NICHOLAS HOLMES: Jenny Holzer's
PROTECT PROTECT
focuses on works from the last 15 years.
For people who have been
following her career,
this exhibition may seem like
somewhat of a departure.
Holzer's primary material
has always been language.
She's put text on LED,
or light-emitting diode displays,
t-shirts, hats,
light projections on buildings
and other unconventional places.
Now her LED displays have morphed
into more elaborate sculptures,
and she's been making paintings.
The overall visual effect
of the exhibition PROTECT PROTECT
is seductive.
The gallery walls are awash
in colored light,
and text moves hypnotically
across the sculptural surfaces.
The work draws you in, and in doing so,
brings you closer to the work's
often disturbing content.
Since 2004, Holzer has drawn her text
from declassified
government documents.
The earliest of the documents relate
to the Reagan administration's support
of Saddam Hussein in the early 1980s.
The latest take us through
the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
She obtained these
through the National Security Archive
and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Both of these groups use
the 1966 Freedom of Information Act
to bring government documents
into the public record.
Holzer made a strategic decision
to make documents into paintings,
reproducing them, unaltered,
in oil paint on linen.
She'd noticed that people
give paintings more time, attention,
and value than other art forms.
She wanted people to look
at these documents in the same way.
Like most of her document paintings,
"Request for Approval Green, White"
is a bit hard to read.
Holzer has enlarged the original,
letter-sized page, which was already
a poor quality print
after having been photocopied, scanned,
or faxed a number of times.
She's reproduced a memo containing
a kind of interrogator's wish list.
It asks permission
to conduct twenty-hour interrogations,
to subject prisoners
to enforced grooming,
specifically shaving their beards,
and to deprive them of things
that give them comfort,
like religious objects.
Holzer accessed the documents through
the American Civil Liberties Union,
or ACLU,
and the National Security Archive.
Kate Doyle is a senior analyst
at the National Security Archive.
DOYLE: The National Security Archive,
despite its somewhat sinister name,
is not a government agency.
It is not the National Security Agency.
It is not the National Archives.
It is actually a nonprofit,
nongovernmental organization
that was founded in the 1980s
by journalists and analysts,
investigators to, first and foremost,
promote and defend
the public's right to know.
HOLMES: Working with
the National Security Archive
and the ACLU, Holzer looked at
about 40,000 documents
including autopsy reports, policy memos,
statements by American soldiers
and other products of the bureaucracy
supporting the war.
This painting, "Jaw Broken,"
reproduces a statement
by an Iraqi detainee who has had
his jaw broken during an interrogation,
and ends with his declaration
of forgiveness of his abuser.
The content of the documents
Holzer has used varies widely,
but most of them
have one thing in common:
they've been edited or redacted
by government censors, blackened out
so that the content is illegible.
Again, Kate Doyle.
DOYLE: Although the Freedom
of Information Act provides people
with a legal tool to request information
from their own government,
there are exceptions to the kind
of information that the government
will or can provide.
Those exceptions, or exemptions,
are specified in the law,
and they might be for reasons of,
for example, national security.
B1, the National Security exemption
in the Freedom of Information Law,
is one of the key exemptions
that are used in denying us information
that we request to government agencies.
And those black marks will cover
anything from the most sensitive
intelligence information such as
the names of sources of intelligence,
or the methods that are used
by the government to gather intelligence,
whether it be wiretapping or spying.
HOLMES: Holzer has also
used government documents
in LED sculptures, and in some cases,
these too are redacted.
The text in the sculpture "Purple"
comes from accounts
of criminal proceedings against members
of the armed forces.
She's reproduced the redacted areas
with X's.
Often, the history
of a document's declassification
is visible on its surface.
The painting
"The White House 2002 Pink, White"
reproduces a memo George W. Bush
sent to his administration
detailing his position
on the Geneva Convention regarding
the treatment of prisoners of war.
In the lower left corner,
we can see that the document
was partially declassified in June 2004,
and not fully declassified
until October 2004.
DOYLE: When you are talking
about policies that walk the line
between what's legal and what's not,
immediately, even in the moment
of the creation of those policies,
comes the cover-up, comes the attempt
by the administration to protect itself.
And what you're seeing
when you see documents with text
that has been released
over a long period of time
is you're seeing the "push me, pull you"
of public demand.
When we first request
a document from the government,
we might get back a highly classified,
highly censored text.
We then have the right
to appeal that decision,
and that will usually produce
a less censored text.
We will have more information.
And if we really care about this issue,
and most of these issues
that we're talking about-- torture
and detention policy
and the War on Terror-- we cared about
and care about tremendously,
we will go to court over it.
HOLMES: In some cases,
the government
will declassify documents
that have been completely redacted.
DOYLE: The law actually stipulates
that they have to provide the document.
So even if the document
is entirely blacked out,
we will receive that document.
And the tiny scratchings
at the bottoms and tops of those pages
sometimes tell us things
about the document that are hard
for other people to see.
For example, it will tell us
what exemption they used
to hide that information.
And that gives us a clue
that this information was about
a national security issue,
or a privacy issue,
or it was about law enforcement,
depending on what exemption they cite.
Each president,
when he comes into office,
issues an executive order
on classification and secrecy.
And each president interprets
his administration's position on secrecy
in a different way.
There are very real, concrete efforts
to investigate, possibly for prosecution,
some of the officials
of the Bush administration for policies
that were clearly illegal at the time
they were carried out.
So in that sense, this exhibition
couldn't have a better timing
because these are precisely
the questions that members
of Congress, human rights lawyers,
both in this country
and in countries around the world,
are asking themselves.
HOLMES: Power dynamics
and sexual violence
have been important subjects
in Holzer's work for many years.
In 1994, Holzer produced
a series of works called "Lustmord,"
a German word that translates loosely
as "rape murder."
The works respond to the genocidal war
in the former Yugoslavia.
Early in that conflict,
it became evident that Serbian soldiers
were raping Bosnian women
in a deliberate, systematic fashion,
using rape as a weapon of war.
For "Lustmord," Holzer wrote text
from the perspectives of the victims,
the perpetrators
and, because these crimes
were often committed very publicly,
the observers.
In this version,
the texts have been engraved
on metal bands
encircling human bones,
which Holzer purchased
from natural history stores.
In earlier presentations of "Lustmord,"
the texts were written on people's bodies.
Laurel Fletcher is Professor of Law,
and Director of the International
Human Rights Law Clinic,
University of California Berkeley.
FLETCHER: In virtually
every conflict in the world
involving displacement of civilians,
you will see incidences
of rape of women.
The degree and the extent
and the patterns will vary,
but I think that the war in Yugoslavia
and the way rape was used there,
specifically as part of an effort
to terrorize and induce a population
to move, was something new.
HOLMES: The War in the Balkans
began in 1991.
At that time,
under President Slobodan Milosevic,
the Serbians seceded from Croatia,
hoping to form Greater Serbia,
an ethnically pure nation.
FLETCHER: And it was that desire
to have ethnically pure territory
that meant that you had to drive out
the inhabitants who had been living
in those areas,
in some cases for centuries.
So it was part of,
"How do you get civilian populations
who have lived in rural communities
for hundreds of years to leave
those communities and uproot?"
That is where the use of rape
as a tool of terror came into play.
HOLMES: A pattern reigned
from 1992 to 1993, as Serb forces
gained control in Bosnia.
Soldiers would lob artillery
into a Bosnian village;
its inhabitants would begin to flee.
Paramilitaries, or militias,
often run by criminal gangs,
would then arrive.
FLETCHER: But in general,
men and women were separated.
Then, women might be rounded up
and taken to separate detention facilities
where they would be raped.
They would be pulled out
of those detention facilities
at night by soldiers and raped.
Sometimes, as they were
rounding up villagers,
they would go door-to-door
and conduct house searches.
And in the context
of those house searches,
women would be raped.
So they might be raped
in front of their family members,
they might be raped
in front of their children,
or certainly within earshot.
The shame and humiliation
that accompanied this practice
needs to be understood
in the cultural milieu
of that rural population,
where purity and chastity
were prized among women.
So if a woman was raped and defiled,
that brought shame not only on herself,
but shame on her family.
And for that reason, then,
women would want to flee
and never return to their homes.
Sometimes women
would become pregnant,
and they would be told,
both in the course of the rape
and afterwards, that now you're going
to bear a Serbian child.
Others, if they were lucky,
were able to then escape or be released
because they had been impregnated
by a Serb,
in a sense sending the woman
and her full womb as a testament
to the conquest of her body
by Serbian forces.
And so as she returned
to her community, then that would send
a message in a ripple effect.
HOLMES: We asked Professor Fletcher
to respond to Holzer's "Lustmord"
from her perspective as an expert
in human rights violations.
FLETCHER: I think that one of
the challenges to all of us
is not to turn a blind eye,
or to shutter our hearts,
to the pain and suffering of victims,
which can become overwhelming
if you pay attention to the stories.
And sometimes it takes focusing in
on the fine details that may not be
the precise descriptions
of physical acts.
But it's as though...
you can't look directly
at a star to see its reflection,
you look to the side
and it will come into focus more clearly.
I think that the exhibit
serves the same function.
It allows us a pathway
that is perhaps easier to journey down,
but is an invitation to honor
the suffering and experience of victims.
HOLMES: PROTECT PROTECT
is on view at the Whitney Museum
until May 31, 2009.
This is Nicholas Holmes
of the Whitney Museum.
.