In her thirty-year career, Jenny Holzer has explored the power of words in public spaces and their impact on individuals, examining the relationships between truth, belief, bias, power and control. Her highly anticipated and widely attended presentation at the Guggenheim showcases her deep engagement with signs and symbols and their social, political, and commercial implications. As this major exhibition, “Light Line,” concludes on Sunday (Sept. 29), it’s an ideal moment to reflect on its significance within today’s complex societal and political context.
With her incisive voice, Holzer addresses pressing issues such as climate justice, women’s rights, political corruption and the violence of war. Her return to the Guggenheim takes place in an increasingly polarized political landscape and amid global instability, making the show a timely exploration of the responsibilities tied to power—whether wielded by governments or individuals. The exhibition underscores the ever-relevant dynamics between words and truth, which have only been further complicated by emerging communication technologies. Here, the artist adopts and manipulates mass communication strategies to confront the politics of public space, using language as her primary medium to respond to sociopolitical realities and reveal how we acquire—or lose—information about the world around us.
Photo: Michele Perel © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
In 1982, the Public Art Fund invited Holzer to present her work on a monumental urban scale with a sign in Times Square, creating something akin to a billboard. Electronic signs have been central to her practice ever since. One of the most iconic is her 1989 LED artwork for the Guggenheim, which has been reimagined for this new exhibition using the latest technology, including artificial intelligence, to create graphics behind the scrolling text. Climbing all six ramps, the central installation features texts from her “Truism” series (1977-1996) and is the result of a complex reverse-engineering process by Guggenheim conservators, raising intriguing questions about the durational nature of digital messages and words.
Holzer began writing her Truisms (1977-79) while a student in the Whitney Independent Study Program, conceiving concise, often paradoxical statements that mimic the language of advertisements and propaganda to question the relative nature of truth. Playing between public and private, institution and street, legal and illegal, Holzer deployed these sharp aphorisms in both temporary and enduring formats such as posters, electronic signs, stone benches and paintings. By moving between intimate existential claims and societal commentary on an urban scale, Holzer has used language to explore how truths can be silenced, distorted or manipulated by authority figures, media and governments. Her work reveals communication strategies that lead people to mindlessly internalize ideas and ideologies shaped by those in power. Echoing Paulo Freire’s ideas in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it addresses the ways people often uncritically accept answers from external authorities instead of engaging with the complexities of thought as multidimensional beings who exist simultaneously as individuals, family members and members of society.
This problematization of language and media relations is clear in the very first room, featuring Inflammatory Wall (1979-1982)—a series of vibrant, thought-provoking posters covering all the walls and forming a chaotic, abstract and pixelated grid. While the posters’ sharp assertions raise pointed observations that challenge societal norms and perceptions, the message is also submerged in the overwhelming multitude and distracting color composition, creating a continuous tension between content and context.
As one moves further into the show, a new version of Truism from 2023 features these inquisitive and provocative statements carved into six solid Carrara white marble benches, standing as unsettling monuments to a shared failure to decode the truth. “A positive attitude makes all the difference in the world. Ambition is just as dangerous as Complacency. Confusing yourself is a way to stay honest,” reads one. This statement encapsulates the core message Holzer seems to convey: embracing confusion and ignorance, in the spirit of thinkers like Plato and Susan Sontag, as a way to navigate an increasingly complicated reality while continuing to question it. Ignorance, rather than a way to ignore reality, becomes a catalyst for deeper learning and engagement.
Further up the ramp, starkly contrasting the permanence of the solid marble, are about forty irregular metal fragments mounted on the wall as part of Holzer’s Cursed series. Looking like degraded versions of ancient steles, these plaques bear tweets posted by Donald Trump during his presidency. With their wrinkled surfaces and ripped edges, they manifest their ephemerality, rusting almost as soon as tweeted—worthy of only the fleeting attention they receive in the relentless internet stream.
One level higher in the rotunda, the exhibition expands to include a wide range of political and military document-based works, showcasing Holzer’s deeper exploration into propaganda, factual information and manipulated messages. Declassified government documents are transformed into ghostly, sometimes silvery-shining painted versions of the originals. The intentional occultation of the original messages with scribbles, leafed metal and gestural watercolor compositions complicates the viewer’s relationship with the truth, prompting a painstaking process of decoding each piece’s relevance, aided only by the scanning of QR captions. Upon closer inspection, these seemingly abstract compositions actually conceal transcriptions of U.S. military records, discussions surrounding post-9/11 detainees and government reports on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Holzer’s interplay of color, paint and light becomes both a trap and a test—challenging the viewer to either succumb to a superficial appreciation of the work’s aesthetic appeal or take on a more investigative approach.
As the exhibition continues along the ramp, viewers encounter bronze and aluminum plaques that Holzer created in the early 1980s. Mimicking the aesthetics of permanent labels on historic buildings, these works hold the same authority as warnings, directions or quiet observations while conveying existential advice from her Living (1980-1982) and Survival (1983-1985) series.
Amid this endless interplay of signs, semiological traps and traces staged along the Guggenheim’s ramps, the raw reality of violence abruptly emerges through a series of cast replicas of human scapulae affixed to the building’s wings. As Heidegger might suggest with his notion of “Being-towards-Death,” these elements serve as stark reminders of mortality, confronting viewers with the unavoidable philosophical and existential truth no one can escape. In this way, Holzer’s work appears to align with the Heideggerian belief that facing death is not merely a personal concern but a fundamental ontological condition, revealing the nature of Being as perpetually incomplete and “in question.”
By the time one reaches the end of the show, Jenny Holzer’s position becomes unmistakably clear: at some point, the collision with reality and truth is inevitable. This idea is underscored by three broken marble benches titled Broken (2024), lying shattered on the floor. The truth remains present, but only in disjointed fragments, reflecting a moment of rupture that exposes the fragility of any illusion. It suggests that the only truth we can hope to grasp is a scattered puzzle of elements that we must painstakingly piece together to find meaning. Ultimately, Holzer succeeds once again in sparking a dialogue about the nature of truth and its fragility—whether objective, subjective or entirely constructed by societal power structures.