Under erasure: Jenny Holzer’s War Paintings

Abstract This article examines Jenny Holzer’s painterly reworkings of redacted American military documents, comparing her practice with some of Nancy Spero’s extended visual narratives of torture and victimization. As two artists immersed in a feminist visual politics (and poetics) of representation where language is both a vehicle and a form of expression, they adopt contrasting strategies of transformation: for Spero via allegory and the mythic, for Holzer through an aesthetic of negation. I read their work partly through Jacques Rancière’s notion of the necessity for bringing traumatic events into visibility, and I argue that in their respective scripto-visual artworks and sensitivity to the materiality of language and its performative dimension, they ‘make the inhuman perceptible’. I also consider their practice as evidence of an ongoing project of foregrounding arts responsibility as witness to history and the historical subject, seeing in their respective modes of figuration and emphasis upon surface (presence/absence, colour, writing) a means of inscribing the body in the text.