The Guggenheim rotunda is bathed under the glow of these familiar all-caps one-liners: “SAVOR KINDNESS BECAUSE CRUELTY IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE,” “MONEY MAKES TASTE,” and “I WILL THINK MORE BEFORE I CANNOT.” The phrases show typographic boldness and deadpan unease that is unmistakably the text art of Jenny Holzer. The artist has, over a career that spans five decades, effectively trademarked the concept of floating language in space, sharpened to disrupt our tendency towards passive reception of information. While her practice has evolved in response to changes in technology and society, her core concerns—language and power—have remained constant.
Holzer’s seamless integration of blunt remarks about power into public environments reaches new vertiginous heights at the Guggenheim Museum’s “Light Line.” The centerpiece, an installation of LED lights climbing up the full ramp of the museum, features a stock ticker–like flow of aphorisms addressing power dynamics, warfare, surveillance, and existential anxieties. In this expanded restaging of a 1989 installation, some are recycled from Holzer’s “Truisms” (1978–87) and “Inflammatory Essays” (1979–82), others are newly generated with artificial intelligence. Regardless, the authorship of the phrases is left intentionally ambiguous—a throughline for Holzer, whose artistic practice was initially centered around anonymity. Such a momentous restaging of one of Holzer’s most ambitious projects reminds us of her continued relevance: “Light Line” immerses the viewer in a vertigo-inducing spectacle. As Holzer’s reputation has expanded, so too have the scale and complexity of her work.
Holzer began her career as an abstract painter and, during the rise of fast-paced media culture in the late 1970s and early ’80s, began to move away from the formal aspects of abstraction to incorporating words into her art. By strategically placing her text-based work in public spaces, she discovered that art could engage even those who weren’t actively seeking it, prompting thought and debate. Initially uninterested in showing in gallery settings, Holzer garnered attention for her series of “Truisms” (1977–79), which she began while she was a student in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Printed on white paper, these phrases—some invented by Holzer, others appropriated—like “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE” and “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT”—were originally posted anonymously throughout Lower Manhattan. Later, they were printed onto merchandising objects like stickers, baseball caps, and t-shirts. While this series came with a certain cool remove, for her more provocative “Inflammatory Essays” (1979–82), Holzer co-opted the incendiary words of Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, and others, into a uniform essay format, each composed of 100 words arranged into 20 lines.
Holzer’s groundbreaking use of language as an artistic medium blurred the contours between art and everyday communication. Whether she engaged with advertising aesthetics or replicated the authoritative typeface, design, and tone of political messaging, her intent was to interrogate and provoke rather than imitate. While there are clear similarities with contemporaries like Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, and Louise Lawler, Holzer’s approach to language wasn’t rooted in persuasion or confrontation. Instead, she employed cryptic, free-floating language—equally convincing, and beguiling, in its anonymous authority—to maintain an ambiguity of meaning and destabilize conventional linguistic systems.
In the 1980s, Holzer explored new ways of incorporating text into three-dimensional spaces. She adorned benches, plaques, and sarcophagi, all evoking authority and commemoration, with her trademark aphorisms, allowing her expansive statements to exist within specific contexts. For her “Living” series (1981), she presented short instructional texts on bronze plaques that conveyed a nondescript, institutional voice. Yet their contents were surprising, disclosing intimate thoughts about daily life: breathing, sleeping, and human relationships. Started in 1986, Holzer’s now-emblematic granite benches are included in the current show, “Light Line,” as well. It was this series that enabled her to subtly intervene in the urban landscape, disrupting the norm of public commemoration by replacing impersonal signage with politically or intimately charged messages.
Holzer’s explorations of LED signs, which had a newfound capacity for displaying moving text, led to a project commissioned by the Public Art Fund for the Spectacolor board in Times Square in 1982. Recognizing the potential of these signs to create immersive and site-specific experiences (as opposed to traditional paper posters, which have activist, DIY associations), she continued to use them to lend her words a sense of impartial authority. Her 1989 installation at the Guggenheim Museum transformed half of the iconic spiraling rotunda into an electronic arcade. “Light Line” restages this installation, expanded to encompass the entire six-story spiral, and updated with flashing and strobing chromatic effects.
Holzer continued to explore the politics and modes of modern information systems in the public sphere. In epic light-based projections, she began employing the façades of monumental buildings across the world—from Rockefeller Center to Singapore’s City Hall—as canvases for projecting scrolling text that slips over architectural surfaces before dissipating into the night sky. These nocturnal light displays carry an undertone of institutional critique that resonates throughout her site-specific art. In 1990, Holzer made history as the first living woman artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Her installation there featured multilingual text flashing on LED sign boards, etched on marble benches, and incised on the pavilion’s marble floor, earning her the prestigious Golden Lion for the best national pavilion. Holzer calibrates her work to suit each context, staying versatile even when the modes of her expression remain consistent.
With the turn of the millennium, Holzer revisited painting. For her “Redaction Paintings” (2005–present), she produced silkscreened canvases based on declassified army documents and redacted government documents. This body of work is presented in the upper reaches of the rotunda for “Light Line,” where infographics from government reports, books about AI, and email correspondence between congressmen are turned into large-scale painting.
While the centerpiece of “Light Line” brilliantly activates the full ramp, the museum bays remain mostly bare, recalling the blacked-off lines of her “Redaction Paintings.” And yet beyond the obvious spiraling path, such as stairwells or other less-conspicuous corners, there is additional artwork—including recent watercolors based on the heavily redacted reports and documents about Russian influence in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Once again, Holzer surprises by subverting traditional presentational procedures of museums and institutions, discreetly reminding us, even when her own blazing light show pulls at our attention, to look closely and question intentionally.
