Holzer, Jenny

Jenny Holzer

For the past three decades, the influential American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer has been challenging viewers' assumptions about the world through language that conveys the multiplicity of often contradictory voices, opinions and attitudes that form the basis of contemporary society. Alternating between fact and fiction, public and private, the universal and the particular, Holzer's work offers an incisive social and psychological portrait of our times. During the last decade, Holzer has shown extensively in Europe but has been less visible in the United States--following a period of wide exposure and pervasive influence beginning in the late 1970s. This volume, which accompanies a major presentation of Holzer's work in various media from the 1990s onward at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, goes a long way towards rectifying this situation, and reintroduces her to the American audience at a timely political moment. Featuring several scholarly essays and an interview with the artist, Works in Public Space provides an overview of the work of one of the leading artists of the 80s generation.

Jenny Holzer: Truth Before Power

The politics of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is the subject of Truth Before Power, Jenny Holzer's recent Kunsthaus Bregenz project. The complicated dialectic of decision-making and public debate, as it has unfolded through the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, and George W. Bush, is explored in texts devoted to such issues as the international trade in arms and oil, the war on terrorism, 9/11, the FBI and CIA, and Congress's oversight of the intelligence community. For the most part, the installation's text has been taken verbatim from U.S. government documents--many of which were classified at the time they were written. Under the landmark Freedom of Information Act passed in 1966, all are now public record, though some remain heavily redacted. This illustrated catalogue includes selections from declassified U.S. government documents, Henri Cole's poem To the Forty-third President, and highlights from Holzer's own writing. Color photographs document Holzer's installations at the Kunsthaus and the Johanniterkirche in Feldkirch, and the eight xenon light projections staged in Vorarlberg.

Jenny Holzer: Xenon For Duisburg

ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE MURDER HAS ITS SEXUAL SIDE PEOPLE WON'T BEHAVE IF THEY HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE SLOPPY THINKING GETS WORSE OVER TIME Jenny Holzer's Truisms, the series of texts from which these phrases derive, are just one of the sources for the jolting words that the artist projects across monumental manmade and natural structures from Buenos Aires to Berlin. Beginning in the late 70s, Holzer has posted her provocative texts around the urban environment via a range of media--first on simple xeroxed posters, later on stickers, T-shirts, postcards, bronze plaques, and baseball caps. In the 80s, she moved on to the mass formats of large-scale LED screens in airports and sports stadiums. In her most recent projects, she has gone larger still, adopting xenon spotlight technology to project printed messages onto building facades and public squares, mountain sides, and river surfaces. The effect is overwhelming, as if Holzer's inflammatory commands were being spoken by some omniscient voice, impossible to ignore. Xenon for Duisberg: The Power of Words documents a cross-section of Holzer's light-art oeuvre, featuring recent projections of text works sampled from her earlier series Truisms (1977-1979), Inflammatory Essays (1979-1982), and Survival (1983-1985). Also included is Mother and Child (1990), a set of phrases projected onto the monumental blast furnace at the former Thyssen steelworks and on other prominent architectural structures in downtown Duisburg in 2004. The accompanying DVD features more texts and images.

Jenny Holzer: Lustmord

Artwork by Jenny Holzer.

The Venice Installation

Jenny Holzer: Laments

Artwork by Jenny Holzer.

Jenny Holzer: Truisms And Essays (Nova Scotia Pamphlets)

Artwork by Jenny Holzer.

Jenny Holzer: Redaction Paintings

This elegant clothbound monograph gathers the most recent work by the seminal language-based installation artist, Jenny Holzer. Presented to great acclaim at New York's Cheim & Read gallery this past summer, the work consists of enlarged, colorized silkscreen "paintings" of declassified and oftentimes heavily censored American military and intelligence documents that have recently been made available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act. Beautiful in their own right, the works are also haunting reminders of what really goes on behind the scenes in the American military/political power system. Documents address counter-terrorism, prisoner abuse, and even the threat of Osama Bin Laden. Some of the documents are almost completely inked out, like Colin Powell's memo on Defense Intelligence Agency reorganization. Others are spotty enough to allow readers to try to fill in the blanks. As Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times, these are "the hardest-hitting, least hypothetical texts of Holzer's career."

Jenny Holzer & Cindy Sherman: Personae

Public Image Ltd.: David Joselit on Jenny Holzer and "Consider This ...".(MEDIA): An article from: Artforum International

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Citation Details
Title: Public Image Ltd.: David Joselit on Jenny Holzer and "Consider This ...".(MEDIA)
Author: David Joselit
Publication: Artforum International (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 45 Issue: 1 Page: 113(2)

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