Belligerent

Jenny Holzer’s Belligerent is the latest title in the LiberArs series. While the book shares a format with the others in the collection, a closer look reveals that this is not a traditional book but a box with a magnetic closure. The box opens to reveal seven original works by Holzer that unfold into 60 x 79 cm posters, which can be kept in the box or even framed and displayed. In Belligerent, Holzer has found the fingerprints of an idle consciousness in redacted reports of detainee abuse in American military prisons, revealing it with precision while daring the reader to look. In his introduction, Joshua Craze says ‘There is a double violence in the redacted documents that Holzer paints: the violence done to the detainees, meted out in secret, and the violence done to the truth, visible in the redactions of the documents. The truth does not simply disappear, but appears as an absence.’