PROTECT PROTECT

focuses on works from the last 15 years.

For people who have been

following her career,

this exhibition may seem like

somewhat of a departure.

Holzer's primary material

has always been language.

She's put text on LED,

or light-emitting diode displays,

t-shirts, hats,

light projections on buildings

and other unconventional places.

Now her LED displays have morphed

into more elaborate sculptures,

and she's been making paintings.

The overall visual effect

of the exhibition PROTECT PROTECT

is seductive.

The gallery walls are awash

in colored light,

and text moves hypnotically

across the sculptural surfaces.

The work draws you in, and in doing so,

brings you closer to the work's

often disturbing content.

Since 2004, Holzer has drawn her text

from declassified

government documents.

The earliest of the documents relate

to the Reagan administration's support

of Saddam Hussein in the early 1980s.

The latest take us through

the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She obtained these

through the National Security Archive

and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Both of these groups use

the 1966 Freedom of Information Act

to bring government documents

into the public record.

Holzer made a strategic decision

to make documents into paintings,

reproducing them, unaltered,

in oil paint on linen.

She'd noticed that people

give paintings more time, attention,

and value than other art forms.

She wanted people to look

at these documents in the same way.

Like most of her document paintings,

"Request for Approval Green, White"

is a bit hard to read.

Holzer has enlarged the original,

letter-sized page, which was already

a poor quality print

after having been photocopied, scanned,

or faxed a number of times.

She's reproduced a memo containing

a kind of interrogator's wish list.

It asks permission

to conduct twenty-hour interrogations,

to subject prisoners

to enforced grooming,

specifically shaving their beards,

and to deprive them of things

that give them comfort,

like religious objects.

Holzer accessed the documents through

the American Civil Liberties Union,

or ACLU,

and the National Security Archive.

Kate Doyle is a senior analyst

at the National Security Archive.

DOYLE: The National Security Archive,

despite its somewhat sinister name,

is not a government agency.

It is not the National Security Agency.

It is not the National Archives.

It is actually a nonprofit,

nongovernmental organization

that was founded in the 1980s

by journalists and analysts,

investigators to, first and foremost,

promote and defend

the public's right to know.

HOLMES: Working with

the National Security Archive

and the ACLU, Holzer looked at

about 40,000 documents

including autopsy reports, policy memos,

statements by American soldiers

and other products of the bureaucracy

supporting the war.

This painting, "Jaw Broken,"

reproduces a statement

by an Iraqi detainee who has had

his jaw broken during an interrogation,

and ends with his declaration

of forgiveness of his abuser.

The content of the documents

Holzer has used varies widely,

but most of them

have one thing in common:

they've been edited or redacted

by government censors, blackened out

so that the content is illegible.

Again, Kate Doyle.

DOYLE: Although the Freedom

of Information Act provides people

with a legal tool to request information

from their own government,

there are exceptions to the kind

of information that the government

will or can provide.

Those exceptions, or exemptions,

are specified in the law,

and they might be for reasons of,

for example, national security.

B1, the National Security exemption

in the Freedom of Information Law,

is one of the key exemptions

that are used in denying us information

that we request to government agencies.

And those black marks will cover

anything from the most sensitive

intelligence information such as

the names of sources of intelligence,

or the methods that are used

by the government to gather intelligence,

whether it be wiretapping or spying.

HOLMES: Holzer has also

used government documents

in LED sculptures, and in some cases,

these too are redacted.

The text in the sculpture "Purple"

comes from accounts

of criminal proceedings against members

of the armed forces.

She's reproduced the redacted areas

with X's.

Often, the history

of a document's declassification

is visible on its surface.

The painting

"The White House 2002 Pink, White"

reproduces a memo George W. Bush

sent to his administration

detailing his position

on the Geneva Convention regarding

the treatment of prisoners of war.

In the lower left corner,

we can see that the document

was partially declassified in June 2004,

and not fully declassified

until October 2004.

DOYLE: When you are talking

about policies that walk the line

between what's legal and what's not,

immediately, even in the moment

of the creation of those policies,

comes the cover-up, comes the attempt

by the administration to protect itself.

And what you're seeing

when you see documents with text

that has been released

over a long period of time

is you're seeing the "push me, pull you"

of public demand.

When we first request

a document from the government,

we might get back a highly classified,

highly censored text.

We then have the right

to appeal that decision,

and that will usually produce

a less censored text.

We will have more information.

And if we really care about this issue,

and most of these issues

that we're talking about-- torture

and detention policy

and the War on Terror-- we cared about

and care about tremendously,

we will go to court over it.

HOLMES: In some cases,

the government

will declassify documents

that have been completely redacted.

DOYLE: The law actually stipulates

that they have to provide the document.

So even if the document

is entirely blacked out,

we will receive that document.

And the tiny scratchings

at the bottoms and tops of those pages

sometimes tell us things

about the document that are hard

for other people to see.

For example, it will tell us

what exemption they used

to hide that information.

And that gives us a clue

that this information was about

a national security issue,

or a privacy issue,

or it was about law enforcement,

depending on what exemption they cite.

Each president,

when he comes into office,

issues an executive order

on classification and secrecy.

And each president interprets

his administration's position on secrecy

in a different way.

There are very real, concrete efforts

to investigate, possibly for prosecution,

some of the officials

of the Bush administration for policies

that were clearly illegal at the time

they were carried out.

So in that sense, this exhibition

couldn't have a better timing

because these are precisely

the questions that members

of Congress, human rights lawyers,

both in this country

and in countries around the world,

are asking themselves.

HOLMES: Power dynamics

and sexual violence

have been important subjects

in Holzer's work for many years.

In 1994, Holzer produced

a series of works called "Lustmord,"

a German word that translates loosely

as "rape murder."

The works respond to the genocidal war

in the former Yugoslavia.

Early in that conflict,

it became evident that Serbian soldiers

were raping Bosnian women

in a deliberate, systematic fashion,

using rape as a weapon of war.

For "Lustmord," Holzer wrote text

from the perspectives of the victims,

the perpetrators

and, because these crimes

were often committed very publicly,

the observers.

In this version,

the texts have been engraved

on metal bands

encircling human bones,

which Holzer purchased

from natural history stores.

In earlier presentations of "Lustmord,"

the texts were written on people's bodies.

Laurel Fletcher is Professor of Law,

and Director of the International

Human Rights Law Clinic,

University of California Berkeley.

FLETCHER: In virtually

every conflict in the world

involving displacement of civilians,

you will see incidences

of rape of women.

The degree and the extent

and the patterns will vary,

but I think that the war in Yugoslavia

and the way rape was used there,

specifically as part of an effort

to terrorize and induce a population

to move, was something new.

HOLMES: The War in the Balkans

began in 1991.

At that time,

under President Slobodan Milosevic,

the Serbians seceded from Croatia,

hoping to form Greater Serbia,

an ethnically pure nation.

FLETCHER: And it was that desire

to have ethnically pure territory

that meant that you had to drive out

the inhabitants who had been living

in those areas,

in some cases for centuries.

So it was part of,

"How do you get civilian populations

who have lived in rural communities

for hundreds of years to leave

those communities and uproot?"

That is where the use of rape

as a tool of terror came into play.