CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/1/2016

Jenny Holzer: War Paintings

Jenny Holzer's Redaction Paintings "draw your attention not simply to the details of the U.S. war on terror, but to the structural and political conditions that made it possible," Joshua Craze writes in Jenny Holzer: War Paintings. "The redactions of the government documents take on additional weight when painted—they become visible, not as determinate content, but as absences... It becomes clear, staring at these paintings, that the absences are weapons of war: legal and bureaucratic means of continuing the war on terror. Holzer's paintings, then, are not reports from the battlefield, not sketches of breathless intensity made next to the scene of the fight. Instead, they are forensic analyses of one of the weapons with which the war is fought: the structure of the military and intelligence bureaucracies, and the legal impunity that veils their actions in shadow." Featured image is Water Board 0000090, 2008.