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Selection from Living Series (With Sophisticated Record Keeping…)

Jenny Holzer

1980-82

Bronze with black patina

Cast bronze with black patina
8 1/4 x 10 1/2 inches (21 x 26.7 cm)
Edition of 3
(Inventory #29748)

Through her “Living” series, Jenny Holzer presents a set of quiet observations, directions, and warnings. The “Living” texts are written in a matter of fact, journalistic style, suitable for descriptions of everyday life. Meanwhile, the commentaries touch on how the individual and his or her body negotiates landscapes, persons, rules, expectations, desires, fears, other bodies, one’s flesh, and one’s self. Holzer presented the “Living” texts on cast bronze plaques, of the “official” sort that typically mark historical sites or commemorate important events. The plaques look nondescript, but their contents startle, veering into the intimate sphere of personal relationships, behaviors, and beliefs. “It has always been easier for me to write while imagining I am someone else,” Holzer has said. Her use of direct address also produces a shifting subject, so that to read a phrase is automatically to become the “you,” to engage with a work that transforms the act of aesthetic contemplation into one of self-reflection.

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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 program 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 (1977-79), 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. 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. The LED signs have been placed in high-impact public spaces such as Times Square, New York, as well as in art galleries and museums.

Bibliography

Jenny Holzer: Signs (exh. cat., Des Moines, IA, A. Cent., 1986-7) Jenny Holzer (exh. cat. by D. Waldman, New York, Guggenheim, 1989-90) M. Auping: Jenny Holzer (New York, 1992)

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