Jenny Holzer

Part of "What guns mean: the symbolic lives of firearms," collection of essays edited by Jonathan M. Metzl.

Gun violence impacts our experience of public spaces, including how we represent and memorialize tragic events stemming from guns in public ways. Immediate memorials, complete with flowers and other ephemera, frequently appear at the sites of gun violence, at times to be followed by permanent memorials with contemplative spaces and names of victims etched in stone. While communicating loss and grief, both of these strategies usually evade any real political action or consideration of the complexities of gun violence or its causes. Mirroring the stalemate in our political dialogue around guns and their proliferation, our dominant strategies of memorialization similarly offer little more than "thoughts and prayers". In what ways can contemporary art break through these evasions and even prompt dialogue or change around the complex array of issues that arise with the increased presence of guns in American society? How can art generate experiences for viewers that allow for a more complex consideration of gun-related violence than the cycle of grief seen in immediate and permanent memorials? In this paper, I survey works of art that produce possibilities for transformative conversation around the issue by considering guns as what Bruno Latour calls "actants". I begin by examining guns in the gallery, first offering new readings of Chris Burden's Shoot (1971) and Marina Abramović's Rhythm 0 (1974), both of which notoriously included real firearms, and then turning to sculptural projects that literally disarm guns, rendering them deliberately strange and prompting complex conversations about their material presence in American life. I then shift focus towards the public sphere to consider works by Krzysztof Wodiczko, Jenny Holzer, and Michael Rakowitz, artists who rewire established circuits of monumental commemoration, public space advertising, and vernacular immediate memorials to generate a sense of distance, and even a safe space for dialogue in the public realm.

"In 2008, Cedar Lewisohn curated the first large-scale exhibition of street art at a major museum or gallery. 'Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution' (23 May - 25 Aug 2008) involved the exhibition of works by six international street artists on the exterior facade of the Tate Modern in London. In the exhibition's accompanying publication Lewisohn stated, "Street art and graffiti both have the peculiar ability to exist in the mainstream of culture and at the same time on its periphery."

This dissertation attempts to excavate this claim in the context of developments in New York City. It explores, primarily, the inter-relationship between graffiti and street art from their rapid period of evolution in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and from the mid-1990s onwards. The initial definitions applied to distinguish graffiti and street art have highlighted key differences in methodology and the underlying aims of the artists involved in each practice. The first section examines the practices of early graffiti writer Dondi White alongside his contemporaries John Fekner and Jenny Holzer, contemporary artists who were working in the streets of New York during the early 1980s in addition to producing studio-based work. An analysis of the street-based practices of 'street art pioneers' Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring also considers the crossover of street practice to gallery career, a transiton established in graffiti writing  during the early 1980s in which graffiti moved from a peripheral presence to a major subcultural development and gallery fixture. The third and final section comprises a discussion around the current day development of street art and its transition into the mainstream through the practices of Banksy, Shepard Fairey and Swoon. This development has been facilitated by gallery exhibition and increased representation for street artists, the dissemination of ideas through the internet, and the increased media attention given to street artists.

In a similar manner to graffiti writers, street artists have ignited controversial debates through their transition from relatively unknown urban artists to overnight gallery sensations, a transition that has been both lamented and applauded. For the purposes of this discussion, it also serves to highlight the ambivalent and dichotomous position that continues to surround the existence of graffiti and street art aesthetics in both a peripheral and mainstream context.

For the full text, please email me. I am happy to provide references and the dissertation to interested students and researchers."

A rhetorical lens can bring a new dynamic and new insights to museological studies of our “multicultural platforms for negotiations” because the focus of rhetoric is on the close reading of how to persuasively operate collectively in the public sphere. In a world that grows increasingly polyphonic, museums are often the only public institution presenting the kind of discourse that aims to build a dialectical community across diverse groups. Thus, the increased interest of rhetoricians in their work. The question of museology’s role becomes in rhetorical terms, “What are the theories and analyses that explain how museums impact the world?” This article examines several rhetorical themes, including the public sphere, rhetorical appeals, epideixis, the rhetorical triangle, polyphony, juxtaposition, the tragic and the comic frames, and, of course, persuasion.

The main objective of this paper is the study of Jenny Holzer’s latest works, specifically the Expose (2020) and Protect (2020) projects, from a comparative and historical perspective.
The study opens by tracing the echoes – present in the works produced during the pandemic and the darkest time of the Trump administration – of a younger Jenny Holzer, who was struggling to emerge in the late 80s and early 90s as she wanted to give voice to the desperation of New York, a city that had been brought to its knees both by the explosion of the AIDS virus, and the silence and indifference of Reagan’s policy on the issue. Secondly, I will offer some observations about the hitherto unseen interaction of Holzer’s well-established artistic hallmarks – the trucks and the signboard, which she had been using since the 80s – with the use of social media, particularly Instagram, showing how venturing onto social media during the pandemic was a great occasion for Holzer to overcome the postmodern positions of her youth and to rediscover the more strictly political vein of her artistic practice.

Francis Bacon’a göre insan zihni; kuruntularını, yarattığı put metaforları ile ortaya koymaktadır. Bacon’ın Modern deneyciliğin teorik alt yapısını oluşturmak adına ortaya koyduğu putlar metaforuna göre, insan zihni bilimsel yöntemde yakalayacağı başarıya ancak bu putları yıkarak ulaşabilir. Putlar metaforunda bir simülasyon algısı oluşturarak gerçekliğin yerini alan bir yanılsamadan bahsedilmektedir. Simulasyon teorisinde günümüzde teknolojik gelişmelerle birlikte daha somut olarak simülasyonlar gerçekliğin yerini almaktadır. Moderniteden postmodern döneme teknolojik gelişmelerle birlikte insanın gerçeklik algısında değişimler oluşmuştur. Bu değişimler ise Jean Baudrillard tarafından Simülasyon veya Hipergerçeklik incelemeleri ile ortaya koyulmaktadır. Bu bağlamda araştırmada zihinde oluşan yanılgılar, metaforik anlatımlar ve gerçekliğin sorgulandığı yanılsama ile Jenny Holzer ve Cindy Sherman’ın eserleri Baudrillard’ın Simulasyon Kuramı ve Francis Bacon’un Put Metaforu yaklaşımının ilişkisel çözümlenmesi yapılarak örnekleme alınan eserler üzerinden gerçekliğin yansımaları yorumlanmıştır.

Gun violence impacts our experience of public spaces, including how we represent and memorialize tragic events stemming from guns in public ways. Immediate memorials, complete with flowers and other ephemera, frequently appear at the sites of gun violence, at times to be followed by permanent memorials with contemplative spaces and names of victims etched in stone. While communicating loss and grief, both of these strategies usually evade any real political action or consideration of the complexities of gun violence or its causes. Mirroring the stalemate in our political dialogue around guns and their proliferation, our dominant strategies of memorialization similarly offer little more than “thoughts and prayers”. In what ways can contemporary art break through these evasions and even prompt dialogue or change around the complex array of issues that arise with the increased presence of guns in American society? How can art generate experiences for viewers that allow for a more compl...

Na disciplina Laboratorio de Som e Imagem, cursada na Universidade do Porto em 2012, um trabalho instigador foi proposto. Deveriamos escolher um projeto (artistico, acadêmico) ou autor(a) que incitasse a reflexão critica. Jenny Holzer, artista norte-americana contemporânea que usa muito as palavras em seu trabalho, foi escolhida. Para ela, cada um é atingido de modo único por suas mensagens.

The paper’s aim is to analyse the representation of works of Jenny Holzer’s Redaction Paintings series in the context of building a collective memory. Taking into account the relationship between art and memory, I research how this relationship operates in the above example. The subject of the series are the declassified documents of the American government regarding military operations in the Middle East which the artist made into paintings by transferring them onto the canvass and adding colour. This transfer of the war narrative from the field of politics into art makes it possible to go beyond the fixed framework of memory and shape it anew. The artist’s polemics with ready-made patterns of remembering imposed by the government and the media facilitates the reflection not so much on the discourse as on the framework within which is it legitimised.

3/2017 (194)

Nach zehn Jahren Vorbereitungs- und Bauzeit ist das Louvre Abu Dhabi im November 2017 eröffnet worden - und folgt einem bahnbrechendes Konzept: Gezeigt werden Objekte, die das Gemeinsame verschiedener Kulturen der Menschheit betonen. Ein Überblick.

When we talk about Banksy and poetry, it is first his pseudonym, which is poetic. Robbin’ banks. Like graffiti this pseudonym is an action (robbin’ or scratching), it is innovative and funny, and it is between words and pictures. Banksy’s stencils are in form and content closer to words than to painting. Then second Banksy uses inscriptions or comments next to his pictures or without them, often known slogans, which he places in a unfamiliar context. And third Banksy’s poetic and highly aphoristical texts in his books and on his website, which we did not have time to take a closer look at, which are poetry by Banksy, but not Street Art at the end.

Bachelor's thesis in Contemporary Art and Design on the sculpture "Selection From Survival: Men Don't Protect..." created in 2006 by the American artist, Jenny Holzer, and sold at the Sotheby's auction, "By Women, For Women's Tomorrow", on March 1, 2019 in New York.

Through examining Regina José Galindo’s performance, Mientras, ellos siguen libres (Meanwhile, they are still free), 2007 along with Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord (1993-1994) this paper investigates the differences between directly and indirectly viewing a body that bears reference to the act of rape against women within visual culture. This paper views the works with two theories of subject formation in mind; Jacques Lacan’s mirror theory and Bracha Ettinger’s theory of matrixial difference. The paper questions how being able to position another subject as, what Lacan would term ‘Other’ to us or as Ettinger would term a ‘non-I’ impacts upon the way in which the viewer may respond to the subjects present within the work, as well as the acts of violence the works relate to. It asks whether allowing the viewer to identify a subject within a piece of artwork as someone separate from themselves prompts the viewer to reject the vulnerability that the work depicts. Or, are there specific circumstances, despite the discomfort that the work may solicit in its connection to the brutal act of rape, which can allow for a more hospitable relationship between the viewer and the works? Is it possible that instead of rejecting the vulnerability of another, a viewer may accept their vulnerability despite difference?