WHATEVER YOU SAY

Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.

- JACKSON ARN

Fair warning: after you leave the Guggenheim’s summer blockbuster, “Jenny Holzer: Light Line,” words will misbehave. Basic signage may seem newly cryptic, ad slogans slacker. Pleasantries of the “What’s up with you?” variety may leave an unpleasant taste in your mouth. The verbal machinery that ordinarily moves things forward will grind and screech until you remember how to tune out the noise.

The part of the show which will pry open your senses is called “Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.” It is made of phrases, enough of them that it takes the words several hours to crawl up an L.E.D. spiral lining the museum’s interior. Many of the phrases (“You have a sick one on your hands when your affection is used to punish you”) are wacky. Some (“Affluent college-bound students face the real prospect of downward mobility”) are true, though others (“Forget truths, dissect myth”) opt for something mistier. A significant number made the same journey up the Guggenheim’s ramp in 1989, for Holzer’s first show at the museum, and all are taken from sequences of word art that she composed between the late seventies and the nineties. They add up to a single epic poem that is, by my count, Holzer’s one and only gift to art history, so major that it makes a footnote of pretty much everything else in the show.