Jenny Holzer at Hauser & Wirth

At Hauser & Wirth’s new West Hollywood location, an LED column swings through the gallery like a battering ram. The artwork, by neo-conceptualist artist Jenny Holzer, is a text piece that was made with the assistance of AI technology. For the piece, titled WTF, Holzer utilized text from Trump speeches and QAnon posts, which scroll across the column letter by letter. As their words float by, the motorized LED column swings erratically through the space — its choppy movements mirroring the aggressive language. Elsewhere in the show, Holzer utilizes heavily redacted government documents, which she recreates as large works on canvas shrouded in gold and silver leaf, the shapes formed by the redactions form uncanny geometric abstractions. Aside from these works that utilize preexisting texts, this show also marks Holzer’s foray into AI, which she used to create two new LED works that hang nearby in the space. Titled Good and Bad — one comments on the sublime ecstasies of nature while the other shouts out choppy political rhetoric, the two representing conceptual poles of the human experience.

Installation view, ‘READY WHEN YOU ARE Jenny Holzer,’ Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood.1 September–21 October 2023. ©Jenny Holzer. All rights reserved, DACS, London / ARS, New York 2023. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Collin LaFleche.