Jenny Holzer

Holzer, MONUMENT, 2008.

Photograph: Vassilij Gureev

A Guantanamo detainee was found next to a pile of his own hair. The man had spent the night pulling it out while he was shackled in a 100-degree room.

This is one of the many stories of torture and interrogation that American artist Jenny Holzer has reproduced since 2004 in her Redaction Paintings, oil-on-linen facsimiles of declassified United States government documents from the so-called War on Terror. Their horrors overshadow this exhibition.

“PROTECT PROTECT” showcases paintings and electronic signs that the 58-year-old artist has made since the mid-1990s. The MCA gives these works an assaultive installation that suits their violent content: The museum’s first-floor galleries would be pitch-black if not for Holzer’s signature LED (light-emitting diode) sculptures; the encroaching darkness makes the pieces’ blinking, scrolling, glowing texts so disorienting that they induce vertigo.

Language has been the foundation of Holzer’s work for more than 30 years, most famously in the Truisms she began disseminating in 1977. These original statements, such as “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” and “Protect me from what I want,” sound like clichés; Holzer combined them in ambiguous, contradictory lists that suggested multiple anonymous voices. Holzer stopped writing her own texts in 2001, yet the words she now borrows articulate a clearer viewpoint: She appropriates the language of violence to oppose it.

By magnifying FBI and military e-mails and letters so that they’re several feet tall and presenting them as art, Holzer demands that museumgoers pay attention to the government’s abuses of power. The fact that she easily obtained her declassified documents through the National Security Archive and the American Civil Liberties Union makes pieces like Wish List/Gloves Off pewter (2007) chilling indictments of the American military under George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld’s watch. (One shudders to think what the classified documents say.)

One of the four paintings in Wish List/Gloves Off pewter reproduces a “wish list” of “alternative interrogation techniques” an officer would like to use on “unlawful combatants,” which includes low-voltage electrocution and hitting them with phone books. The officer assures his correspondent that these techniques “cause no permanent harm,” but Holzer’s many paintings of dead detainees’ autopsy reports and handprints suggest otherwise.

The content of Holzer’s Redaction Paintings is much more powerful than their formal qualities; they resemble large, ugly photocopies. Her electronic signs are visually striking, however, especially Purple (2008), consisting of 33 LED screens, each a few feet tall, that curve up from the floor to the wall. The screens’ vertical format requires unusually close scrutiny. One normally struggles to avoid missing any of Holzer’s words; Purple forces viewers to read its texts about insurgent interrogations one letter at a time, before they’re (seemingly) swallowed by the wall—or a black hole of apathy.

Yet Purple’s harmony of form and content is rare. Although Holzer uses LEDs in exceptionally creative ways, her advances in the medium still make less of an impression than her provocative texts. This is partly the MCA’s doing: The museum provides a tiny bit of commentary, but it gives visitors almost no insight into Holzer’s process, influences or the original writings that appear in the show, which include the Truisms, Arno (1996) and Lustmord (1993–94). Without such context, it’s difficult to avoid getting hung up on the timelier war-related pieces. And Holzer confronts military abuses so effectively that one wonders whether Chicago’s contemporary-art aficionados should be her target audience.

Most likely, the MCA’s visitors already oppose the war and “alternative interrogation techniques.” While the Redaction Paintings gain strength from a museum setting, the genius of Holzer’s LED works stems from their real-world origins. Holzer has reached out to people beyond the museum since the beginning of her career, leaving flyers of her Truisms on the streets of New York and broadcasting her writings on electronic road signs. Wouldn’t Purple do more good if it were installed amid Chicago traffic?

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