Holzer-isms

 

Jenny Holzer/Larry Walsh

Holzer-isms

Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, 2024

32 pp., 4.25 x 5.25”, boxed loose leaves

Edition size unknown

Unlike other books in the Princeton University Press ISMS series (Shirin Neshat, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, etc), the Jenny Holzer quotes are not from interviews about her work, they are her work. More than any artist credited with sculpting language down to its bare essentials (Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, etc), Jenny Holzer has spent an entire career perfecting her aphorisms to be simultaneously striking and familiar. 

Avoiding a singular signature style, her texts have been displayed on LED signs, marble benches, postcards, t-shirts, baseball caps and myriad other media. But she began with small street posters, a format this publication returns to. 

In 1977, a twenty-something Jenny Holzer anonymously flyposted Manhattan with coloured photocopied texts. Typeset in all caps to resemble newspaper headlines, the provocations ranged from the philosophical (IS IT POSSIBLE THAT ENJOYMENT OF PAIN CAN BE SUBVERSIVE?) to the political (ONLY DIRE CIRCUMSTANCE CAN PRECIPITATE THE OVERTHROW OF OPPRESSORS) to the outright aggressive (I’LL CUT THE SMILE OFF YOUR FACE). 

“It was a good, encouraging practice to start out illegally, because then I could realize anything I wanted to get done, to the limits of my endurance and stealth,” she told Even Magazine in 2016, before confessing to once getting caught. She found herself in the back of a police car at three AM, trying to talk her way out of arrest. 

“I launched into a rambling explanation and they decided I was not worth keeping. I was dripping with so much wheat paste they probably didn’t want me on their back seat much longer.”

Designed more for passersby than art-educated gallery goers, Holzer was most satisfied when someone would stumble across the work in the course of their daily life, and find themselves engaged by it. 

“People would star things or underline parts,” she told the Times. “Sometimes I would come back around and stand close enough to listen to people argue over them.”

My earliest experience with her work is not dissimilar to that of Douglas Copeland (see quote below):

My Mississauga high school Art teacher sent me to visit the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation in Toronto. Myself and a friend - whose parents I convinced to let her out of school for the day, promising it would be an educational outing - drove out to the corner of King and Tecumseth, searching for the venue. My teacher had neglected to tell me that there was no signage for the space, other than UNIFORMS REGISTERED, left over from the buildings previous owner. After enduring a couple of hours of traffic, feeling lost while at the correct address was maddening. Just as I was about to leave - cursing sweet Harriet, the elderly Art teacher - I see a small plaque that reads YOU ARE CAUGHT THINKING ABOUT KILLING ANYONE YOU WANT RIGHT NOW.

Street posters were not only Holzer’s medium of choice in the early days, they were her inspiration. She describes coming across a vile, unhinged political poster and being stopped dead in her tracks. The content disturbed her, but she couldn’t help but admire how effective it was in disrupting a casual walk down the street. 

She repurposed a reading list given to her when she was a student of the Independent Study Programme at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, boiling it down to its essence. 

“I tried to re-present the great content from the list so it would be more accessible, or at least shorter,” she told the Financial Times, a decade ago. “I resorted to my family’s approach to ‘say it with a cliché’. The habit of flashing statements might have to do with my childhood in a Midwestern family that declined to speak about what was important. The more urgent the matter, the less likely it was to be discussed. If something absolutely had to be said, a stand-in must do such as ‘children are better seen than heard.’” 

The posters (and grey stickers to be affixed to parking meters and garbage cans) attracted a lot of attention, and a little over a decade later, Holzer was representing the USA at the Venice Biennale (the first woman, shockingly, chosen to do so - almost a century after the event’s 1895 origin). 

The posters were also packaged up, like the stickers, and sold for a few dollars at places like Printed Matter. 

Every Holzer item in my modest collection (wooden cards, a condom, golf ball, rubber stamps, pencils, stickers, etc.) was purchased for a dollar or two and is now worth ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred times that amount. There is no reason to assume this well packaged collection of posters won’t soon be out-of-print and scarce on the secondary market, too, fetching hundreds of dollars on Ebay and other auction houses. 

Buy it from the publishers, here, for $60.00/£50.00.

“I have read reports of early-20th-century artists—of how they went to Paris and saw a Picasso painting for the first time—and of how they could never look at the world the same way ever again. I guess that’s what it was like with me after reading Jenny Holzer’s truisms (fourth-generation photocopies covered in studio guck). It was as if my brain had been a large, poorly formatted document in 11 different fonts, with italics and weirdly aligned paragraphs. In one grand swoop “Jenny” made my brain flush left, with one font, and suddenly everything became clear. The truisms also gave me some hope that there was still a future for the written word.”

- Douglas Copeland, ArtForum