JENNY HOLZER

Among the new works Holzer has created for the exhibition are two robotic vertical LEDs installed side by side,each displaying AI-generated texts. The latest development in a career-long conceptual exploration of both originaland borrowed language, the artist’s experiments with AI pose new questions of authorship prompted by the re/degenerate nature of new technology. In the LED titled GOOD (2023), an AI tool was instructed to describerapturous experiences—human and nonhuman, physical and immaterial. Its responses were poetic descriptionsof emotional sensations and natural phenomena, as well as nonhuman experiences and entities such as machinesounds and extraterrestrials. Selected texts were programmed to rise along the four sides of the work in pastelhues. In BAD (2023), extremist political content was fed to the generator, which was then asked to composeshort statements and cryptic poems evocative of the far right and alt-right. These passages flash, spin andpulsate across the LED in shades of gray and bursts of red. The texts activate all sides of both LED columns whileanimating the space through their individually choreographed robotic movements. The works are presented notas adversarial counterparts, but as a complete sensorial depiction of complex parallel experiences, both humanand artificial. From joyful and contemplative to aggressive and chaotic, the LEDs evoke the unpredictability andunknowability of AI’s current reach and future potential.

Also on view is WTF (2022), a swinging LED beam that displays tweets posted by Donald Trump during hispresidency and posts by Q, the eponymous leader of the QAnon conspiracy movement. WTF slides along atrack in an unpredictable cadence, echoing the erratic rhythm with which these messages first appeared online.The flashing and scrolling texts illuminate nearly 300 ‘curse tablets’ scattered across the floor. Inspired by thecurse tablets of the Greco-Roman world, which were inscribed with citizens’ wishes for vengeance and cursesupon their foes, Holzer’s tablets feature tweets by Trump, echoing the LED above them. They were created bystamping the tweets onto cast metal, then distressing and aging the objects through crumpling, folding, piercingand chemical baths. Like deformed or molten iterations of the artist’s previous evocations of public plaques, thesedamaged tablets suggest refuse, wreckage and devastation. Together, these works form a time capsule of therecent past while signaling the possible near future, both recording and reflecting the hyperbolic, enraged rhetoricthat characterizes the contemporary political and media landscape.

The gallery walls are lined with Holzer’s latest works from her ongoing series of Redaction Paintings, which arebased on her decades-long research into declassified government documents. Holzer has taken pages fromthese sources and transferred them to linen by hand, meticulously layering their contents and censored revisionswith oil paint and metal leaf. The paintings include references from FBI records concerning the Patriot Act, Trump-era briefs, and a 2021 report from the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence that analyses therapid advancement of AI technology. The luminous and richly textured surfaces of these new works explore bothreal and perceived dangers to democracy through the ongoing and interconnected tumults of current-day politics.