Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer
born 1950
American installation and conceptual artist. Her studies included general art courses at Duke University, Durham, NC (1968–70), and then painting, printmaking, and drawing at the University of Chicago before completing her BFA at Ohio University, Athens (1972). In 1974 she took summer courses at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, entering its MFA programme in 1975 and beginning her first work with language, installation, and public art. Holzer moved to New York in 1977. Her first public works, Truisms (1977–9), appeared in the form of anonymous broadsheets pasted on buildings, walls, and fences in and around Manhattan. Commercially printed in cool, bold italics, numerous one-line statements such as ‘Abuse of power comes as no surprise’ and ‘There is a fine line between information and propaganda’, were meant to be provocative and elicit public debate. Thereafter Holzer used language and the mechanics of late 20th-century communications as an assault on established notions of where art should be shown, with what intention and for whom (e.g. Laments (I Want to Live . . .), 1989). Her texts took the forms of posters, monumental and electronic signs, billboards, television, and her signature medium, the LED (light emitting diode) sign. Other works appeared on T-shirts, tractor hats, stickers, metal plaques, park benches, and sarcophagi. On walls and façades, in galleries and outdoor spaces of cities around the world, she made electronic LED ‘projections’ to display various ironic ‘truisims’, lines of poetry and passages from declassified government documents and other texts. Her carefully chosen words illuminate themes of social and political justice and the heart-rending effects of war. Lustmord (trans. ‘Sexual Murder’, 1994) an installation inspired by war crimes in Bosnia, combined tables covered with female bones and LED billboards across which moved alternately the words of victims, perpetrators, and observers of crimes against women. Protect Protect (2008–9; Chicago, IL, Mus. Contemp. A.; New York, Whitney; Basle, Fondation Beyeler), comprising work made after 1993, included texts on long LED strips moving rapidly across several gallery floors and walls and a series of silkscreen paintings based on redacted government documents concerning the Middle East and Iraq. Holzer’s focus continued to be on the visual, intellectual, and experiential power of language. [Margaret Barlow. "Holzer, Jenny." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T038706.]
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