Jenny Holzer

As I was writing a paper on the artist Jenny Holzer for another class, I couldn't help but think that some of the issues raised by her work fit this class as well.  Jenny Holzer takes her work to the streets.  She works with text, with statements meant to disrupt the quotidian intake of postmodern media.  Where one expects to see an advertisement, one instead sees a message like, "TORTURE IS BARBARIC."  Of course, not all of her messages are so charged, and often she uses contradictory statements so as not to fall under one political heading versus another.  Her art incites questioning and encourages contemplation.  Whether you agree or disagree with any given statement, or simply don't know what to make of it, once you read it, there has to be some response.

By presenting her work in public places, she engages spatial politics and draws attention to the nature of discourse in the socio-political realm.  Rosalyn Deutsche reminds us that, “the political public sphere is not only a site of discourse; it is also a discursively constructed site.”[1]

Holzer's work has also had a successful life in galleries and museums, but that does not necessarily make it any less potent.  According to Diane Elam:

 

Rather than treating the spaces of high art and everyday life as two separate spheres, Holzer’s recontextualizations push to make them more of a continuum, more in dialogue with one another.  She makes the spaces different by making them less different from one another.[2]

 

I find these issues fascinating.  Holzer's art work brings up many issues about what public art could and should be, and that is why I find it relevant for this course. 

 

 

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[1] Rosalyn Deutsche, “Agoraphobia,” in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 281, 288-89; quoted in Gelley, “Language of Order(s),” 193.

[2] Diane Elam, “Deconstruction and Feminism,” in Deconstructions edited by Nicholas Royle (Hampshire, England: Palgrave, 2000), 89.