Jenny Holzer, Describing the Indescribable
“JENNY HOLZER: THING INDESCRIBABLE,” GUGGENHEIM BILBAO, SPAIN, TILL SEPTEMBER 9.
Jenny Holzer’s “Thing Indescribable” at the Guggenheim Bilbao is a blockbuster show, part retrospective, part statement of future intent. A world-renowned Neo-Conceptualist and feminist icon, Holzer picks her words as carefully as you might expect. But she is both gracious and good-humored in person, despite her own avowals of intense shyness and the seriousness of much of the show’s subject matter. We start our chat looking down from a great height onto her LED sign, Ram (2016), which shoots out RGB light, softly illuminating the human scapulae arranged into a pattern around it.
JETHRO TURNER: Where is the text on the sign in “Ram” from?
JENNY HOLZER: These are poems from Anna Swir, from Building the Barricade, from her experiences in the siege of Warsaw. It took her decades to be able to return to that time, not surprisingly, given the extent of the trauma. She was at one stage lined up on a wall because the National Socialists wanted her to think she was going to die. Or maybe they were trying to decide whether she should because she’d been in the Resistance. She’s not a trifling poet! To be able to do it, to withstand it, and then write so clearly about it and not in a gratuitously sensational way—it’s both absolutely factual, yet extremely observant. That’s an achievement beyond comprehension. At least my limited comprehension.
It made me think of War and Peace, where Pierre is lined up with the prisoners who are shot. But of course Tolstoy never experienced it himself, it’s an imagined trauma, not a revisited one.
She did it all. Imagine trying to be a volunteer nurse without being trained as a nurse, and with no steady hospital, no medical supplies. You know, that is unspeakable.
And within that, we get the sense of women as improvisers, of making do. A sense that there’s always a necessity to survive.
To survive, and to administer everything from solace to sustenance. It somehow becomes our job. It can be a little annoying when women are there to mop up, not exclusively men’s mess ....
Well, the mess of a patriarchal world?
You all are challenged by testosterone, I think! Not to make gross generalizations!
I speak to female colleagues or friends who have taken testosterone, and they say what an extraordinary experience it is. It’s only then that they understand so much more about why men think and act the way they do.
Yes, the violence in the world, especially compounded by climate change and use of political capital declaring others as “the other” … and nationalism too seems extra bad to me. Don’t you think?
There seems to be a kind of cultural shift at the same time, that seems much more inclusive, and your work seems to be part of that. Your use of language and improvisation has provided statements that seem to have become a whole new way of communicating. Whether it’s ‘‘Abuse of power comes as no surprise,” or your work in relation to Lydia Davis and Rachel Cusk, that idea of finding the most appropriate thing—the thing that gives sustenance or solace or understanding—is very strong. But Rachel Cusk has a playwright character in one of her novels, a woman who can’t help but distill everything down to one word. To the point where she can no longer work—whole plays become single words like “attention” or “friendship.” Did you ever struggle with what editing down does to your thought process?
The hunt for the essential is a good thing. And the succinct essential is a good thing. That you might catch people and hold them for enough time that content will be absorbed. That said, a ridiculous reduction is not representative of reality. I think I froze myself by narrowing things to where I was saying almost nothing. And that’s why it was a great rescue by my friend Henri Cole, the great poet who sent me elsewhere, so that I could search for, recognize, collect, sequence, bundle these wonderful, sometimes long-form things, and then contribute what I can. Which is how to give them back to people with a visual component, sometimes
almost a tactile one. Sometimes literally a tactile one: carved in stone, your hands can trace the letters. I know in that case that information enters your mind in a different way than something on Twitter. But here’s to Twitter in good hands!
Which makes me think of the difference between the current and last American president, in terms of the carefulness with which they employ language.
Well, and the quality of the language and the depth of the thinking behind the speaking...
In Obama, you have such an extraordinarily deft user of language, and employer of the right words in the right order, and Trump is so extraordinarily the opposite of that. Any yet the power of Trump’s misstatements seems so intense. He reaches so many more people through his mistakes.
Humans are a most imperfect animal, no? That Trump’s statements are inspirational to so many is, among other things, dangerous, gruesome, unfair. I can go on with the un-s! Unimaginable .... Yet they’re right before us. His attack recently on John McCain is … I’m searching for the word … to what possible good end? How will that help the commonweal?
It’s like pure id.
And what a substandard id! If you’re going to be troubled by a big id, it shouldn’t be that one!
You were talking about the tactile nature of letters and being able to touch the stone benches. What’s interesting about this show is the mix of things that you can or could touch, and things that you very much can’t—the human scapulae and the ossuary-style piles of bones, for example.
This is not my territory ordinarily, nor should it be anyone’s. I’m a bit repressed physically: the last thing I want to do is touch meat or bones. During and after the war in the former Yugoslavia when any number of women and girls, and some men, were assaulted, raped, killed as a tactic of war—it’s long been an approach—but to have that in the 20th century in Europe while I was watching seemed especially egregious. Well, anywhere in the world—it takes place all around—I don’t mean to imply it’s notably sad only when in Europe.
But all the more unexpected, perhaps?
It was immediate for good and bad reasons. And I wrote about it. I went to Amnesty International, I talked to various people who’d been assaulted. And not to go on about it, but I’ve been assaulted, so many of my friends have been. It’s not unknown territory. But having it openly as an assault weapon and a plan had me resort to buying human bones and making an ink made in part from human blood. We did the cover and large part of the interior of the magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and I wrote texts from the point of view of the perpetrators because though I didn’t want to be there I wanted to understand; and then from the point of view of the victims, which I knew more about; and from the point of view of the observers, someone who might be a United Nations worker who comes in afterwards and has to try to put things back together again. The writing was necessary, but we also literally wrote the text on people’s skin and photographed it so there would be the shock of the body and some references to tattoos on skin. And I made arrangements of bones, some of which have silver bands on them as if they were science museum specimens, with the text of the perpetrators on them. So that’s what started it. I don’t use them very often, but things recently have had me bring them back again. Syria, for example. Iraq. Afghanistan. You name it.
One of the most shocking things in the show is not the physical bones, it’s reading the semi-redacted reports and autopsies from those wars.
And the torture memo, the enhanced interrogation techniques. Seeing instructions about how to hit somebody with a phonebook. And that was among the lesser tortures.
And it’s titled “wish list.” It’s this odd inversion or perversion of language.
That was an awful thing in the George W. Bush administration. Briefly, although not briefly enough, it seemed that torture was becoming normalized, courtesy of titles like “wish list” and various legal defenses of it.
In “wish list,” you have this casualization of torture, and in “enhanced interrogation,” you have this legalization of it.
And a little Orwellian twist thrown in to make it just a list.
I read a great conversation between you and your daughter a few years ago, and I think you said something like “language affords me the opportunity to be obscene.” I liked this idea that it’s easier to be obscene with language than with pictures. When I read those reports, it was striking because they were utterly affecting in the blankness and directness of the words alone. But have you ever wanted to depict those kinds of acts in a more visual medium that text?
Those I think need to be exactly what they were. At least in my including all the content as it was presented. That was the rule I gave myself when I made those works. I enlarged some of the texts and I made them quite big, but I didn’t change anything on the pages. I thought they should be—forgive me— reportorial. Just maybe more available. Later on, I wouldn’t have them just be black and white. I think for the first ones I was, maybe in the back of my head, considering Warhol’s Disaster series, that they were silkscreens, just the facts of a suicide, or bad tuna. This was really bad tuna! So when I first went looking in the archives I wanted to see things so that I would be better apprized of what was going on, of the promoters behind the war. And so some of the experience—from a detainee, to an officer, to an enlisted man or woman, to a civilian—those things written in the moment got digested or represented. So I think those needed to be real. Later on, I worked with highlighting the redactions themselves as a representation of what one will never know and maybe should.
Is there any legal opportunity for them to be recovered or revealed, the sections that have been redacted?
It’s interesting. Sometimes different departments redact different things. And in documents that have been shared between nations, different redactors cut different things. So there are distinct versions of these documents out there. It would be a life’s work to go find them and show them side by side. We’ve found a few that are different versions at the same page.
So there’s like a palimpsest almost to be made?
They’re fraternal twins.
Is there any other way of recovering the information?
You can continue to file Freedom of Information requests. And you can go to court, as various organizations do. I don’t know what exactly can be done. Talk to the National Security Archive! They know what to do. I’m an amateur in so many ways.
Isn’t that the most joyous part of connecting these things?
Yes, I’m a fond amateur.
Is that a good credo for the work you do?
A curious citizen. That’s maybe a good thing about growing up in the 1950s and 60s, the idea that one has a right and a responsibility to know. I’m a little discouraged, but I think that’s worth holding on to.