Whether questioning consumerist impulses, describing torture, or lamenting death and disease, Jenny Holzer’s use of language provokes a response in the viewer. While her subversive work often blends in among advertisements in public space, its arresting content violates expectations. Holzer’s texts—such as the aphorisms “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” and “Protect me from what I want”—have appeared on posters and condoms and as electronic LED signs and projections of xenon light. The Ohio-born artist’s recent projects range from silk-screened paintings of declassified government memoranda detailing prisoner abuse to poetry and prose in a sixty-five-foot-wide wall of light in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center, New York.
Originally presented anonymously on the streets of New York, the mass-produced short texts that make up Inflammatory Essays address such subjects as power, social control, abuse, consumption, and sex, which have been ongoing concerns throughout Holzer’s career. Declarative and forceful in tone, the Inflammatory Essays embody her distinctively crafted voice: omniscient, detached, and yet enraged, shifting between multiple identities.
