In 1986, the electronic Starburst sign above Caesars Palace in Las Vegas glowed with artist Jenny Holzer's wry text, "Protect me from what I want." That desperate plea seems all the more ironic in context of Holzer's recent work, which suggests that such refuge is not only illusory, it's also dangerous. Twenty-one years later and all grown up, today's marquee might read, "Protect me from what protects me."

The '80s text-art superstar, who once wrote, "Abuse of power comes as no surprise," has, like her Dada collagist predecessors, staked a career on language as a means by which power is propagated. So it's no surprise that her current Redaction series, portions of which are now on view at The Contemporary Museum, focuses on language disemboweled: declassified and other sensitive documents that the United States government has "redacted" (edited by blacking out select text) for public release.

The exhibition also features inscribed marble footstools, and a large-scale installation of 48 mini-LED (light-emitting diode) displays that bear texts from Holzer's various series, including her aphoristic Truisms and dark, apocalyptic Under a Rock series. While those objects, and their dialogue about permanence and transience, are a pleasure, the intimate space allows only a truncated survey, and may have been better served instead by more complete representation of the urgent Redaction paintings.

Those "paintings" are actually screenprints of blown-up, redacted documents over oil-on-linen painted backgrounds. The letters, memos, emails and medical reports track a post-9/11 political and military climate. (When the series debuted in New York last year, additional documents from previous eras provided historical perspective.) Most metaphorical are enormous, redacted hand- and fingerprints, with scrawling black ink that evokes architectural edifices. Their graphic obliteration of identity informs and haunts the series.

The overall display is like carnage: We can't look away; but the writers (and their potential victims) are most devastated. Their words — those that remain — suggest human negligence and ignorance. Some panels detail autopsy reports from anonymous prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, naming gunshot wounds, strangulation, blunt force and possible hypothermia as causes of death. FBI memos, dated July 2001, raise suspicions about a possible relationship between U.S. flight school participants and the jihad.

A father requests that his enlisted son's generals spare him the public hardship of military trial and expulsion for what he alludes are alleged prisoner abuses. Of the pieces included here, this document's complexities most encapsulate the potential of Holzer's new work. The father's censored denial, shame, entitlement, powerlessness and love commingle in Shakespearean proportions: However heinous a perpetrator's war crimes are, the human loss extends in all directions. In this way, war is like language, and language like war: Both simultaneously serve and sever.

Yet it seems naive to accept the claim, made in press materials by Holzer's New York gallery Cheim & Read, that her "relay of information and presentation of a range of voices presume no particular ideology." Holzer is indisputably an editor with a cause. Though conflicting opinions co-exist, it's in her juxtaposition of these particular, chosen documents that certain voices acquire strength, and certain erasures implicate their censors.

And it's testament to Holzer's shrewd, banal gloss of flatly layered oils that the documents appear as straightforward, nondogmatic source materials. Her choice of monumental painting, a first for the artist, as this series' seductive medium makes sense in other ways, too. It not only allows the documents to appear whole and magnified (both give viewers pause), but also vests the work, and its disenfranchised narratives, with the automatic authority that such paintings — historically aligned with power — still command in a gallery context.

Similarly monumental, the combined LED scrolls are modulated and textural like human voices; again, there's a slight echo of Dadaism in the machine-as-medium. It's a lovely installation: contemplative, mesmerizing and sublimely epic. Yet strung together, the multicolored language threads, no matter how beautiful or skillfully subliminal, are — much like television — more hypnotic distraction than effective provocation.

That's the great irony of doing the sort of work that Holzer does in an age that might be best termed the misinformation age. As marketing agencies and Wikipedia and Stephen Colbert and The Associated Press and YouTube and Google and the blogosphere cross-reference each other in a glutted, unreal hall of mirrors, what's a text artist who appropriates such media for her own devices to do? She can occupy the forms to expose their machinery; but in the end, she's defined by what she refuses.

It's a trap — not unlike war, or language. And yes, the product can be banal. But Holzer's current occupation is essential viewing, most of all for its reminder that we don't know much about — or pay much attention to — what "protects" us.

Marie Carvalho is a freelance writer who covers the arts.

HOLZER DIGS INTO ARCHIVE FOR ART SERIES

Jenny Holzer's Redaction series reproduces FBI memos and Guantanamo Bay autopsy reports — but where did she get her hands on the papers? She culled sensitive United States government records and declassified documents from the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental, nonprofit research institute in Washington, D.C.

Part legal watchdog organization, part library, part journalist's treasure trove, the archive is dedicated to providing public access to such records under the 1966 Freedom of Information Act. Check out the archive at www.nsarchive.org.

— Marie Carvalho