Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Edited by Jenny Holzer. Afterword by Lauren Hinkson.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Jenny Holzer: Light Line, a reimagining of the artist’s landmark 1989 installation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, this artist’s book will provoke and inspire. Each page features a phrase chosen by Holzer from three of her text series—Truisms, Living and Survival—in the form of drawings she has used for many years to create her iconic stone benches. All interior pages are vellum, a physical and conceptual layering that invites novel readings of Holzer’s work. This unique volume extends her practice with a material presentation of real and imagined works that weaves new connections through its pages. Holzer harnesses the power of words to convey joy, sorrow, contemplation, rage and everything in between. Her work presents writing—both her own and that of others—in an array of mediums, including electronic signs, plaques, paintings and stonework. Starting in the 1970s with her New York City street posters, and continuing through her more recent light projections, mobile LED signs and experiments with artificial intelligence, her practice rivals ignorance and violence with humor, kindness and courage. The public dimension is integral, and the surprising sites where her work appears range from city streets to stadium scoreboards, memorials, T-shirts and condom wrappers. The thought-provoking and indelible words she chooses highlight the pressing issues of our time. For over 40 years, Jenny Holzer (born 1950) has presented her work in public places and international exhibitions, including Times Square, the Venice Biennale and the Guggenheim Museums. She received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1990, the US State Department’s International Medal of Arts in 2017 and the Wall Street Journal’s Art Innovator Award in 2022. She lives and works in New York.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited by Thomas Kellein. Foreword by Gabriela Belli. Introduction by Christian Boehringer. Text by Joshua Craze.
Jenny Holzer (born 1950) became known in the 1980s with her billboards, projections and LED installations that often used text to deliver social critique. Jenny Holzer: War Paintings is a significant departure from the works for which she is known. It draws from declassified and US government documents concerning the War on Terror and military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Holzer transforms these redacted documents--memoranda, planning maps, diplomatic communiqués, interrogation records, autopsy reports and the handwritten cris de coeur of detainees themselves--into ravishing silkscreened and handpainted oil-on-linen paintings several times their original size. Holzer embarked on the war paintings in an effort to end the normalization of torture. This volume compiles over 200 images--full-bleed reproductions and installation views--of some of the most important political art of our time.
Jenny Holzer's light projections have been displayed across four continents, fifteen countries, and more than thirty cities. From Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie and Daniel Libeskind's Judisches Museum in Berlin to I.M. Pei's Pyramide du Louvre in Paris, Holzer's light events have been installed in numerous significant architectural spaces. Her projections onto waves and mountains in Rio de Janeiro, the Seine and Arno rivers, the mountains and ski jump in Lilehammer and the Dune du Pyla engage the natural landscape as quiet and affecting settings for reflection, laughter and exchange. Through a discerning selection of full-page images printed in black and white--many the result of Holzer's longstanding, working relationship with the photographer Attilio Maranzo--this book tours projections made over a twelve-year period. While the artworks themselves are transient, each image suspends the tension of the passing moment and locates the beauty of experience within the frame.
Published by Kerber. Edited by Friederike von Bünau. Text by Henri Cole, Rose-Maria Gropp, Peter Weibel.
In October 2010, Jenny Holzer (born 1950) launched an ambitious public artwork in the city of Frankfurt. From the night of October 4 onward, Holzer projected a series of scrolling text works onto six public buildings in the city: the Alte Nikolaikirche, the Römer, the Dreikönigskirche, the Literaturhaus, St. Katharinenkirche and Portikus. All of the texts related to either the city itself or to the history of German Protestantism, and were drawn from the works of philosophers and writers such as Wislawa Szymborska, Theodor Adorno, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Buber, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sören Kierkegaard, Martin Luther, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Paul Tillich. This volume records the commission, showing how Holzer’s (unusually lengthy) excerpts, set in heavy, sans-serif caps, dramatized Germany’s intellectual and literary heritage.
Famed for her LED message boards and the declarative, politicized cast of her linguistic materials, Jenny Holzer (born 1950) has in fact employed a great variety of media in her subversions of dominant ideologies. Among these media are granite and marble benches, enamel signs and even, as this handsome catalogue for Holzer’s 2010 show at Skarstedt Gallery reveals, a sarcophagus. Jenny Holzer: Retro covers a decade of Holzer’s oeuvre from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, underlining the diversity of media in some of the artist’s most iconic works. It shows how each medium elicits differing types of language composition, from the direct provocations of the ephemeral LED message boards to the horrific cracked narratives of the stone benches with their rhetoric of enshrinement and permanence. Surveying works that vary thus from the fleeting to the fixed, Retro also underscores the temporal scale of Holzer’s bold and influential oeuvre.
PUBLISHER Skarsdedt
BOOK FORMAT Clth, 8.75 x 11.5 in. / 68 pgs / 59 color / 3 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/30/2011 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2012 p. 95
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781616237196TRADE List Price: $30.00 CAD $35.00
Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Joan Simon, Elizabeth A.T. Smith.
For the past three decades, the influential American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer has been challenging viewers' assumptions about the world through language that conveys the multiplicity of often contradictory voices, opinions and attitudes that form the basis of contemporary society. Alternating between fact and fiction, public and private, the universal and the particular, Holzer's work offers an incisive social and psychological portrait of our times. During the last decade, Holzer has shown extensively in Europe but has been less visible in the United States--following a period of wide exposure and pervasive influence beginning in the late 1970s. This volume, which accompanies a major presentation of Holzer's work in various media from the 1990s onward at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, goes a long way towards rectifying this situation, and reintroduces her to the American audience at a timely political moment. Featuring several scholarly essays and an interview with the artist, this volume provides an overview of the work of one of the leading artists of the 80s generation.
This elegant clothbound monograph gathers the most recent work by the seminal language-based installation artist, Jenny Holzer. Presented to great acclaim at New York's Cheim & Read gallery this past summer, the work consists of enlarged, colorized silkscreen "paintings" of declassified and oftentimes heavily censored American military and intelligence documents that have recently been made available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act. Beautiful in their own right, the works are also haunting reminders of what really goes on behind the scenes in the American military/political power system. Documents address counter-terrorism, prisoner abuse, and even the threat of Osama Bin Laden. Some of the documents are almost completely inked out, like Colin Powell's memo on Defense Intelligence Agency reorganization. Others are spotty enough to allow readers to try to fill in the blanks. As Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times, these are "the hardest-hitting, least hypothetical texts of Holzer's career."
PUBLISHER Cheim & Read
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.25 x 11.75 in. / 112 pgs / 95 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 2/1/2007 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2007 p. 147
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780975331781TRADE List Price: $65.00 CAD $75.00
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Söke Dinkla. Essays by Friedrich W. Block, Söke Dinkla, Eleonora Louis and Michael Müller.
ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE MURDER HAS ITS SEXUAL SIDE PEOPLE WON'T BEHAVE IF THEY HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE SLOPPY THINKING GETS WORSE OVER TIME Jenny Holzer's Truisms, the series of texts from which these phrases derive, are just one of the sources for the jolting words that the artist projects across monumental manmade and natural structures from Buenos Aires to Berlin. Beginning in the late 70s, Holzer has posted her provocative texts around the urban environment via a range of media--first on simple xeroxed posters, later on stickers, T-shirts, postcards, bronze plaques and baseball caps. In the 1980s, she moved on to the mass formats of large-scale LED screens in airports and sports stadiums. In her most recent projects, she has gone larger still, adopting xenon spotlight technology to project printed messages onto building facades and public squares, mountain sides and river surfaces. The effect is overwhelming, as if Holzer's inflammatory commands were being spoken by some omniscient voice, impossible to ignore. Xenon for Duisberg: The Power of Words documents a cross-section of Holzer's light-art oeuvre, featuring recent projections of text works sampled from her earlier series Truisms (1977-1979), Inflammatory Essays (1979-1982) and Survival (1983-1985). Also included is Mother and Child (1990), a set of phrases projected onto the monumental blast furnace at the former Thyssen steelworks and on other prominent architectural structures in downtown Duisburg in 2004. The accompanying DVD features more texts and images.
Published by Kunsthaus Bregenz. Edited by Eckhard Schneider. Essays by Maurice Berger, Sherman Kent, Thomas Blanton and Eckhard Schneider. Poetry by Henri Cole.
The politics of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is the subject of Truth Before Power, Jenny Holzer's recent Kunsthaus Bregenz project. The complicated dialectic of decision-making and public debate, as it has unfolded through the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, and George W. Bush, is explored in texts devoted to such issues as the international trade in arms and oil, the war on terrorism, 9/11, the FBI and CIA, and Congress's oversight of the intelligence community. For the most part, the installation's text has been taken verbatim from U.S. government documents--many of which were classified at the time they were written. Under the landmark Freedom of Information Act passed in 1966, all are now public record, though some remain heavily redacted. This illustrated catalogue includes selections from declassified U.S. government documents, Henri Cole's poem To the Forty-third President, and highlights from Holzer's own writing. Color photographs document Holzer's installations at the Kunsthaus and the Johanniterkirche in Feldkirch, and the eight xenon light projections staged in Vorarlberg.
PUBLISHER Kunsthaus Bregenz
BOOK FORMAT Clothbound, 11 x 12 in. / 128 pgs / 63 color / 2 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2004 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2005 p. 146
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783883758466TRADE List Price: $59.95 CAD $70.00
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Essays by Diane Waldman and Jenny Holzer.
Now in Paperback Jenny Holzer gained widespread recognition when texts from her Truisms series appeared on a vast electronic advertising board overlooking Times Square. Throughout her career, Holzer has intrigued audiences by placing her provocative messages in unexpected contexts, including posters, metal plaques, stone benches, electronic signs, television spots and Web sites. Her canny melding of the mediums of mass culture with an unadorned, emphatic language is perfectly attuned to an age of advertising slogans, headlines and sound bites. Yet despite the very public nature of much of her work, Holzer has also created more intimate pieces for display in galleries and museums. Her stunning installation at the 1990 Venice Biennale was awarded first prize and brought the artist international acclaim, proving that Holzer's art is equally compelling wherever it is shown--in a setting calculated to reach the masses or in the most rarefied art spaces. This book features a complete collection of the artist's writings, up to and including her 1996 text for a monument in Erlauf, Austria, accompanied by color photography of the entire range of her installations and projects. In an insightful essay and a lively interview with the artist, Diane Waldman traces the history of Holzer's series of writings and the varied environments in which they have appeared. The volume is rounded off with a chronology, exhibition history and bibliography.
Jenny Holzer: War Paintings
Jenny Holzer: For Frankfurt
Jenny Holzer: Retro
Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer: Truth Before Power
Jenny Holzer
