Jenny Holzer at the Whitney

We walked into the Jenny Holzer exhibit at the Whitney thinking it was a retrospective. It isn’t. But that’s OK, because her new stuff traffics in the word as art, just like her old stuff.

Probably best known for her Truisms, which she began while studying at the Whitney in the 1970s (and which she is now putting up on Twitter), Holzer treats text as image. She became famous for projecting aphoristic slogans like “abuse of power comes as no surprise” all over New York, from telephone booths to Time Square. For her recent work, she found inspiration, so to speak, in declassified government documents dealing with the Iraq War. Some have been blown up and repainted, and some have been typeset onto colorful LED displays (so bright, in fact, that a few security guards were wearing sunglasses). "Words tell the truth," we read, but we're not sure Holzer would agree. "Words show the truth" might be more apt.

Photo: thanks