JENNY HOLZER

The exhibition takes a variety of forms, beginning with light projections on the museum’s facade along the Seine during the show’s opening week (7–11 pm nightly, October 18–22). Excerpts selected by Holzer from a range of sources, from artists’ letters found in the museum’s archive to contemporaneous literary and political commentary, transform the building’s exterior and offer passersby an immersive experience akin to stepping out of time.

Inside the museum, a site-specific LED sign animated with colorful streams of text allows visitors to immerse themselves in content drawn from, and responding to, the history represented in the Musée d’Orsay’s collection. Extending through four galleries—those dedicated to history painting, naturalism, and symbolism, as well as the Courbet room on the floor below—this illuminated artwork echoes the building’s conversion from nineteenth-century railway station to modern museum. The custom program traversing the space mirrors the bustle of visitors, in a nod to the Gare d’Orsay’s original function. An artist-curated presentation unfolds throughout the history painting room, which has been rehung to focus on the theme of war in the spirit of Holzer’s practice of creating memorials and antimemorials. Ordinarily dedicated to an assortment of historical scenes (religious, mythological, secular, or associated with political events), this gallery now centers on conflict. It combines war-related works from the collection (varying widely in genre and subject matter) with a selection of gold-, platinum-, and palladium-leafed paintings by Holzer concerning recent international battles.

The exhibition also features nineteen stoneworks, including seventeen benches and two columns — a new type of sculpture for Holzer, inspired by the Orsay’s pedestals — placed in conversation with the museum’s architecture and its permanent collection. These original sculptures, created by Holzer for this occasion, are installed throughout the galleries and ground-floor spaces. Most are engraved with texts from the period covered by the museum’s collection (1848–1914). The unusual colors of the stone are a response to the remarkable diversity of the stone used in the museum’s sculptures as well as its pedestals since its opening in 1986. The artist has identified each stone type and traced its origin, ensuring an extremely precise match.

With more than 750 unique texts drawn from 424 sources and 73 authors, “J’AI VU” may well be Holzer’s largest selection of texts for an exhibition to date. The breadth of her approach has resulted in a remarkably diverse assortment of writings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revolving around themes such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71; the 1871 Paris Commune; colonialism; activism; anarchism; the world of labor and workers’ strikes; the military, especially conscription, hazing, and corruption; Baron Haussmann and living conditions in Paris; art criticism; and artists’ correspondence. This plurality of voices takes on particular resonance when projected at monumental scale onto the museum’s facade, carved into marble and granite, or propelled through space as a stream of light. In returning to the primary documents of the period represented by the Musée d’Orsay’s collection, Holzer paints a portrait of an era via a multitude of voices, anecdotes, and points of view.