Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) is recognized as one of the most significant artists of her generation. Trained as a painter and printmaker at the Rhode Island School of Design, Holzer started using language as her primary medium after participating in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in 1976-77 where she studied with Yvonne Rainer, Dan Graham, and Vito Acconci, among others. It was during this period that Holzer began writing her now famous Truisms (1977-79). The Truisms is a compendium of original phrases that pose as strongly held beliefs across political, ideological, and moral spectrums. Adopting a model of distribution used both by advertisers and rock bands, Holzer arranged the alphabetized texts on posters that she wheat pasted throughout downtown Manhattan where she lived until the late 1980s.
During this period, Holzer also was involved with Collaborative Projects (or Colab), an artist-run organization that developed and hosted open-call group shows in temporary sites. With the artist Coleen Fitzgibbon and as a Colab project, Holzer organized the Manifesto Show in 1979 in a storefront off the Bowery. Artists and non-artists contributed printed matter and objects that took the manifesto form as their starting points. Holzer contributed her Inflammatory Essays (1979-82), a series of 100-word tirades and rapturous rants that she penned after studying models such as those by Mao Tse-Tung and Emma Goldman.
These texts also were distributed on posters throughout New York City neighborhoods. Her practice was—and remains—one concerned with the ways publics are organized and influenced. To explore how power is consolidated and made salient, Holzer presents audiences with information that deals with political beliefs, everyday emotions, and contemporary problems. To do this, Holzer has relied on forms of address that are part of the everyday visual landscape—like posters, electronic signs, T-shirts, and stone benches—that reveal how the media and advertising have become naturalized. Holzer has said, “If you want to reach a general audience, it’s not art issues that are going to compel them to stop on the way to lunch, it has to be life issues.”
Including the Truisms and Inflammatory Essays, Holzer wrote 13 series until she stopped producing text in 2001. Some of the writing addresses how the individual lives within and reacts to historical cataclysms. In response to the AIDS crisis, irresponsible politics, and unnecessary death, Holzer prepared Laments (1989).
She used individual voices to approach how the horror of disease, death, and not knowing about survival had to be lived. For the presentation of Laments at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City, Holzer had the texts inscribed into stone sarcophagi and programmed into LED signs. During the war in the former Yugoslavia, she wrote Lustmord (1993-95) as a response to how the rape and abuse of women both was a tactical tool in that war and the too common everyday experience for women worldwide. Lustmord was written in three voices: that of the perpetrator, observer, and victim. For publication in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung magazine, Holzer had a sentence printed in blood ink and other texts handwritten on skin and photographed.
For various exhibitions, Lustmord was streamed on electronic signs, embossed into the red leather of a hut, engraved onto silver bands that were wrapped around human bones, and included as the voiceover for a virtual reality world. By situating her texts in a variety of physical forms, Holzer looks to materials that will embody her thematic and contextual concerns. She insists on the object, not just an idea of language as sufficient, to suggest our own physical lives and the things our bodies endure.
In addition to her writing, Holzer is known for her sensitivity to space and installation. After receiving the Leone d’Oro for best pavilion at the 1990 Venice Biennale, she has gone on to produce some of the more iconic permanent installations of the last quarter century. Invited by the Guggenheim Bilbao to create a work for their Frank Gehry building then under construction, Holzer created a towering series of floor-to-ceiling vertical electronic signs in an alcove gallery. Streaming her text Arno (1996)—an account of living with the death of one who once was loved—the front side of the artwork displays in red the writing in Spanish and English while the blue back of the piece is in once-forbidden Basque.
For a commission at the Mies van der Rohe Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Holzer installed electronic signs that match the dimensions of each of the ceiling beams and melt the black steel with light. First used for their connotations with news media and advertising, the electronic signs now have become objects Holzer designs and employs for architectural and sculptural purposes.
But her interest in public art hasn’t flagged. Holzer’s first light projections were realized in 1996 as part of the Biennale di Firenze. A projector on a bank of the Arno River cast light and text onto the water and a building’s façade on the other side. Since then, Holzer’s light projections have taken place in major cities around the world such as London and Rio de Janeiro and have appeared on mountains, ocean waves, sand dunes, and architectural icons such as I.M. Pei’s Pyramide du Louvre in Paris and the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome.
The projections provide the setting to gather and read together, a pursuit that is usually a private, quiet activity. The immaterial light looms large but then recedes. Projections leave no physical trace. Though she frequently uses her own texts, writings by Henri Cole, Elfriede Jelinek, and Wisława Szymborska, among others, have become central to the projections. Regarding the Polish Nobel laureate, Holzer has said: “Szymborska writes on a number of subjects that are of interest to me. She has a poem about torture, (and another) about refugees. There’s one about a terrorist. These are things on people’s minds now. She writes about writing. She writes about being guilty. And then there’s one about parting I like at the end (of the film) because it’s a gentle release. Szymborska manages to speak to everything essential, and I think that’s a good thing to proffer to people. Here is what’s essential, written by a superb poet, floating by and on you.”
For Poznan, as part of her Art Stations exhibition, Holzer will project the poems of Szymborska on Stary Browar and Ratusz. It will be the first time Holzer will project Szymborska’s texts in Polish, the language in which the poems were written.
Holzer’s latest work, and the focus of the exhibition here, concerns the wars in the Middle East waged after the events of September 11, 2001. Wanting to find more on the very early and then at times ignored accounts of prisoner abuse and torture, Holzer began studying government documents released by non-government U.S. organizations such as the National Security Archive (NSA) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). After incorporating a number of these documents into light projections, she decided to silkscreen the documents onto painted grounds. While we can trace the debate on interrogation practices, torture, and the execution of the wars on some, many have been censored—or redacted—to such an extent that we can see little but black boxes and lines. By creating a type of history painting that follows the model of Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, Holzer sought a medium people both look at and preserve—an issue of particular importance when the content of these paintings often was dismissed. Like in Holzer’s earliest work, the ambition is to present information that will empower viewers to see for themselves how history and power are constructed and represented.
From 10th to 25th April, Jenny Holzer will present light projections on the façade of the Royal Castle, and on the river Wisła in Cracow, showing the poems of the Nobel prize winner Czesław Miłosz on the occasion of Czesław Miłosz Year.
