016), Museo Correr, Venice (2015), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2011, 2001), DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal and The Baltic, Gateshead (both 2010), Foundation Beyeler, Basel and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (both 2009), The Barbican Centre, London (2006), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1991), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2000), ICA, London (1988), as well as Dia Art Foundation, New York and Guggenheim Museum, New York (both 1989). Group shows include Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (both 2020), MoMA PS1, New York (2019), Whitney Museum, New York (2015, 1996, 1989, 1988, 1983), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014), Hayward Gallery, London (2013, 1992), Malba, Buenos Aires (2012), Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011), The Barbican Centre, London (2008), MoMA, New York (2008, 2005, 1997, 1996, 1992, 1988), Venice Biennale, Venice (2005), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2005, 2000, 1995, 1990, 1988), and documenta 8, Kassel (1987).

 

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