The Brooklyn Rail

It has been thirty-five years since Jenny Holzer lit up the Guggenheim Museum with a blazing electronic line of LED messages that curled around the interior of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic spiral. For many of us who saw it at the time, it is remembered as one of the most spectacular and insightful site-specific installations of the 1980s. For those who have only seen it reproduced in books or magazines, the opportunity to have a physical encounter with Holzer’s new iteration of the LED as part of her upcoming exhibition, Light Line, is a gift. The work is a transformational intervention of Wright’s famous—and famously difficult—building.

Holzer’s brilliant solution in 1989 was to employ a minimal amount of physical material to create a remarkably physical/visceral/mental environment. The museum was no longer a backdrop. It became a stadium of people looking into, across, and around the space of the building to catch glimpses of the moving tornado of words.

The realization of this installation was pivotal in the development of Holzer’s art, and our perception of what “type” of artist she was. In the late seventies and early eighties, she was often described as a language artist, a nomadic conceptualist who anonymously placed various textual propositions around Manhattan. Found on posters, T-shirts, and small plaques, the texts could be argumentative, humorous, or brutally expressive. In a number of cases the texts were placed to interact with a particular site: PRIVATE PROPERTY CREATED CRIME on a high-end apartment building; T-shirts on women walking in downtown neighborhoods.

In those days one could think of her work as a cool, more calculated version of the graffiti movement that was taking over the city. The difference was her ambition, most notably through her aggressive engagement with electronic, public signage. Few have forgotten seeing Holzer’s giant words on the huge Spectacolor board hovering above Times Square in 1985. PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT, the lighted words implored to a city known to offer anything, day or night. I’ve always been impressed by Holzer’s attitude. She once convinced the owners of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas to display MONEY CREATES TASTE on a monumental sign that loomed above the famous casino. Holzer’s outdoor work has always been admired, and it continues to play various roles in many of her exhibitions.

What the 1989 Guggenheim piece signaled was her ability to engage and dramatically transform interior spaces. It didn’t happen overnight. Holzer’s exhibition at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York in 1986 was to my mind the beginning of her development of a new kind of architectural theater. Simplicity was the hallmark of her perception of a room. Precisely calibrating the rectangular area of the gallery, Holzer built a single wall at one end, which held a horizontal LED sign. Austere stone benches were precisely aligned to fill the room. The result was a futuristic church. The language emitted from the sign and carved into the benches, entitled Under a Rock, is Holzer’s internalization of news headlines involving what she has described as the simple realities of violence—“things that crawl out from under a rock.” The artist describes a rape in a brutally frank tone:

CRACK THE PELVIS SO SHE LIES RIGHT. THIS IS A MISTAKE. WHEN SHE DIES YOU CANNOT REPEAT THE ACT. THE BONES WILL NOT GROW TOGETHER AGAIN AND THE PERSONALITY WILL NOT COME BACK…

As the language got more apocalyptic, the atmospherics got darker. Holzer’s installation of Laments (1989) at the cavernous downtown Dia art center was an impressive example of her ability to activate large areas of space into a kind of operatic field through exaggerated contrasts of light and dark, making the sprawling room an eerie and desolate tomb. Stone sarcophagi were aligned like minimalist sculptures, their lids carved with language that reflect the fears of a generation, particularly the AIDS epidemic that was ravaging New York:

THE NEW DISEASE CAME.
I LEARN THAT TIME
DOES NOT HEAL.
EVERYTHING GETS
WORSE WITH DAYS.
I HAVE SPOTS
LIKE A DOG.
I COUGH AND CANNOT
TURN MY HEAD.

Dia was a massive space, but the Guggenheim was a unique challenge. She was engaging one of the most famous works of modernist architecture. It was a high-profile face-off between an artist and the internationally renowned architect who had declared architecture to be the “mother” of the arts.

Wright’s assessment was by no means universally shared by artists, particularly in regards to museum architecture. The Guggenheim has been one of the most controversial museum buildings ever built. Its round, corkscrew shape simply overwhelms much of what is shown, making it a classically difficult venue for artists to present work.

Holzer’s approach was cunning and astute. She didn’t simply fit it into the Guggenheim. She literally made the building a part of the piece. The line seemed to dance over the building’s interior, making the space crackle with new energy.

Her words swirled up and down the rotunda, picking at your brain, seeking out false moralities, while referencing very real brutalities that exist in the world, from homelessness:

THERE’S NO REASON TO SLEEP CURLED AND BENT. IT’S NOT COMFORTABLE, IT’S NOT GOOD FOR YOU AND IT DOESN’T PROTECT YOU FROM DANGER. IF YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT AN ATTACK YOU SHOULD STAY AWAKE OR SLEEP LIGHTLY WITH LIMBS UNFURLED FOR ACTION.

to bigotry:

WHAT COUNTRY SHOULD YOU ADOPT IF YOU HATE POOR PEOPLE?

Throughout the eighties, Holzer’s language became increasingly intense, and in some cases very personal, as when she wrote about her fears as a new mother. Her generally cool and straight-forward delivery spills into deeper emotion:

I AM INDIFFERENT TO MYSELF BUT NOT TO MY CHILD. I ALWAYS JUSTIFIED MY INACTIVITY AND CARELESSNESS IN THE FACE OF DANGER BECAUSE I WAS SURE TO BE SOMEONE’S VICTIM. I GRINNED AND LOITERED IN GUILTY ANTICIPATION. NOW I MUST BE HERE TO WATCH HER. I EXPERIMENT TO SEE IF I CAN STAND HER PAIN. I CANNOT.

There is a dynamic relationship between Holzer’s words and the buildings’ walls and interior volumes that makes her language visceral. It’s a form of psycho-political-architectural poetry that penetrates the place it is installed in. Because her words pop out at us in speedy bursts, you don’t just see her language, you feel its passage. I think of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” because of how you sense the force of Holzer’s language, her radiating words the equivalent of Olson’s use of “breath” to convey physical poetics. By the time Holzer engaged the Guggenheim, using the swirling movement of the place to convey her words, it felt like she was screaming.

This reworking may very well amplify that effect. The original installation had the artist’s line of language and light stretching 535 linear feet over three rings of the museum’s parapet wall. This 2024 version will climb nine hundred linear feet to the building’s apex. Also, the housings that hold the light emitting diodes are being replaced with new ones. The 1989 LED housings would draw attention to history, to an electronic environment well behind us. Instead, Holzer’s upgraded technology will meet our current moment with sleek new hardware, and a new kind of light.

The title of the new exhibition, Light Line, is a way of acknowledging the formalist power of Holzer’s later work. Her aesthetic engagement with architecture has become a huge force over the last three-plus decades. This new installation is in essence a huge, electronic drawing that ties all of Wright’s circular, architectural gestures together into a literally moving performance.

I doubt the Guggenheim planned the new installation for an election year, but many of the texts Holzer presented over thirty-five years ago are going to be frighteningly relevant:

ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE … SOME DAYS YOU WAKE AND IMMEDIATELY START TO WORRY. NOTHING IN PARTICULAR IS WRONG IT’S JUST THE SUSPICION THAT FORCES ARE ALIGNING QUIETLY AND THERE WILL BE TROUBLE … YOU ARE CAUGHT THINKING ABOUT KILLING ANYONE YOU WANT…

In the final act, or one could say opening act, of Holzer’s Guggenheim intervention, she will (for five evenings) wrap the building with a series of light projections, completely immersing the building with her art, from exterior surfaces to interior space.