The politics of US foreign policy in the Middle East is the subject of
TRUTH BEFORE POWER, Jenny Holzer’s Kunsthaus Bregenz project. The complicated dialectic of decision-making and public debate, as it has unfolded through the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush,William Jefferson Clinton, and George W. Bush, is explored in text devoted to such issues as the international trade in arms and oil, the “war”on terrorism, 9/11, the FBI and CIA, and Congress’s oversight of the intelligence community.

For the most part, the installation’s text has been taken verbatim from US government documents. Many were “classified” at the time they were written. Under the landmark Freedom of Information Act passed in 1966, all are now public record, though some remain heavily redacted.

On the museum’s second floor, where electronic signs are programmed in red and amber, Holzer seeks to convey the welter of voices involved in government decision-making. Amber signs, on the third floor, are devoted to the theoretical literature of the American intelligence community, and this community’s relationship with the executive and legislative branches of government. A more lyrical note is provided by American poet Henri Cole, whose recent work “To the Forty-third President” appears in English and German on the first floor blue sign array; and again on the Museum’s ground floor, translated into German and inscribed on a diagonally displayed log.

For Holzer’s companion installation at the Johanniterkirche Feldkirch , the poem is branded in English, spiraling down a bare vertical tree trunk.

Johanniterkirche Feldkirch, Jenny Holzer, President, 2004

Henri Cole is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently “Middle Earth”which received the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award earlier this year. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Bennington College, and has been described by critic Harold Bloom as a “central poet of his generation.”Cole lives in Boston, MA.

TRUTH BEFORE POWER, the title of the exhibition, is taken from a 1968 essay, “Estimates and Influence,” by Sherman Kent, one of the CIA’s founders and leading thinkers. “I suppose that if we in intelligence were one day given three wishes,”Kent mused, “they would be to know everything, to be believed when we spoke, and in such a way to exercise an influence to the good in the matter of policy.”

As a companion piece to her installation in the lobby of the Kunsthaus,
Holzer will place a monumental, text-branded tree in the nave of the Johanniterkirche Feldkirch. Referencing Trajan’s Column, the text – presented in English in the church and in German in the Kunsthaus lobby – will spiral the length of the trees. In the Johanniterkirche, the tree column will be centered beneath Florus Scheel’s ceiling fresco in the crossing of the nave and the side chapels. The tree, placed in the midst of excavated graves, will be positioned on the church’s uneven earthen floor.

Holzer’s installation in the Johanniterkirche is the most recent project in the collaboration, established in 2001, between the church and Kunsthaus Bregenz.