A Bigger Universe: Jenny Holzer: Light Line at the Guggenheim

Installation view, Jenny Holzer: Light Line, May 17–September 29, 2024, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © 2024 Jenny Holzer, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Filip Wolak

By KURT COLE EIDSVIG September 30, 2024

There’s an old story about Albert Einstein visiting the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York when Alexander Calder’s A Universe from 1934 was first exhibited at the museum. One of Calder’s first mechanical mobiles, the work is under 4 feet in height and is made of iron pipe, wire, wood, string, and paint. It also has a motor to propel the elements of the contraption in a loop. As the pieces whirled in that fateful first museum showing, Einstein reportedly stared, riveted, for the entire 40-minute loop. Calder constructed a universe that Albert Einstein could be fascinated by.

Fast forward nearly 90 years to Jenny Holzer at the Guggenheim. The artist and the space have conspired to render something much more elaborate: the universe of the mind. Entering the iconic and majestic sweep of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda, it’s hard to imagine a better pairing between art and surroundings than the Jenny Holzer: Light Line exhibition. When Jenny Holzer created the original Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1989, the installation stretched three revolutions of the museum’s rotunda and was the longest LED sign in the world at the time. Nearly thirty-five years later, this updated version spirals up through all six levels and crawls high toward the oculus of the space.

Einstein stood watching those 40-some-odd minutes, waiting until the moving parts repeated. Jenny Holzer’s Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is like that, too, but as an acrobatic swirl of text careening all around us. We watch as the words travel in synch, as solid as moving blocks of train cars on tracks, and the experience leads to an illusion of twisting. Stare up at the spiraling 6 levels during these synchronous movements, and you eventually have a vertigo-like corkscrewing sensation, being literally twisted by the words, twisting your body to keep up if you want to spin and try and track them (impossible). We are similarly twisted into knots with their implications, meanings, confusions, and paradoxes. If Calder was able to represent the swirling of a universe in his groundbreaking mechanical mobile, Holzer is near perfect in her rendering of our minds. The 100 billion galaxies of our visible universe stand parallel to the almost 70 billion neurons in the human mind as we stand in the rotunda and are confronted with this steady stream of thoughts, words, and contradictions.

There are moments when the fonts and colors change. There are others when specs of color flicker in partial pixelated stripes and zoom in a speedy spiral all around the space. At other times, the texts shift, and a second layer of words slips beneath the main word blocks, a pair of twin ribbons of Holzer-isms ascending and descending the rotunda simultaneously. Rather than screwing our feet firmly in the ground, the effect of the ascending and descending texts casts us as the contents of an anticipatory champagne bottle as the words work themselves against our corks. We are spinning to bursting while the tapes of words run in opposition as different fonts, forms, and intensities spiral all around. If we are stuck inside an expanded version of our noisy minds, the experience of ascending the rotunda ramps allows us a perspective on our racing thoughts. Not only in the ability to see ourselves as thought machines from different angles but also in the contributory factors to the mind noise we all contend with.

The layout of the museum is outstanding because it supports this sweeping Jenny Holzer exhibition as representing the internal and the external simultaneously. As we experience the center, the hive, the whirling span of the LED screens with scrolling texts as a depiction of our frenetic and staggering thoughts, the supporting galleries provide examples of the stimulus we receive as catalysts for our ideas. Tweets, PowerPoint slides, secret documents, rubbings, and hidden signs are among the forms Holzer uses to recontextualize everyday forms. Donald Trump's tweets are recreated on stamped lead and copper with precious metal plating swoop along the wall before descending into a pile of debris in Cursed, 2022. Accelerated, 2023, provides a flow chart of Societal Levels of Conflict in relation to Artificial Intelligence on 24k gold, moon gold, and red gold leaf and oil on linen. Small plaques like Living: It can be startling to see..., 1981, or Survival: Laugh hard at the absurdly evil, 1984, are positioned in ways they are almost hidden in plain sight near fire extinguishers, and the coat check almost blend in with the operational functions of the space. There are redacted FBI documents, cracked marble, and sarcophagus forms as well, all observable as external stimuli as the ever-present 6-level LED scroll stains everything we glance at with the reflections of its light.     

The push-pull of this relationship between the internal (our minds) and the stimulus of the external world (tweets, documents, etc.) displays a collaboration of the sensations here as well. Spinning around us, the power of words is nearly injected into our collective blood and data streams, and the circulatory action of texts spinning through our veins underscores the power of Holzer’s work. She demonstrates how embedded words become as they are transformed into the fabric of our lives, the foundations of our beliefs, and, as shown through the spinning arteries of language, our very lifeblood. If we get injected with the wrong jab, these words can poison us, overdose us, contaminate our bloodstream, and clog up our congested hearts. Both generator and responder, we interpret the words outside ourselves as a universe of colliding ideas only to push them back out into the world around us in ever-escalating truths, questions, and tragedies.

Moving past the experience of Einstein’s Calder staring, with Holzer, we are placed in the middle of our own complex cosmos. We are our own universes to be stared at and reconsidered from the inside out as we scale up and down the ramps of the Guggenheim’s rotunda. In bringing us all this and more, Jenny Holzer: Light Line is a masterpiece.

Jenny Holzer: Light Line is on display at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through September 29, 2024. WM