jenny holzer essays

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Object of the Week: Inflammatory Essays

Originally plastered around New York City without attribution in the late 1970s and early 80s, Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays were made to confront passersby. Though she was relatively unknown at the time, Holzer’s careful combination of poetics and politics soon drew international attention and acclaim. In 1990, she became the first woman to officially represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, and was awarded the Golden Lion—the Biennale’s top prize. Just six years prior, Seattle Art Museum’s Contemporary Art Council sponsored the installation of Essays along a wall at Second Avenue and Pike Street in 1984. The posters would resurface 16 years later at SAM as part of the 2001 exhibition, Art of Protest .

Each essay, comprising 100 words and neatly arranged in 20 lines, is laden with conflicting views. As Leah Pires recently wrote in Art in America , “The concision and conviction of the language invites easy agreement—a feeling that is quickly complicated by the contradictions that become apparent when the statements are read together.” The commercial history of offset printing, coupled with Holzer’s typographic choices (the essays’ typeface is reminiscent of billboard advertisements), suggests a mass-distributed message in an aggressively declarative tone. The first line in one essay reads: “FEAR IS THE MOST ELEGANT WEAPON, YOUR HANDS ARE NEVER MESSY.”

These texts do not mirror Holzer’s own sentiments, but are rather drawn from the writings of anarchists, dictators, and revolutionaries around the world. Such voices include Emma Goldman, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, and Leon Trotsky. Whether directly stated or implied through irony, Inflammatory Essays critiques power and control, sex and abuse—themes that continue to inform Holzer’s practice today. Her work is meant to provoke, but Holzer is well aware of the weight words carry. In a 2016 interview with Even Magazine , she says, “Later I found it necessary and proper at times to be careful…I’ll put tough stuff out, but not what might incite gratuitous, hideous violence. I’m pro-expression but not pro-murder…I think it is utterly irresponsible and reprehensible…to incite violence in a political campaign, or anywhere else. One should not do it. We are a murderous species. We don’t need encouragement. Once we get rolling, it’s hard to stop.” 

Produced 40 years ago, Inflammatory Essays feels eerily contemporary. In a polarized era marred by fake news, the quick dismissal of credible journalism, and our self-imposed curation of media, Holzer urges us to question the statements we are bombarded with on a daily basis. Through their challenging and, at times, aggressive statements, Inflammatory Essays continues to elicit critical public discourse by means of self-examination.

– Rachel Hsu, SAM Exhibitions Coordinator

Images: Inflammatory Essays , 1979-82, Jenny Holzer, offset posters on paper 17 x 16 3/4 in., Gift of the Contemporary Art Council of the Seattle Art Museum, 2012.9.20 © Artist or Artist’s Estate. Poster Project, Seattle, Washington, USA, 1984, © 1984 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Installation view Art of Protest , Seattle Art Museum, 2001, photo: Nathaniel Wilson. Inflammatory Essays , 1979-82, Jenny Holzer, offset posters on paper 17 x 16 3/4 in., Gift of the Contemporary Art Council of the Seattle Art Museum, 2012.9.16 © Artist or Artist’s Estate. Inflammatory Essays , 1979-82, Jenny Holzer, offset posters on paper 17 x 16 3/4 in., Gift of the Contemporary Art Council of the Seattle Art Museum, 2012.9.21 © Artist or Artist’s Estate.

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• Tag: Adolf Hitler , Art of Protest , Emma Goldman , Jenny Holzer , Leon Trotsky , Mao Tse-tung , object of the week , Venice Biennale , Vladimir Lenin

Jenny Holzer

Inflammatory Essays (Essais incendiaires)

[1979 - 1982]

Jenny Holzer (1950, États-Unis)

ln writing this series of provocative texts, Holzer was inspired by political theorists, religious fanatics and impassioned "folk" literature. In these hundred-word, twenty-line essays, Jenny Holzer explored a range of ideas extending from the far left to the far right in an aggressive and "delirious" tone. The subjects range from science to politics and the personal. "I wanted to talk about things that are very important to people, but in a non-didactic way.", the artist declared. These posters were originally displayed in the streets of New York in order to have a direct effect on a large public, a central aim in Holzer's work.

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Domain
Techniques	Impression offset sur papier
Dimensions	43,3 x 43,3 cm
Acquisition	Don de l'artiste, 1988
Inventory no.	AM 1988-542

On display:

Museum, level 4, central aisle

• Art conceptuel
• typographie

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Photo credits : Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Georges Meguerditchian/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn

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Detailed description

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Artist	(1950, États-Unis)
Main title	(Essais incendiaires)
Creation date	[1979 - 1982]
Domain
Description	26 affichettes imprimées sur des papiers colorés
Techniques	Impression offset sur papier
Dimensions	43,3 x 43,3 cm
Acquisition	Don de l'artiste, 1988
Collection area	Cabinet d'art graphique
Inventory no.	AM 1988-542

By the same artist

Signal électronique

Survival Series (Série survivance)

[1983 - 1985]

How Do You Resign Yourself to Something That Will Never Be?

1980 - 1982

Interviews : l'époque, la mode, la morale, la passion

Art et publicité

Bibliography

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• Documentation

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer's artistic medium is words and ideas, and she uses a variety of vehicles—from stickers, posters, and T-shirts to benches, bronze plaques, electronic displays, and the Internet—to disseminate her piercingly incisive phrases in public spaces. Rooted in conceptual art, semiot­ics, and feminism, Holzer's artistic practice interrogates the effects of rhetoric, engaging spectators in fundamental questions such as "Who is speaking?" "Where does this text come from?" and "What does it mean?" Answers, however, remain productively elusive. Her texts—whether directives, confessions, or observations—elide authorial intentionality and unlock a sort of societal subconscious, from which hacked-up bits of ideology, desire, fear, humor, and hatred pour forth.

Beginning with Truisms (1977–79), Holzer has authored dozens of textual series that—while distinct in personality, tone, and subject—often resurface in various material forms over time. # Her Inflammatory Essays (1979–81) are a series of mass-produced short essays—one hundred words in twenty lines—printed in capital letters on colorful paper and originally displayed anonymously in the streets. # The essays cover a variety of subjects that have been ongoing concerns throughout Holzer's career, including power, social control, abuse, consump­tion, and sex. Declarative and forceful in tone, they embody Holzer's distinctively crafted voice, one that is omniscient, detached, and yet enraged. "Don't talk down to me. Don't be polite to me. Don't try to make me feel nice. Don't relax. I'll cut the smile off your face," begins the essay on light pink paper. The "author" projected by these texts, however, is never clear but rather shifts between multiple, conflicting political and gender identities. The texts, as David Joselit has suggested, are "nowhere and everywhere—both uncannily personal and rigidly ideological." #

In the current era of terror, Holzer has turned her attention to the erasure of language and information in declassified government documents. Part of her series of thirty-two Redaction Paintings, MEMORANDUM FOR CONDOLEEZZA RICE GREEN (2006) reproduces a magnified copy of a typed memo, dated January 25, 2001, from Richard C. Clarke of the National Security Council to then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice seeking clarification on terrorist threats. Screen-printed black text on bright green, the memo requests a review of the "al Qida network" (eight months before 9/11) and inquires about funding groups in opposition to "the Taliban/al Qida," such as the Afghan Northern Alliance, the perceived "threat magnitude" from the terrorist network, and the Bush administration's intended strategy. Holzer's Redaction Paintings—which include witness and soldier depositions, George W. Bush's opinion on the authority of the Geneva Conven­tions in a period of international terror, and even autopsy reports—index the same unsettling mix of violence, ignorance, and truth that has always intrigued Holzer and remained at the center of her work.

—Ruth Erickson

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Singulart Magazine > Spotlight on... > Artists > Jenny Holzer and the Provocative Power of Inflammatory Essays

Jenny Holzer and the Provocative Power of Inflammatory Essays

In today’s contemporary art, only a few names can be compared with Jenny Holzer when it comes to recognition and respect. As a renowned artist, her works are always characterized by being both thought-provoking and challenging of common norms and traditions. She has established a special domain in the art world with her influential installations and strong messages. For instance, her well-known series, “ Inflammatory Essays ,” exemplifies her courage to deal with the critical issues and the unfailing desire to provoke discussion and argument. In this article, we plunge into the mysterious universe of Jenny Holzer to investigate the captivating fascination of “Inflammatory Essays” by highlighting its importance and staying power.

Who was Jenny Holzer?

Jenny Holzer, who was born in 1950, in Gallipolis, Ohio, is an American conceptual artist who has gained both nationally and internationally to scrutinize political issues and instill contemplation on personal questions. Holzer’s artistic career started by creating abstract paintings but in the late 70s she began using language, incorporating words to express her strong messages in public places.

FUN FACT: Did you know that Jenny Holzer originally studied painting before transitioning to text-based art? It’s a fascinating evolution from one medium to another, showcasing her versatility as an artist

Holzer gained immense popularity in the 1980s when she created the Truisms series, a collection of aphoristic statements that she placed in public spaces using LED signs, posters, and other mediums. It was then that she embarked on an investigation of the relation between language, power, and the public realm.  Throughout the years Holzer has proved to be a controversial artist who carries her torch in the area of installations, sculptures and projections that touch on the reality of war, violence, and consumerism.

What is Happening in Inflammatory Essays?

	Jenny Holzer
	Late 1970s to early 1980s
	Printed text on colored paper
	Conceptual art
	Contemporary
	Variable
	100 essays
	Private collections and museums worldwide

In the late 1970s, when the socio-political atmosphere was electric with tension and unrest, Jenny Holzer embarked on a fearless artistic project which would become her hallmark – “Inflammatory Essays.” The series consisted of 100 separate thought-provoking statements containing potent messages each specifically created to nudge people towards dialog, shift their mindsets and make them consider.

Holzer’s choice of medium is as precise as it is effectual. The essays, printed in all capitals on colored paper are mind-catching. This technique of deliberately using colors in addition to words gives a sense of being real and stronger which urges the individuals to take action. From the angry reds of revolution to the gentle blues of meditation, each of these colors becomes a visual cue to the observer, guiding him or her through various thoughts and feelings.

Interesting Facts about “Inflammatory Essays”

Bold Statements: Holzer’s essays are characterized by their directness and confrontational tone. Each statement is designed to provoke a reaction, challenging viewers to confront uncomfortable truths about society and themselves.

Colorful Palette: The use of colored paper adds another layer of meaning to the essays, with each hue evoking different emotions and associations. From vibrant reds symbolizing passion and anger to cool blues representing calmness and detachment, the choice of color enhances the impact of the text.

Public Engagement: Holzer originally distributed the essays as posters wheat-pasted onto walls in public spaces, blurring the boundaries between art and activism. By bringing her work outside the confines of traditional gallery spaces, she democratized art and made it accessible to a wider audience.

Endless Interpretations: The open-ended nature of the essays invites multiple interpretations, allowing viewers to project their own experiences and beliefs onto the text. This ambiguity fosters a dynamic interaction between the artwork and its audience, sparking dialogue and debate.

Artwork Spotlight: Sense

“ Sense ” is also available on Singulart. While the declaration “Sense” is a simple yet powerful statement, it calls us to challenge our view of the world and our place within it.

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Frequently Asked Questions

When did jenny holzer become famous.

In an iconic 1982 event, Holzer displayed on the massive Spectacolor electric signboard in Times Square, made possible by sponsorship from the New York Public Art Fund. With the 1986 piece Under a Rock, Holzer started distributing her texts across larger media. 

What materials does Jenny Holzer use?

Jenny Holzer uses a variety of mediums, such as printed materials, billboards, paintings, carved stone, electronic signs, and billboards, to place text in public areas.

Jenny Holzer’s “Inflammatory Essays” has left an indelible mark on contemporary art, as it pushes the limits and defies the norms with its merciless, uncompromising stance. Through the use of words that arouse thought and get you involved, Holzer challenges us to deal with human experience complexity and work for a better and more just world.

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Jenny Holzer Shines New Light in Dark Places

Her signboards predated by a decade the news “crawl.” At the Guggenheim she is still bending the curve: Just read the art, is the message.

By Nancy Princenthal

Thirty-five years after she first set the Guggenheim’s rotunda ablaze with an electronic text racing along its spiral ramp, Jenny Holzer is reprising the installation, and turning up the heat. “Light Line,” a career-spanning exhibition, presents a newly updated LED sign which, together with other recent work, illuminates changes in political language and its modes of delivery unimaginable in 1989.

Her advice to viewers has remained fixed: Just read the art.

The targets of the texts Holzer wrote between the late 1970s and 2001 — variously excerpted and re-sequenced for the new sign — range broadly. Early on, she veered from laconic assessments of everyday injustice (“abuse of power comes as no surprise” is the best known) to puzzling propositions (“being happy is more important than anything else”; “it’s heroic to try to stop time”) and wry laugh lines (“having two or three people in love with you is like money in the bank”). In the newer, non-electronic work in this exhibition, she keeps a viselike grip on threats to democracy.

“Optimism is not my specialty,” Holzer, 73, freely conceded during a recent conversation at her river-facing Brooklyn studio, where one work after another bore witness to extrajudicial incarceration, “enhanced interrogation” and other governmental malfeasance. Her motivating question now, she said, is “how to represent lethal conflict” both in the United States and abroad. Yet her tone is imperturbably chipper. A Midwesterner by birth, born at midcentury, she is self-deprecating, plain-spoken and armed with a wicked gift for irony.

“Truisms, ” Holzer’s first language-based work, emerged amid the Conceptual art of the late 1970s and its backdrop of post-Watergate political fatigue, financial disarray, urban blight and cross-disciplinary punk. The gentrifying Reagan years that followed gave rise to archly analytic work addressing institutional power. Holzer’s early choices reflected — and resisted — all these conditions.

She began to put her texts on electronic signboards in the early 1980s. Often scrolling too fast to read and then stopping for a few blinding beats to flash, they were sometimes installed in sensory-overloading proximity. In her award-winning 1990 Venice Biennale installation, the first solo exhibition by a female artist at the U.S. Pavilion, racks of high-colored signboards were mirrored in the polished stone floors.

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The Life and Art of Jenny Holzer, Artist of Text-Based Truisms

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• Art History
• Architecture

• M.A., History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art
• B.A. History of Art, Yale University

Jenny Holzer is an American artist and political activist. Best known for her series of Truisms , text-based art exhibited in public spaces in the form of plainly worded statements written in bold, her work ranges in content from the neutral to the political.

As both an exhibitor in public and private spaces, Holzer is keenly aware of the effects of her work on both the intentional and the casual passerby. She is inspired by reading, world events, and the contexts of her own life, though she seeks to be “ out of view and out of earshot ” in order to lend her work a voice of truth and trustworthiness.

Fast Facts: Jenny Holzer

• Occupation : Artist
• Born:  July 29, 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio
• Education : Duke University (no degree), University of Chicago (no degree), Ohio University (BFA), Rhode Island School of Design (MFA)
• Selected Works : Truisms (1977–79), Inflammatory Essays (1979–1982)
• Key Accomplishments : Golden Lion for Best Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1990); member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• Spouse : Mike Glier (m. 1983)

Early Life and Education

Jenny Holzer was born in Gallipolis, Ohio, where she grew up the oldest of three children. Her mother was an active participant in the community and her father was a car salesman. Holzer’s upbringing was rooted in Midwestern traditionalism, an attitude from which she believes the frankness in her art derives. “They want to get things done so they do it in the most expeditious way,” she has said of her fellow Midwesterners. “Expeditious as in fast and right.” It is perhaps for this reason that her work is so often reproduced, as its split second appeal is derived from its keen ability to distill truths about our culture into digestible phrases.

As a teenager, Holzer moved to Florida to attend Pine Crest Preparatory in Boca Raton before enrolling at Duke University for college. Holzer’s next few years were itinerant, seeing her leave Duke to enroll at the University of Chicago and then at Ohio University in Athens, where she received her BFA in Painting and Printmaking. Holzer would go on to receive her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

She married fellow RISD student Mike Glier in 1983 and had her daughter Lili in 1988.

Early Artwork

Holzer did not arrive at using text as the base of her artistic career without a few detours along the way. She began her life as an artist as an abstract painter, inspired by many of the great painters of Abstract Expressionism. By her own admission, she was only a decent third generation American abstract painter, as she felt that there was a more relevant way to communicate the fast-paced media culture that was on the rise in the late 70s and early 80s.

Motivated by the conviction that her work ought to include discernible content (rather than the formal content of abstraction), but feeling the genre of social realism to be increasingly of the past, Holzer began placing words in her work, often in the form of found objects such as scraps of newspaper and other clippings.

It was at this point that she began placing her work in public spaces to test their effect on passers-by. The realization that art could engage people who did not intend to see it, moving them to think or even provoking them to argue, motivated her to pursue text-based work.

Truisms and Inflammatory Essays

In her last year as an MFA student at RISD, Holzer rethought the inclusion of words in her work by using her own. She wrote a selection of one liners which were meant to distill truths encountered almost daily in Western civilization, which she then assembled into a series of posters. Though the phrasing of these posters was original, she sought to tap into universal sentiments that would seem familiar as ideas. “I want them to be accessible,” she said, “but not so easy that you throw them away after a second or two."

Among these statements are phrases like “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE,” “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT,” and “MONEY MAKES TASTE.” The Truisms, as they are known , have been posted in various locations throughout the world and have been translated into several languages.

Thinking the Truisms too bland, Holzer began a series of political works also printed on posters in capital letters, which she called the Inflammatory Essays. With the allotment of a paragraph per poster, Holzer was able to dive into more complex ideas and explore more controversial topics.

Art, Technology, and Public Space

Holzer’s work has always been intertwined with technology, and in 1992 she began using LED signs for a project commissioned by the Public Art Fund for Times Square. Enthralled by their ability to display text in motion, she continued using the signs as they lent her words a neutral authority that the posters could not, as posters carried with them the connotation of anarchist protests. Since 1996, Holzer has worked with light based projections as installations, using the facades of monumental buildings as the canvas onto which she projects scrolling text. Holzer’s use of the institution as the base upon which her work rests has been the inspiration for numerous political protests since Holzer developed the method.

Though Holzer’s work is largely concerned with text, its visual expression is a key element of her work. From the deliberate eye catching colors of the Inflammatory Essays laid out in grids to the speed and font of her scrolling texts, Holzer is a visual artist who has found her voice in words, an artistic medium she found best expressed her views on the culture of media in which she came of age. The material of these signs—whether they be LED lights of the carved stone of her Sarcophagi series—is equally as important as their verbal content.

Holzer’s work centers around text and its placement in public spaces. Using billboards, jumbotrons , lighted signs, and walls, Holzer uses city streets and areas of public interaction as her canvas. She is interested in the ability of public art to provoke a reaction and perhaps start a conversation.

Not all Holzer’s work is staged outdoors, and when she does exhibit in gallery spaces, she is equally deliberate with their curation as she is when planning work publicly. As she is conscious of the museum goers slowed pace, she takes the opportunity to construct more complex interactions among her works, often juxtaposing different mediums.

Reception and Legacy

Holzer’s work has been presented in countless exhibitions and retrospectives across the world. She has won numerous prizes, including the Golden Lion for Best Pavilion at the 1990 Venice Biennale (where she represented the United States), and has been honored by the French Government with a diploma of Chevalier from the Order of Arts and Letters. In 2018, she was selected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of 250 living members.

• Art 21 (2009). Jenny Holzer: Writing & Difficulty . [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxrxnPLmqEs
• Kort, C. and Sonneborn, L. (2002).  A to Z of American Women in the Visual Arts . New York: Facts on File, Inc. 98-100.
• Waldman, D. Jenny Holzer. (1989). New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in association with Henry N. Abrams.
• Tate (2018). Jenny Holzer's Inflammatory Essays: Why I Love . [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONIUXi84YCc
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Selections from Truisms, Inflammatory Essays, The Living Series, The Survival Series, Under a Rock, Laments, and Child Text

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Jenny Holzer American, b. 1950

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Site: Diehl + Gallery One, Moscow April 18–June 14, 2008 Text: Truisms , 1977–79; Inflammatory Essays , 1979–82 Photo: Vassilij Gureev

Site: Sprüth Magers Berlin April 27–June 16, 2012 Text: U.S. government documents Photo: Jens Ziehe

Site: Sprüth Magers Berlin April 27–June 16, 2012 Text: U.S. government documents Photo: Collin LaFleche

Site: BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England March 5–May 16, 2010 Text: Truisms , 1977–79; Inflammatory Essays , 1979–82 Photo: Collin LaFleche

Site: DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal June 30–November 14, 2010 Text: Truisms , 1977–79; Inflammatory Essays , 1979–82 Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay

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Jenny Holzer

Inflammatory Essay Red, 1979-1982

Not on View

series Title

Inflammatory Essays

offset lithograph in black on pink wove paper

sheet: 25.24 × 25.24 cm (9 15/16 × 9 15/16 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Bob Stana and Tom Judy

Accession Number

2015.115.21

Artists / Makers

Jenny Holzer (artist) American, born 1950

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lower right in black ink: Jenny Holzer

(Concept Art Gallery, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania); Bob Stana and Tom Judy, Washington, D.C., 2005; acquired 2015 by the National Gallery of Art

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