President’s Surveillance Program is part of Jenny Holzer’s long-running “Redaction” series of paintings, drawings, and prints. By modifying previously redacted (censored) U.S. government documents to emphasize their suppressed content, Holzer highlights the extremes of sanctioned secrecy and surveillance. Here, she enlarged the original document and reproduced it on vellum (treated animal skin, also known as parchment), a reference to the parchment on which the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were written. In so doing, she exposes the irony that constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech, press, and protest are often the first casualties of government abuse. Holzer has rendered the censor’s redactions with broad, gestural strokes, in a brilliant shade of red, implying blood and emphasizing that redaction is the work of human hands and minds. The effect is a powerful suggestion that the cost of rising government secrecy is the loss of personal freedom.
