Spiralling

Inspired!  That's what I call whoever made the decision to project the pithy messages of Jenny Holzer around the spiraled atrium of the glorious Guggenheim.  

The LED lighting changes colors, too, as they round and round.

A lot of curatorial imagination--or maybe hers?--has gone into the 74-year-old artist's retrospective, aptly named "Light Line."

Her philosophical text is literally everywhere.

Holzer's work can be very sly.  Nothing more be said about J. Edgar Hoover's privacy intrusions than the FBI's investigation of Alice Neel at the height of the country's Red Scare. 

Her focus on government documents serves as an artistic indictment, like this 1972 conversation between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger after the U.S. bombed the shit out of North Vietnam in 1972, an event resulting in protests that shut down Columbia in the spring of my freshman year.  

P:    Goddamn, that must have been a good strike!

K:    Yeah.

P:    Of course, you want to remember Johnson bombed them for years and it didn't 

        do any good.

K:    But, Mr. President, Johnson never had a strategy; he was sort of picking away

        at them.  He would go in with 50 planes, 20 planes;

P:    I bet you we will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson 

        had in a month.

Holzer transcribes it on a background shaped like the country.

Freedom of Information requests--including those relating to the cover-up of American atrocities at Abu Ghraib--are as critical for Holzer's political art as the variety of artistic material she employs.  Is it my imagination or do some of the redactions look like weapons?

Twitter made it possible to hoist a certain U.S. president on his own petard, not that it has made any difference.   

I chose this example for aesthetics, not content

@ real Donald Trump (March 15, 2017):  Can you imagine what the outcry would be if @SnoopDogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama? Jail time!

More presidential detritus, where it belongs.

From an historical perspective, FOIA provides more substantive content

. . . including this understatement about January 6, 2021.

I couldn't quite parse this piece, although the gold-embossing of White House stationery surely alludes to the 45th president: They are ready for you when you are.

Several gravity-defying sculptural works in other galleries demanded to be photographed.

"Acceleration=Dream, Fibonacci Numbers in Neon and Motorcycle Phantom" by Mario Merz (1972)

"Riddle of the Sphiinx" by Mike Kelley (partial, 1991)

"Oh! Happy Days" by Maro Michalakakos (2012)

I'm a bigger fan of the grand daddy of folk art.

"The Football Players" by Henri Rousseau (1908)