Sometimes it seems like Jenny Holzer has suffered the worst possible fate of a “prophetic” artist – banality. Her early aphorisms concerning torture and war are said time and again to be uncannily suited to the millennial world. But does it really feel uncanny? In Holzer we recognize our own intimations, the prophecy we all shared of war and encroaching power. She’s like us.

The timely artist is suspect, Nietzsche says, and like her content, Holzer’s form can seem all too timely. The scrolling line format is no more subversive than gchat. Does anyone really feel the need to undermine “the homogenous rhetoric of modern information systems”?

But this is to deal with her in the abstract. When you actually go to Protect Protect, the first thing you remember is the pure excitement of walking into a Holzer room. Sure, she’s a word artist. But the initial effect is a geometric trance that has little to do with logos. The Whitney show has done a great job of evoking this overlooked aspect.

The big new piece is For Chicago. Ten LED columns, about fifty feet long, scroll the entire canon of her work in brilliant yellow. The axis shifts, and when it’s vertical, we read the text letter by letter as it shoots away from us. Early feminisms like “My Mouth Provides Comfort” interchange freely with the pleas of black-cell detainees. The piece seems almost consciously crafted for a retrospective.

Its best aspect is a patterned interference that intermittently washes out the words as you read them, mirroring the redacted passages in her silkscreens. Holzer seems to be reminding us that language obscures more than it reveals. As you watch, the eye becomes inured, and you learn to expect and work around the distortions. Yet every once in a while (by chance, mind you), the blurring clears up just as a sentence begins, providing a pupil-dilating sense of sudden clarity, ten columns wide.

Red Yellow Looming (2004), though not so grand, is even more clever in its visual effect. Thirteen smaller, double-sided LED screens are tiered between two of the Whitney’s massive walls. In this installation, Holzer has used the bunker-like museum to great effect, and the text seems to flow from the structure itself. As Pentagon strategic documents scroll from left to right, it’s as if the workings of some vast, indifferent machine were flashing briefly into intelligible form. These are calm, unsettlingly brief statements concerning nuclear proliferation, alliances, Chinese containment. For a moment you feel like Tantalus: You have stolen from the gods.

The big kinetic pieces only take up half the show. The other half is reserved primarily for Holzer’s silkscreens. For the most part, these are blown-up declassified documents. A lot are letters and testimony from “foreign combatants”[1]. Again these are largely redacted, some to the point of presenting a textured, all-black canvass, recalling Holzer’s early interest in abstract expressionism. In a few cases, images of the detainees’ fingerprints have been blacked out. Even the simple truth of the body, the pre-cognitive, threatens to slip away.

One exceptional piece contains a written testimony from a Sergeant in Iraq. He is explaining the behavior of his men, who are apparently under investigation for the rape and murder of civilians. The hand is wandering and juvenile, and you get the sense that the Sergeant is straining to emulate the official tone the document calls for. The third paragraph states simply “I personally killed a child.” The effect on the surrounding wonders is unfortunate.

[1] Timely as ever, Holzer’s show coincides with the publication of the Red Cross report on the treatment of foreign detainees. Mark Danner has written an incisive piece on this staggering document.

Image: Jenny Holzer,”Green Purple Cross”, 2008, and “Blue Cross”, 2008. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.