Jenny Holzer on Paris Protests: 'It's Gruesome That Kids Have to Fight'

Jenny Holzer has condemned the protests gripping Paris, telling T: The New York Times Style Magazine: "It's gruesome that kids have to fight for a better education or for teachers to be paid properly, for their schools to be clean." She added: "I worry about the kids' safety."

The interview ran earlier this month, after the first large-scale demonstrations in the city. The protests have continued to roil Paris in the weeks since.

The occasion was Holzer's solo exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay. It includes an LED panel (a scrolling electronic text display, her signature medium) carrying a line the French writer Émile Zola penned in 1860: "I think of the future and see it so dark, so dark that I shrink back terrified."

Zola wrote that a century and a half before schoolchildren took to the barricades. Holzer did not have to reach for the parallel.

What else is in the show?

The exhibition spreads across the museum, inside and out:

• Scrolling text projected on the Musée d'Orsay's exterior, with quotations from 30 cultural figures, including Charles Baudelaire, Vincent van Gogh, and Auguste Rodin
• Paintings and sculptures bearing inscriptions
• A marble bench carrying a message from the painter Mary Cassatt: "As you say the world is mad just now"

The quotations come from the archive of the Musée d'Orsay itself. The museum's own paper trail supplied the show's text.

Why do 19th-century voices read as news?

Holzer described working with the material as a jolt. "The shock was how contemporary the issues are," she told T. "And a warm surprise was how companionable the writing is. Sometimes they're talking about being devastated; other times they're making bad jokes, pontificating, being vulnerable. It's like, 'Oh, hi there. Thank you for passing the time with me.'"

That is the exhibition's quiet argument. Zola's terror, Cassatt's madness, Baudelaire's gloom — none of it stayed in the 19th century, and children marching over dirty schools and unpaid teachers have made the point more sharply than any LED panel could. As Paris's demonstrations continue, Holzer's show keeps projecting the past onto the museum's walls, where it reads less like history than a forecast.