Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist based in Hoosick, New York. Her work focuses on the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays.
Holzer belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists who emerged around 1980. She was an active member of Colab during this time, participating in The Times Square Show.
Among the most notable honors she has received for her contributions to the arts are the Leone d'Oro, the World Economic Forum's Crystal Award, the rank of Officier des Arts et des Lettres, the U.S. State Department's International Medal of Arts, and the Time 100 Award, as well as honorary doctorates from Williams College, the Rhode Island School of Design, the New School, and Smith College.
Early life and education
Holzer was born on July 29, 1950, in Gallipolis, Ohio. Originally aspiring to become an abstract painter, she took general art courses at Duke University and then studied painting, printmaking, and drawing at the University of Chicago before completing her BFA at Ohio University in 1972. After taking summer courses at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1974, she entered its MFA program in 1975. She moved to Manhattan in 1976, joined the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program, and began her first work with language, installation and public art. She received her MFA from RISD in 1977 and was an active member of Colab from 1977 to around 1981, participating in The Times Square Show and other Colab projects. Holzer worked as a typesetter for Laundry News, a laundromat-industry trade newspaper, to pay the bills at the beginning of her career, and this work influenced her artistic practice.Style, form and media
Holzer is known as a neo-conceptual artist. Most of her work is presented in public spaces and includes words and ideas, in the form of word art. The public dimension is integral to Holzer's work. Her large-scale installations have included advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other architectural structures, and illuminated electronic displays. LED signs have become her most visible medium, although her diverse practice incorporates a wide array of media including street posters, painted signs, stone benches, paintings, photographs, sound, video, projections, the Internet, t-shirts for Willi Smith, and a race car for BMW. Text-based light projections have been central to Holzer's practice since 1996. From 2010, her LED signs started becoming more sculptural. Holzer is no longer the author of her texts, and in the ensuing years, she returned to her roots by painting. Holzer’s LED works are often time-based, with texts programmed to scroll, flash, or repeat over extended durations. This use of movement and repetition aligns her work with systems of public information such as news tickers and advertising displays, emphasizing the relationship between language, technology, and public space. Scholars and curators have noted that the temporal nature of these electronic texts affects how viewers encounter and interpret the messages, as the phrases unfold gradually rather than being read all at once.Holzer only uses capital letters in her work and frequently words or phrases are italicized. She has stated that this is because she wants to "show some sense of urgency and to speak a bit loudly".
Holzer belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980, looking for new ways to make narrative or commentary an implicit part of visual objects. Other female contemporaries include Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Charlesworth, and Louise Lawler.
The subject of Holzer's work often relates to feminism and sexism. Her work discusses heavy subjects such as sexual assault against women. She has said that she gravitates towards subjects such as this due to family dysfunction she has experienced and because she claims "we don't need work on joy."
Works
Holzer's initial public works, Truisms, are among her best-known. They first appeared as anonymous broadsheets that she printed in black italic script in capital letters on white paper and wheat-pasted to buildings, walls and fences in and around Manhattan. Holzer developed Truisms by condensing complex theoretical texts into brief statements that she distributed on public posters in Manhattan. The project invited viewers to question commonly accepted ideas through simple but provocative phrases. These one-liners are a distillation of an erudite reading list from the Whitney Independent Study Program, where she was a student. She printed other Truisms on posters, T-shirts and stickers, and carved them into stone benches. In late 1980, Holzer's mail art and street leaflets were included in the exhibition Social Strategies by Women Artists at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, curated by Lucy Lippard.In 1981, Holzer initiated the Living series, printed on aluminum and bronze plaques, the presentation format used by medical and government buildings. The Living series addressed the necessities of daily life: eating, breathing, sleeping, and human relationships. Her bland, short instructions were accompanied by paintings by American artist Peter Nadin, whose portraits of men and women attached to metal posts further articulated the emptiness of both life and message in the information age.
Inflammatory Essays was a work consisting of posters Holzer created from 1979 to 1982 and put up throughout New York. The statements on the posters were influenced by political figures including Emma Goldman, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Tse-tung. In 2018 an excerpt from that work was printed on a card stitched onto the back of the dress Lorde wore to the Grammys; the excerpt read, "Rejoice! Our times are intolerable. Take courage, for the worst is a harbinger of the best. Only dire circumstance can precipitate the overthrow of oppressors. The old & corrupt must be laid to waste before the just can triumph. Contradiction will be heightened. The reckoning will be hastened by the staging of seed disturbances. The apocalypse will blossom." Others at the Grammys wore white roses or all-white clothes to express solidarity with the Time's Up movement; Lorde wrote, "My version of a white rose — THE APOCALYPSE WILL BLOSSOM — an excerpt from the greatest of all time, jenny holzer."
The medium of modern computer systems became an important component in Holzer's work in 1982, when the artist installed her first large electronic sign on the Spectacolor board in New York's Times Square. Sponsored by the Public Art Fund program, the use of light-emitting diodes allowed Holzer to reach a larger audience. The texts in her subsequent Survival series, compiled in 1983–85, speak to the great pain, delight, and ridiculousness of living in contemporary society. She began working with stone in 1986; for her exhibition that year at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, Holzer introduced a total environment where viewers were confronted with the relentless visual buzz of a horizontal LED sign and stone benches leading up to an electronic altar. Continuing this practice, her installation at the Guggenheim Museum in 1989 featured a 163-meter-long sign forming a continuous circle spiraling up a parapet wall. This installation was re-imagined by the Guggenheim in 2024 for her show, Light Line.
In 1989, Jenny Holzer released the Laments series to the Dia Art Foundation in New York; this installation consisted of columns of colored lights and carved marble and granite tops that made up the laments. Holzer uses the passages she had read while being a part of the Whitney Independent Study Program by simplifying them for public consumption and applying them to her phrases. This series not only provokes thought in her audience through the constant reminder of death and sorrow but also exposes them to sources they normally wouldn't come across. In an interview Holzer mentions that she uses the first person "I" simply to give the impression that a dead person is speaking and therefore make the installation more interesting to her audience. In Laments Jenny gave a voice to 13 different dead individuals, to say everything they might not have gotten the opportunity to while alive. She touches on topics like motherhood, violation, pain, torture, and even death on a personal level to these 13 individuals Although Laments focuses mostly on the darkness of humanity and the tragedies we face daily there is also hidden optimism in the 13 laments.
In 1989, Holzer became the second female artist chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in Italy. At the 44th Biennale in 1990, her LED signboards and marble benches occupied a solemn and austere exhibition space in the American Pavilion; she also designed posters, hats, and T-shirts to be sold in the streets of Venice. The installation, Mother and Child, won Holzer the Leone D'Oro for best pavilion. The original installation is retained in its entirety in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the organizing institution for the American Pavilion at the 1990 Biennale.
After taking a break from the art world, Holzer returned with controversy in 1993. Holzer came out with her Lustmord series, taking the title from the German word meaning "sex murder". Holzer created the series as a response of the Bosnian War, specifically the widespread rape and murder of women. The work feature three poems that retell sex crimes from the perspective of the victim, the observer, and the perpetrator. Lustmord has taken many different forms from texts written in blue, black, and red ink on the skin, to the Lustmord Table, a series of different bones of the body laid on a wooden table, with silver bands wrapped around them, engraved with the text of the three poems.
While Holzer wrote the texts for the bulk of her work between 1977 and 2001, since 1993, she has mainly been using texts written by others, including literary texts from such authors as Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, Henri Cole, Elfriede Jelinek, Fadhil Al Azzawi, Yehuda Amichai, Mahmoud Darwish, Khawla Dunia, and Mohja Kahf. As of 2010, Holzer's work has been focused on government documents, concerning Iraq and the Middle East. Using texts from a very different context, more recent projects have involved the use of redacted government documents and passages from declassified U.S. Army documents from the war in Iraq. For example, a large LED work presents excerpts from the minutes of interrogations of American soldiers accused of committing human rights violations and war crimes in Abu Ghraib prison — making what was once secret public and exposing the "military-commercial-entertainment complex".
Holzer's work often concerns violence, oppression, sexuality, feminism, power, war and death; the artist often utilizes the rhetoric of modern information systems to address the politics of discourse. Her main aim is to enlighten, illuminating something thought in silence and meant to remain hidden.
Critic Samito Jalbuena has written that the artist's public use of language and ideas often creates shocking juxtapositions — commenting on sexual identity and gender relations on an unassuming New York movie theater marquee, for example — and sometimes extends to flights of formal outrage.