General John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, first Prince of Mindelheim, first Count of Nellenburg, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, has become a monster. Tentacles sprout around his stone bust in the library of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. Along these sturdy metal arcs illuminated electronic text slides by at speed, the recent testimonies of UK war veterans. “What are you embarrassing me for? ... And there was an Afghan that … I had all my Afghans with me”.

As night draws in, the marble features of the statesman – who distinguished himself at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, and for whom this grandest of country piles was then built – pulse a gaudy fuchsia, making the curls of his copious wig seem to pulse. The effect is both weird and ghastly, a sort of trippy disco terror.



With her exhibition Softer, Jenny Holzer has transformed Blenheim Palace into a house of horrors as creepy as an old Hammer movie, though the blood and pain here are real. Centuries lie between the present-day soldiers and the duke, but the implication is clear: the glorious victories on which his reputation and family fortune were built are no less traumatic and horrific than the wars of today.

Agony … bones laid out to symbolise war crimes against women. Photograph: © 2017 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photo: Edd Horder

The American artist is a game choice for the Blenheim Art Foundation’s fourth exhibition, with her 21st-century electronics providing a dramatic counter to the palace’s baroque bombast. They go straight for the jugular: Holzer has crusaded against the covert violence on which power is built ever since her breakthrough work Truisms, a series of maxims begun in 1977. Her own pithy sayings – “The abuse of power comes as no surprise” – have since been let loose via posters, T-shirts, baseball hats and more. Holzer has also turned to found texts, including war documents and poetry, as well as more traditional mediums such as stone inscriptions and paintings. Her signature, though, is LED signs beaming out fearful words.

At Blenheim, the finery first turns foul beneath the cupola of the entrance, a two-storey hall where a long LED slab hangs like an alternative chandelier. The fragmented phrases shimmering along it include those of defectors from the Syrian military and detained children: “I must study very hard … Never want to be … Will do whatever it takes…” Elsewhere, marble benches have been inscribed with lines by the Polish poet Anna Świrszczyńska, who was a member of the Polish resistance after the Nazi invasion. The light flickers as if generated by candles rather than this high-tech chandelier, and I catch something about lovers waiting for death in a basement as the air runs out.

Declassified … a military document censored in blood red. Photograph: © 2017 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photo: Edd Horder

Not everything works perfectly. Holzer’s big paintings, made by screenprinting images of declassified military documents with the most toxic content hidden by thick lines of pen, can be found leant against walls beneath portraits of the palace’s former inhabitants. Some of the source material was apparently so sensitive it required total erasure and Holzer records this as blood-red squares resembling abstract painting. Placing one of these beneath a 19th-century portrait of a duchess, parading in gauzy white lace and silk, packs a punch – polluting her perfumed air with the stink of that hidden, violent history. The first time the artist does this, it’s great. But, with the trick performed in antechamber after antechamber, the brilliantly coloured abstractions, placed to chime with the furnishings, actually start to flatter their surrounds.

Cold … excerpts from a poem on Blenheim’s facade Photograph: © 2017 by the author. Used with permission of the author. © 2017 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photo: Samuel Keyte

Holzer has long pointed to this connivance between culture and the tacit forces shaping society and how we think. Her stories of human agony are, after all, lit up using the same LED tech as the luminous billboards of Times Square. Blenheim is clearly a ripe environment for her to explore this theme, with its military origins and clout as a tourist attraction. In fact, its very existence today depends on our continued belief in the awesomeness of its heritage – hosting coachloads of visitors, producing mineral water, and leasing its grounds for weddings, along with other business enterprises.

You have to wait for darkness to fall to appreciate how Holzer has brought the notion of “soft power” out in the open. On War, a work in which damning words are beamed across the gravel and up the ornamented facades in crisp white lines, is coldly magnificent and brutal, like being caught inside the credits from the original Star Wars movies, or the searchlights of helicopters or prisons. Holzer has responded to the palace’s baroque hyperbole with an eye for an eye, matching its over-the-top grandeur with intense spectacle and wrenching emotion. This is not a subtle show, but Blenheim is not a subtle building.

• This article was amended on 3 October 2017 to correct a quote from one of the slides.