Jenny Holzer | Use What Is Dominant

Jenny Holzer

Use What Is Dominant

New York City, USA: The Whitney Museum of Art, 2003

9.5 x 25.5 x 25.5 cm.

Edition of 200

In a matter of a few short years, Jenny Holzer’s aphoristic texts went from being seen on guerrilla  stickers and wheat-pasted posters, to the Times Square Jumbotron and museums around the world. 

Subsequently many of the texts from the Survival Series (1983-85) have adorned baseball caps, t-shirts, postcards, condoms, pencils, golf balls, and the LED lights for which she is still best known. 

"Use What is Dominant in a Culture to Change it Quickly" is a lesser known example, primarily featured as a screenprint on brushed aluminum in 1990, and as part of an earlier parking meter sticker series [see below]. 

However, the statement could be viewed as the artists Modus Operandi. Both the subject and formats of her practice exploit the dominant cultural language of not just the world of advertising, but the pithy platitudes of sloganeering more generally. 

This etched glass bowl featuring the phrase was produced for the Whitney Museum in 2003, by Simon Pearce. His name and Holzer's signature are incised on the base.

"For all of its use of language, the real message of Holzer’s work concerns the media, the electronic display boards and digital units that empty language of any stable “meaning.” Her work imitates not nature (Cage) but culture in its manner of operation. Transformed into pop signs throughout our culture, linguistic meaning “implodes” (to use Jean Baudrillard’s phrase for the disintegration of the signified beneath the signifier). One could argue that Holzer is using Baudrillard’s tactic of strategic resistance to the dominant discourse system, by simulating “in a hyper-conformist manner the very mechanisms of the system . . . turning the system’s logic back on itself duplicating it, reflecting meaning, as in a mirror, without absorbing it.”

- Jessica Prinz, Art Discourse/Discourse in Art