What’s Not There: Jenny Holzer’s enduring exploration of painting and power

For more than a dozen years now, the artist Jenny Holzer—whose primary material has been the language that humans use both to oppress and to emancipate each other—has been at work on paintings that take redacted government documents as readymades and then assist them into the realm of a deeply troubled abstraction, made more unsettling by its beauty and clear affinity with the high-modernist canon. Many of the documents, obtained through freedom-of-information requests, relate to the United States’ intractable post-9/11 military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. The words that remain legible amid the censor blocks, seemingly at random—‘blunt force trauma,’ ‘rendition,’ ‘enhanced techniques’—function as sad windows into what Holzer once described as ‘the covert stuff that makes fate.’