Jenny Holzer’s Facile Guggenheim Museum Show Fails to Meet Our Moment

“OUR TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE,” reads scrolling text that appears on a 900-foot-long LED screen mounted to the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda right now. And who’s to disagree these days? Those words were first written by artist Jenny Holzer roughly 40 years ago, and she’s now recycled them anew, as if to suggest that not much has changed. For Holzer, it’s the same shit, different millennium.

When Holzer exhibited similar dictums via a screen mounted to the Guggenheim’s spiraling ramp into 1989, critics praised her for bringing new modes of communication into the walls of museums. Thirty-five years on, she has returned to the project, this time with the help of AI technology to create new digital effects.

This work, titled Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1989/2024), initially appeared as stock ticker–like flow of commands and phrases in green, red, and yellow. Today, Holzer’s words linger behind blue fog, disintegrate into pixels, and leave behind menacing flares. The technology has been updated, but the maxims remain largely unchanged. Unfortunately, the sentiments feel more dated than ever.

Many of Holzer’s axioms function like bizarre advice or insidious directives: “STARVATION IS NATURE’S WAY,” “THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR WILL BE SECRET,” or the famed “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT” from Holzer’s “Truisms” series. They exude ennui: desires are boring, war is a constant, and no one can be trusted.

Five decades ago, Holzer began pushing these made-up idioms, printed in the sans-serif typeface associated with advertising, into public spaces via posters and T-shirts. She embraced the language of power, as seen on screens and in the media, and aspired to expose the evil that existed beneath its platitudes. The challenging thing about her work was its attractiveness: pictures of a flinty woman wearing Holzer’s “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE” tank top continue to go viral for a reason.

But now, the coolness of Holzer’s art—its icy interior, its beautiful exterior—feels inappropriately glib. Words like Holzer’s appear daily on social media feeds. No one needs her art to understand how power works anymore—all one must do to figure that out is simply log on to X or TikTok. Her museum-filling Guggenheim exhibition, a survey of sorts, shows how this once-great artist went astray, failing to evolve her cold text for another era.

Holzer does, at least, seem keenly aware of what the internet has done to language. With Cursed (2022), one of the many recent works in this show, she exhibits a row of distressed, unevenly edged metal plates that run along a wall before collapsing in a pile on the floor. Each plate is printed with a different Donald Trump tweet, from ones addressing Russia’s involvement in his election to ones that preceded the January 6 insurrection he fomented into being. Their cruddy look runs counter to Twitter’s sleek aesthetic, as if to suggest the relics of a ruined civilization.

Holzer’s point, it would seem, is to imply a continuity between her “Truisms” and Trump’s all-caps histrionics. Then again, so what? Anyone who lived through the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections need hardly be reminded of the thinly veiled cruelties of Trump’s tirades.

His sexist, racist, xenophobic words harmed many, and even got him banned from Twitter during the same year that Cursed was made. The irony is that Holzer exhibited this work at Hauser & Wirth in 2022, at a time when Trump’s Twitter account was offline, essentially ensuring that you could continue to experience this man’s textual hysterics, even when the platform’s moderators thought them too dangerous for mass consumption. Here again, Holzer limply re-presents Trump on his own terms, forgetting to perform critique along the way. (Mercifully, Holzer’s Guggenheim show, which opens to the public tomorrow, comes down on September 29, well before Election Day.)

This is not the only work in the Guggenheim show referring to the Trump administration. There is stake in the heart (2024), a series of giant gold-leafed paintings, each containing a fragment of communications to and from Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, on January 6. There’s also READY FOR YOU (2023), another golden canvas resembling a White House memo with a similar phrase to its title scrawled on it. That note was given to Trump by an aide ahead of the attempted coup d’état.

These are dark, unsettling works because of the mismatch between their gold-leafed surfaces—a style most closely associated with religious icons—and their abject texts. They are engrossing in that way, and also deeply problematic, since Holzer allows these fraught words to float free of context.

This is, to some degree, a shortcoming on the Guggenheim’s part, not Holzer’s. Curator Lauren Hinkson has installed this show without much wall text at all. Labels are placed in areas where they seem deliberately hard to find, and there is no explanation for any of the art on view. If viewers seek to learn more, they must scan a QR code and head to the Bloomberg Connects app—which is virtually impossible to download, anyway, in a museum whose heavy concrete walls limit cell service.

When I returned to my desk and finally went through that app, I found myself angered by some of Holzer’s choices. I spent time lingering over the descriptions for a new work called the beginning (2024), which Holzer did in collaboration with Lee Quiñones. The piece consists of quotations painted atop Inflammatory Wall (1979–82), a floor-to-ceiling grid of posters containing Holzer’s short writings. Within the Guggenheim galleries, a label notes that the beginning contains “testimony” from one Iranian, two Ukrainians, three Palestinians, one Israeli, and one American. (Testimony to what, you wonder? Don’t expect an answer on that from the museum.)

The sources of all that testimony, it turns out, vary widely. They are outlined in detail on the Bloomberg app, where one can discover that Israeli writer Yehuda Amichai’s quotation—“MY CHILD WAFTS PEACE / WHEN I LEAN OVER HIM”—is from a poem by him printed in a 1994 book. Meanwhile, a quotation from the Palestinian Abu Shaker—“I JUST STOOD THERE FOR AN HOUR SCREAMING MY CHILDREN’S NAMES”—was borrowed from a 2023 report on disabled Gazans that was published by Human Rights Watch.

And a quote from the Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov—“NOW THE CITY IS IN RUINS / ON THE STREETS LIE THE CORPSES OF RESIDENTS”—comes from a 2022 text written following his country’s invasion by Russia. (Holzer obtained permission from the respective publishers to use these clipped phrases, according to the Guggenheim.)

Holzer’s troubling equivalency between wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere seems to elide nuance about how each conflict arose. Her appropriations are indelicate—they are all from different years, but this is not readily apparent anywhere other than the app, itself the creation of a philanthropic organization founded by a former New York City mayor who couldn’t always be trusted. She also seems uninterested in each speaker’s individual circumstances.

It seems odd, for example, to place Abu Shaker’s testimonial alongside Amichai’s poetry, given that Amichai, though critical of Israel, has sometimes been criticized by intellectuals. (One was Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer, who taught his students Amichai’s poetry, which he variously described as “beautiful” and “dangerous,” according to the New York Times; Alareer was killed in December during an airstrike in Gaza.) Holzer mentions none of this, nor does the Guggenheim. Both she and the museum seem to hope we’ll read these sentences, acknowledge them as proof that war is bad, and move on.

There’s a lot of other historical material enlisted by Holzer: the artist Alice Neel’s partially redacted FBI file, US government documents about AI, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s dialogues on wartime strategy in Vietnam. Most of these forms did become public until well after all this surveillance occurred. Holzer has repainted these papers, mocking them up at a scale just larger than standard paper size to ensure that their words remain visible to the general populace.

Those works are a bit more successful—even without Holzer there to speak for them, these paintings’ backstories are self-evident enough. the beginning and other pieces at the Guggenheim remain more opaque. Ironically, this is a show about words that’s in need of more of them.

Holzer has done the opposite of citing her sources: she’s concealed a lot of information, viewing political proclamations as nouns, verbs, and adjectives to be played with as needed. That approach worked in the ’80s, at a time when she needed to lay bare the slipperiness of language, but it does not work now, when the use of a single expression is enough to get someone fired or killed.

How might Holzer respond to that allegation? A shrug, maybe, or a giggle. “LAUGH HARD AT THE ABSURDLY EVIL,” reads one 1984 plaque shown here. Rather than being hung in the bays where paintings are usually presented, this piece is exhibited above a trashcan, next to a machine that dispenses hand sanitizer—which feels like a malevolent gag unto itself. Therein lies the problem: Holzer wants us to chuckle at her words, which demand greater scrutiny now than they once did. If only she took things a bit more seriously.