Jenny Holzer: From Typefaces on the Streets to Retrospective in the Museum

The moment of irritation was enormous when Jenny Holzer ran constantly changing messages on an electronic LED board in Times Square in New York in 1982, including the often quoted saying “Protect me from what I want”. The consumption-critical advertising medium paved her way to the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1990.

After studying painting at the University of Ohio, the American, born in 1950, initially started with abstract paintings à la Mark Rothko and Kenneth Noland. It was only after moving to New York that she developed her conceptual approach to writing: typefaces distributed anonymously throughout the cityscape, in which she formulated theses and antitheses on society and politics, love and war.

The “Truisms” (truisms) were only a foretaste of a work whose media spectrum was constantly expanding, which can be seen impressively in the Düsseldorf retrospective in the K21 of the NRW art collection, even if the subversive effect in the museum context is significantly weaker than comes into its own on the street.

Spotlights set the stage for the walls plastered with German and English sentences. You have to read them and decouple them from the rest to resonate with Holzer’s word universe.

From 1986 onwards she engraves her texts on stone benches, which are grouped in red granite to form the “Survival” seating circle in Düsseldorf. In the 1990s, Holzer reacted to the Bosnian war. The piled bones on the piano nobile come from people who donated them for medical teaching purposes. Some have silver bands attached with excerpts from her “Lustmord” text, in which she describes the traumatic experiences of war from the perspective of victims, perpetrators and observers.

The Iraq war is also present in the projection of the US Central Command, which was transferred to the screen and informed US President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld about plans for the Iraq war in 2002. Then you read bureaucratic monsters like: “Attack Aircraft: 591. Attack Helos: 306. Personnel: 254 K”. Holzer proceeds in a similar way when making visible censored documents that deal with the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers.

No soldier was convicted, but the discourse about the cover-up continued, as in the case of the gold-leafed plaque “Wish List Metal,” which references the US military’s torture methods.

So it’s not surprising that at some point you read about war crimes in Ukraine on LED strips and are shocked at your own reaction, because with all the blinking letter acrobatics you almost lost sight of the horrible content.