Jenny Holzer


As requested blue

2006
Oil on linen
33 x 25.5 inches
http://projects.jennyholzer.com
Cheim & Read New York


< Artists + Writers


Jenny Holzer

In the initial ones, from the early 2000s, the documents you were working from were legible. Later ones were mostly or entirely redacted.

The first ones were mostly black-and-white and were relatively informative. For example, there was a wish list with torture techniques. Actually, there were several of them. I was desperate for information way back then, because I didn’t understand why we were going into Iraq (other than oil, but surely there was something else). I wasn’t seeing adequate information in the papers, so I went looking in various archives for primary source info: the National Security Archive, the ACLU. The first paintings were heavy on info, although they had some redactions. I wanted to know, so maybe someone else wants to know.

Once I’d made nearly 500 paintings in my sad frenzy about the invasion, paintings with a lot of summary content, I switched to the redactions. The second generation ones were largely abstracted. Even color crept in. I went for the shapes of what you couldn’t see or know. That’s a whole other point, and I must confess to getting ooey-gooey about the looks of them.

So you were looking at these documents in aesthetic terms, and not just as information?

For the very first ones, the focus was on the content, but inevitably I also looked at them. I became a great appreciator of many styles of redaction. I started being very grateful when the person redacting should have been a Russian Suprematist—when the blocks were just so.

I indulged in hand-painting the fuzz at the edges. Various of these pages had been copied so many times that there were digital excrescences at the limits. Color came by way of relief, and also so people would bother to walk up to the words—as with the early street posters. I wanted some of the paintings to be large, to be like billboards, in a way. I wanted them to loom and to be imposing, so that one would feel small beneath them.”

– Jenny Holzer, interviewed by Jason Farago, Even Magazine