The Big Moose Deli & Country Store, in the small town of Hoosick in Upstate New York, is nearly overwhelmed by its outsized red-lettered signs advertising cider doughnuts, maple syrup, souvenirs and a military discount. Two miles north is the farm where, since the 1980s, the artist Jenny Holzer has lived. She and her six-person team work inside a grey corrugated metal barn they refer to as “the warehouse”. Tucked tidily into a sloping hay field, it is indiscernible among the other barns along the same road: there is nothing to suggest it houses the work of one of the world’s most celebrated living conceptual artists.
This is apt. Although Holzer is one of the most recognisable figures in contemporary art, her work also bears a distinct anonymity. Her primary medium is text – writ large, flashing, scrolling, italicised, bolded, emphatic – which she uses to address the untruths espoused by governments, corporations and others in power who exploit truth for more power. Her best-known series is Truisms, which originated in posters Holzer hung in the streets of Manhattan in the late 1970s, often bearing provocative and charged declarations. Holzer has also painted them on canvas, engraved them into bronze and aluminium plaques and carved them into marble benches. Perhaps the most popular is the deadpan observation “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE,” which glowed above Times Square in 1982.
“Did you see that apparently Y-chromosomes are disappearing?” Holzer asks me with good cheer. I was not aware that they were imperilled; the question makes me laugh, as Holzer surely intended. At 72, wearing her typical dark jeans and dark, long-sleeve shirt, her long hair unstyled, she is forthright and attentive. A self-declared “old hippy, wannabe-revolutionary”, she possesses a disarming sense of humour.
We’re seated in a lofted area of the warehouse. It is neatly crammed with her work; the majority is wrapped and stored on shelves. But on a small table lies work from her show Demented Words, exhibited last autumn in New York. Thin pieces of lead the size of bookmarks are stamped with tweets authored by former US president Donald Trump, and others of his ilk. Their appearance initially calls to mind ancient tablets – except that the words printed on them are damning, alarming and absolutely nuts.
“Trump was an abomination,” says Holzer. “He gave permission and encouragement to some of the worst things – from racism to sexism, to prevarication, to stealing, and on and on. Necessary work wasn’t happening on the environment, on poverty, on education, when it’s quite possible we’re getting very short on time.” She then suggests we stop talking about Trump, noting that normalising his behaviour has only encouraged the dangerous rise of “alt-right” politicians in the US. “That’s what the last gallery show was about, largely: the damage one man can do, and what happened around him.”
Holzer’s work frequently asks the viewer to look at unspeakable things, an approach that may be instinctive. She grew up in south-eastern Ohio and describes midwesterners as “plain-spoken and terse and succinct. And likely, when in doubt, to produce a maxim.” Parts of her childhood were “quite wrong and difficult” and perhaps that’s why she is drawn to “terrible topics, expressed plainly”.
From a young age, she drew incessantly. “I was an almost unstoppable, uncontrollable draftsperson. Draftsbaby.” Her grandmother’s sister, an artist, planted in Holzer the idea that artists are mystics. “Among other things,” she says, “she was a water witch. She could hold a willow twig and it would move when there was water. Somehow I associated that with the mysteries of art-making.”
She attended the University of Chicago with loose plans to become an attorney or an academic. Instead, she says, laughing, “I noticed to my everlasting dismay that I’m not that smart.” Surrounded by “utterly bright people”, Holzer re-evaluated and started thinking about her occult side. Water witches, willow twigs and mysticism.
Holzer’s work has always been blatantly feminist. Many of her best-known pieces denounce misogyny and expose society’s often inhumane treatment of women. When we discuss the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade last June, Holzer becomes sombre. “Aghast is inadequate,” she says. “It’s criminal, in my estimation. I feared it, but I didn’t predict it.”
I point out that her career began in the mid-70s, when Roe v Wade was nascent legislation. What does she wish she could say to her younger self about the future of the feminist movement? “Ooh.” She pauses. “Make it a constant focus. Don’t feel guilty for making it a constant, out-loud focus. Women are not horrible. We’re largely not the problem.” I ask her if she considers herself an optimist. “I must be, on some level,” she says, laughing. “But – large qualifier here – much is horrific, consistently. Whatever made us, Y-chromosome or no, has some serious flaws.”
Later this month, the Whitechapel gallery in London will present Holzer with its prestigious Art Icon award, which recognises artists who have made major contributions to their medium. In recent years, she has met the increasingly desperate crises of our era with increasingly direct methods, drawing criticism that some of her work has become overly earnest and didactic. Ahead of the 2020 US election, Holzer’s team dispatched a fleet of trucks to cities in swing states that carried LED panels illuminated with instructive phrases such as “VOTE JOYOUSLY” and “VOTE FOR YOUR HEALTH.” Holzer concedes to me they “may or may not be art” and that art need not be political: “Just plain art is a wonderful thing, in the right hands.”
Then she bears down on her admiration for good political art, and defends it as necessary, even edifying. “You know, [Picasso’s] Guernica wasn’t so bad. It was both art and exposé. And Goya wasn’t so shabby, both in terms of the quality of the production and the pointedness and truth-telling. It can be done. It’s seldom done well, but when it is, damn.”
At the onset of the pandemic, Holzer spent most of her time in Hoosick. “It was good to come off the road” she says; “to sit still instead of semi-frantically running around doing this or that artistic activity.” Although she’s back to travelling again, she hasn’t yet returned to the constant hurriedness of pre-pandemic demands.
Holzer is often inspired by literature. For decades, she has drawn from poets like Henri Cole, Wisława Szymborska and Anne Carson to “make the work stronger”. Currently she’s reading the work of AA Milne (“I did not know that he was a pacifist. And I genuinely like some of the melodic absurdity of Winnie-the-Pooh!”) and the sermons of Martin Luther King Jr.
Holzer’s daughter, the photographer Lili Kobielski, her son-in-law, and her two grandchildren moved in with her during the pandemic. I ask Holzer what kind of world she hopes her grandchildren will inherit. She mentions solutions to climate-related catastrophes, resource shortages, and the global refugee crisis, and makes a plea for the return of compassion for its own sake. “Wouldn’t it be lovely if kindness as pragmatism would make a reappearance – and as itself?” Holzer is smiling, but serious. “As its plain old self, without any application? It should be honoured.”
I ask Holzer about her hopes for the more immediate future. “Even though I said I wouldn’t talk about him, I will: Trump, incarcerated,” she declares. Then, her voice softening, she adds: “I want my art to get better. That’s a sincere wish. I want people to think of the common good, the common weal.”
• Holzer will receive the Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon award on 19 January
