Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950) is an American conceptual artist. Holzer lives and works in Hoosick Falls, New York.
Holzer belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980, looking for new ways to make narrative or commentary an implicit part of visual objects. Her contemporaries include Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Charlesworth, and Louise Lawler.
Holzer is mostly known for her large-scale public displays that include billboard advertisements, projections on buildings and other architectural structures, as well as illuminated electronic displays. The main focus of her work is the use of words and ideas in public space. Originally utilizing street posters, LED signs became her most visible medium, though her diverse practice incorporates a wide array of media including bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches and footstools, stickers, T-shirts, paintings, photographs, sound, video, light projection, the Internet, and a Le Mans race car.
Holzer wrote texts herself for a long time between 1977 and 2001. However since 1993, she has been mainly working with texts written by others. Some of these are literary texts by great authors such as the Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, Henri Cole (USA), Elfriede Jelinek (Austria), Fadhil Al-Azawi (Iraq), Yehuda Amichai (Israel) and Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine). She also uses texts from different contexts, such as passages from de-classified US Army documents from the war in Iraq. For example, a large LED work presents excerpts from the minutes of interrogations of American soldiers who had committed human rights violations and war crimes in Abu Ghraib, making what was once secret public. Holzer's works often speak of violence, oppression, sexuality, feminism, power, war and death. Her main concern is to enlighten, bringing to light something thought in silence and meant to remain hidden.
“Savor kindness because cruelty is always possible later.”
“You are a victim of the rules you live by.”
“Raise boys and girls the same way.”
“Knowing yourself lets you understand others.”
“Ideals are replaced by conventional goals at a certain age.”
“Faithfulness is a social not a biological law.”
“Expiring for love is beautiful but stupid.”
“Enjoy yourself because you can't change anything anyway.”
“How do you resign yourself to something that will never be? You stop wanting just that thing. You go numb. Or you kill the agent of desire.”
“I try to excite myself so I stay crazy.”
“You confuse me with something that is in you. I will not predict how you want to use me.”
“She has no taste left to her and this makes it easier for me.The color of her where she is inside is enough to make me kill her.”
“Turn soft and lovely anytime you have the chance.”
“Hands on your breast can keep your heart beating.”
“Someone else's body is a place for your mind to go.”
“Protect me from what I want.”
“With all the holes in you already there's no reason to define the outside environment as alien.”
“In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.”
“With you inside me comes the knowledge of my death.”
“SPIT ALL OVER SOMEONE WITH A MOUTHFUL OF MILK IF YOU WANT TO FIND OUT SOMETHING ABOUT THEIR PERSONALITY FAST.”
“If you behaved nicely, the communists wouldn't exist.”
“Going with the flow is soothing but risky.”
“Fear is the greatest incapacitator.”
“Expressing anger is necessary.”
“Deviants are sacrificed to increase group solidarity.”
“Being happy is more important than anything else.”
“Being alone with yourself is increasingly unpopular.”
“Boredom makes you do crazy things.”
“At times inactivity is preferable to mindless functioning.”
“An elite is inevitable.”
“Alienation produces eccentrics or revolutionary.”
“A sense of timing is the mark of a genius.”
“A positive attitude means all the difference in the world.”
“A lot of professionals are crackpots.”
“FEMALE VOICE: 'The truth is people are pushed around by two men who move all the bodies on earth into patterns that please them.' MALE VOICE: 'I love my mind when it is fucking the cracks of events.' MALE VOICE: 'What I give to all the people who do not want to live with me is arithmetic.' FEMALE VOICE: 'Everyday, I do nothing important because I am scared blank and lazy. But then the men come. I put my mouth on them. I spit and write with the wet.' MALE VOICE: 'I was not born live. This body grew but I did not feel cells split.”