Access a slow-looking exercise of this work.

Transcript
Narrator: Jenny Holzer’s work titled "For the Guggenheim" is one in a series of site-specific light projections. It was originally shown at the Guggenheim Museum in 2008 and then again in 2024. Projected onto the museum’s facade are lines of large text in bright white letters. The darkened evening hours emphasize their brightness against the building’s grayed appearance. The text scrolls slowly upward in stacked rows; eventually each row disappears into the night sky above as new text rises from the ground below.  

The projections come from two angles along Fifth Avenue: One near 88th Street, the south side of the museum, onto the convex circular rings of the Guggenheim’s iconic rotunda. The second comes from near 89th Street, the north side, onto the smaller, secondary circular structure as well as the museum’s tall rectangular tower addition behind it.  

The brilliant white text is center-aligned. Sometimes it is contained on the building’s surfaces, and other times longer rows of text spill to the left and right onto adjacent buildings, pavement and cars. The letters are all sans serif, capitalized, and oversized. Each is around 10 feet tall, though the letters stretch and contract in size as they bend over the facade’s curves and recesses.  

Each row contains a few words, which when read together build up to continuous phrases on a loop. Some of them read: 

“In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself  
The buzzard never says it is to blame.  
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.  
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.  
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.  
A jackal doesn’t understand remorse.  
Lions and lice don’t waver in their course.  
Why should they, when they know they’re right?  
Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,  
in every other way they’re light.  
On this third planet of the sun  
among the signs of bestiality  
a clear conscience is number one.” 

Since the mid-1990s, Holzer has projected words in light onto buildings and urban squares as well as sand dunes, mountainsides, and ocean waves, extending an invitation to stand and read together in the night. While the earliest projections featured Holzer’s own texts, in 2001 she began to incorporate historical records and poetry, followed in 2004 by declassified US government documents. In 2008, two decades after she created a spiral LED sign that turned the interior of the Guggenheim’s rotunda into a dynamic text sculpture, Holzer returned to transform its exterior, projecting poems by Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska onto the building’s newly renovated facade. For the 2024 restaging of those projections, Szymborska’s poetry joined that of dozens of international poets whose words speak to conflict, exile, and the necessity of peace.

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