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Jenny Holzer’s Word Salad


Her takeover of the Guggenheim reads like intellectual clickbait for the extended Trump era.

Her primary operating system is the LED readout in a sans-serif font, a formalist leap that is as much her signature as fluorescent light tubes are Dan Flavin’s and boxes Donald Judd’s. The work packed an underground energy by coming from an anonymous artist who turned out to be a woman taking matters into her own hands and demanding that attention be paid — to the streets, to the marginalized, to the masses. One work features the redacted FBI file of the painter Alice Neel, who was investigated for being a “romantic Bohemian type Communist.” We see government documents and paintings about surveillance, interrogation techniques, Nixon and Kissinger.

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Jenny Holzer