Survival
Jenny Holzer
JENNY HOLZER, 1985. ELECTRONIC BILLBOARD.
“We don’t need work on joy”, said Jenny Holzer. Instead, her work digs deep into the flaws of society, into the darkness of humanity and her own psyche and screams it from the rooftops, quite literally. She has used almost every medium available except, for most of her career, a paintbrush and canvas. Instead, she utilises a text based art and presents it on everything from billboards, stone plaques, posters and benches to t-shirts, race cars and postcards. Since 1980 she has been disseminating her text-based work into public spaces and public consciousness. In short phrases, she considers domestic violence, government censorship, the war on terror, gender theory, and personal intimacy. Her work is urgent, immediate, and straightforward yet, presented within public settings, it takes on an abstraction. Holzer disseminates words of confident poetry that interrupt your day and require contemplation.