jenny holzer inflammatory essays tate

Subscribe to our free e-letter!

Why I Love | Jenny Holzer's Inflammatory Essays

Tate staff talk about their favourite artworks – Here, Jessye Bloomfield shares her views on Jenny Holzer's lithograph "Inflammatory Essays," on display at Tate Modern.

Find out more: https://goo.gl/V61vXN

Related Stories

Photography.

Ancient Art

Latin American Art

Indigenous Art

Women Artists

LGBTQ Artists

Renaissance

Contemporary Art

Black Artists

Why Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays matter

The American artist and political activist, Jenny Holzer has racked up a reputation for herself for her Inflammatory Essays over the years. From 1977 to 1982, her text-based Inflammatory Essays were typically displayed for the public in the formula of simply worded statements printed in bold. As a result of her contribution to the artwork, her work has been presented countless times in different exhibitions and retrospectives all over the globe.

Inspiration

Holzer was not always known for her Inflammatory Essays . She did not start specializing in text as the foundation of her work until much later. Originally, she started her career as an abstract artist that was inspired greatly by the principles of abstract expressionism. Although she was fairly successful in this area, Holzer was always on the lookout for a more modern way to communicate the fast-paced contemporary culture that was on the rise during the late 1970s and 1980s.

Inflammatory Essays

Like numerous artists of her time, Holzer relied on mass media and advertising strategies to fuel her work. During the late 1970s, she came up with almost 300 honest principles, observations, and slogans based on commonly accepted truths and clichés. Initially, Holzer would distribute these slogans to the public through various media such as posters, stickers, and t-shirts before she later progressed to electronic displays.

The reaction of the public

Motivated by the need to include discernible content in her work rather than abstract content, Holzer started placing words in her pieces, typically in the form of scraps of newspapers, as well as book and magazine clippings. Before she started displaying her work on a massive scale, she would first test the effects of her essays on regular passers-by. She quickly realized that her work had the power to engage the public, even when the public did not have any intention of seeing it, moving them to think seriously and provoking them to start debates about certain issues. It was this profound realization that encouraged her to keep pursuing her work.

Jenny Holzer’s work on New York’s Times Square

In 1982, Holzer took her messages a step further by infiltrating them to the public via a massive advertising stunt in New York’s Times Square . The messages displayed by Holzer were varied to include an array of themes and topics, but generally, all the messages presented contradictory perspectives. Holzer did this with the hope of awakening the public to the truth to sharpen their awareness.

Artwork description and composition

As she was finalizing her year as an MFA student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Holzer restructured her formula. Instead of simply relying on newspaper and book clippings, she sought to include her own words and opinions in her work. She started by creating a series of one-liners intended to cleanse common truths experienced on a regular basis in contemporary western society.

She then assembled the series of one-liners into several posters. Among some of the statements she came up with include ‘ abuse of power comes as no surprise ’, “ money makes taste , “ protect me from what I want , ‘People look like they are dancing before they love’ and more, all of which she referred to as truisms .

From 1977 to 1987, Holzer pasted other photocopies around New York. Her Truisms series look quite similar to the Inflammatory Essays . When both series started to become commonplace and too expected, she started working on several political installations that she also printed on posters using capital letters. She allotted each Inflammatory Essay a paragraph for each poster with the hope of delving into more complex and controversial issues in society. Rather than refer to these political statements as truisms, Holzer opted to refer to them as Inflammatory Essays .

Holzer’s works have been displayed in various locations worldwide, and they have been translated into different languages. Later on, she began incorporating technology into her installations, using LED signs to display her texts in motion. The LED signs lent a sense of authority that was usually missing in her posters. Since then, she has continued to work on light-based installations utilizing surfaces of popular buildings as the canvas onto which her Inflammatory Essays and truisms are displayed.

Although some of Holzer’s work is displayed outdoors, some of her work is also viewed in art spaces. Even in these spaces, she takes the time to construct complex interactions allowing the museum to enjoy the works that are often comparing different mediums.

Whether she opts to display her truisms and essays via text or through technology-driven visual expression, her work has allowed her to express her opinions on modern culture. Relying on lighted signs, billboards , walls and so on, Holzer uses areas of public interest as the canvas of her work. Her works and essays are created to provoke a reaction from the public so that relevant debates and conversations can be discussed.

More by Jenny Holzer

Discover more

Stay in touch

We would love to keep the conversation going.

Please join us on Instagram , Telegram or YouTube .

Want inspiration in your inbox?

Watch 1,000+ talks, performances, artist profiles, and more.

Please note that limited galleries remain open while we install our upcoming exhibitions.  Learn more

• Documentation

Jenny Holzer, Artist Inflammatory Essays , 1979–81

Jenny Holzer uses language to interrogate the effects of rhetoric, engaging viewers in fundamental questions such as "Who is speaking?" "Where does this text come from?" and "What does it mean?" Yet her texts—whether directives, confessions, or observations—elide authorial intentionality and unlock a sort of societal subconscious, from which bits of ideology, desire, fear, humor, and hatred pour forth. Holzer has authored dozens of textual series that—while distinct in personality, tone, and subject—often resurface in various material forms over time. Originally presented anonymously on the streets of New York City, the mass-produced short texts that make up Inflammatory 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 her distinctively crafted voice, one that is omniscient, detached, and yet enraged, shifting between multiple identities. 

${pageClass}

Selections from Truisms, Inflammatory Essays, The Living Series, The Survival Series, Under a Rock, Laments, and Child Text

Choose collection.

Jenny Holzer

Inflammatory essays.

© Jenny Holzer, member/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Critic’s Pick

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.

For the record, Holzer’s first signboards predated by more than a decade “the crawl” — the scrolling newsfeeds running along the bottom of the screen in cable news coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks, which inaugurated a major shift in journalistic practice. Holzer was way ahead of it.

She is still bending the curve — and, in the present work, favoring legibility over flash. The new LED sign scrolls up all six levels of the museum’s ramp — twice as many levels as in 1989 — and runs for more than six hours without repeating.

In some passages, it mimics its predecessor’s jumpy energy and dot-matrix font. Digitized fire rains down behind the words in one text segment, a liquid mix of bright color pools behind another. But for much of the time, the sign proceeds in clear sans-serif letters and has a smooth, moderately paced, disembodied flow. As the exhibition’s curator, Lauren Hinkson, puts it, the new sign feels “as if you’re drinking the words.”

Elsewhere embodiment takes its revenge, beginning with “Cursed,” a series of small raggedy sheets of various metals, some toxic, that are each stamped with one of the grandiose, grammatically challenged tweets Donald J. Trump began issuing soon after taking office as the country’s 45th president. Hung in a line near the lobby, these curse tablets descend to a poisonous heap on the floor.

The ancient world of bloody empire and fearful superstition to which they allude is evoked a little farther up the ramp in scattered fragments of polished stone slabs bearing fractured epigrams (SEX, BOREDOM MAKES YOU, NATURE’S WAY). These are relics of some of Holzer’s own bench-shaped sculptures, which she shattered (by having a crane drop other benches on them). This portentous graveyard of classicizing form is in part a dark joke at the artist’s expense. But there is no humor in a black granite sarcophagus engraved with a passage from Holzer’s “Laments,” a 1988-89 series addressed to AIDS, that sits across a ramp, blocking passage.

At about midpoint of the exhibition, which is resoundingly and quite radically sparse — many bays are vacant — it shifts to works on canvas. The “Redaction” paintings Holzer undertook in the early aughts reproduce heavily censored documents in which euphemism and brutality mingle in unholy union; the censors’ fields of black ink only highlight the dark sites they conceal.

Comic relief comes with a 2005 painting of an F.B.I. file on the painter Alice Neel (who would have guessed this activist artist had Communist friends?) and a voided dossier on George Orwell, which allows us to see only that on the pages in question, he is not mentioned.

One can’t help wondering what the U.S. Secret Service has on Holzer.

Redaction reaches a kind of apotheosis in nearly wordless paintings such as “Battle Rhythm,” which reproduces a document where blanked out information boxes are arranged in a garland of silvery circles set against a background of rosy gold. Holzer calls it her “af Klint,” after the celebrated Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s spirit-guided abstractions. When I asked her about the bling, here and in other paintings surfaced in silver and gold leaf, she deadpanned that she was “making the paintings shiny to get attention.” In fact, the challenge for the viewer is tearing oneself away.

Among the inexplicably uncensored government documents Holzer has replicated there is a cropped map of Iraq from the lead-up to the U.S. invasion. It clarifies exactly which of Iraq’s oil fields the U.S. could seize (in a war ostensibly meant only to topple a rogue regime).

Holzer and her studio team have also been experimenting with A.I., prompting it to create geometric abstractions. The almost imperceptibly asymmetrical forms that resulted, in the series “Slaughterbots,” (2024) question AI’s trustworthiness, and, implicitly, where liability falls when its wobbles produce human casualties.

On the museum’s final ramp, seven gold-leafed canvases reveal some of the panicky communications that ricocheted around Trump’s inner circle during the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. One text pleads, “Please have POTUS call this off at the capitol. Urge rioters to disperse. I pray to you.” And, in the exhibition’s penultimate words, his reply: “I got the base FIRED UP.” It closes a bracket that opens with the single work in the museum’s lobby, which bears a handwritten message to Trump before he addressed the Jan. 6 rally: “They are ready for you when you are.”

From the start, Holzer has been committed to bringing art to the streets, and to working collaboratively. Her “Truisms” first appeared as posters wheat-pasted on storefronts in Manhattan. In a nod to that history, her “Inflammatory Essays” (1979-82) paper the walls of the gallery adjoining the Guggenheim ramp’s base, printed on neon-colored sheets that form a bright checkerboard. They are partially obscured by harrowing personal testimony from conflict zones, tagged in black marker by the painter, ex-graffitist and longtime Holzer friend Lee Quiñones.

Her studio practice, too, is collaborative, relying on an administrative staff of eight, a dozen painters, and, she says, “a gazillion researchers.” Arguably democratizing as well is her decision to forgo the door-stopping exhibition catalog in favor of an artist’s book consisting only of her texts, reproduced from rubbings of engraved benches and printed in hushed tones on translucent paper. Art critics are put on notice: Interpretive essays are not needed.

Indeed, Holzer’s steadily tightening focus on politics can leave fans of her early writing’s psychological latitude — I’m one of them — missing its puzzling questions. Skeptics will wonder if raising political awareness is best achieved in shiny, zingy art. But even for news junkies, Holzer delivers information that sharpens and deepens understanding, surely a boon to all.

The most public element of “Light Line” is the nighttime projection on the museum’s facade, from May 16-20, of spare, heartbreaking poetry by writers Holzer has long favored, beginning with Anne Carson’s “If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho” and also featuring Wislawa Syzmborska, Anna Swirszczynska, Henri Cole, Yehuda Amichai and others. (A free outdoor projection appeared on the Guggenheim in 2008.) Holzer has created public signage and projections for anti-gun, anti-violence and get-out-the-vote drives since the mid 1980s.

As Holzer departs ever further from signatory writing and mark-making, her work remains unmistakable. That steadiness of purpose throws into relief the thoroughgoing transformation of her context. Political art can no longer presume solidarity in its audience; activists join forces mainly, it seems, in circular firing squads. Freedom of speech is a virtue hijacked by its enemies. Most unforeseeably in 1989, the government and spy agencies she scrutinizes are now being assailed as much by the right as by the left. It is not Holzer’s job to offer guidance or even hope. But she can be relied on to turn the high beams up on the dark road we’re traveling.

Jenny Holzer: Light Line Opens Friday through Sept. 29, Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; (212) 423-3500; guggenheim.org .

Nancy Princenthal is a Brooklyn-based writer whose focus is contemporary and 20th-century art. More about Nancy Princenthal

Art and Museums in New York City

A guide to the shows, exhibitions and artists shaping the city’s cultural landscape..

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

The artist-turned-film director Steve McQueen finds new depths in “Bass,”  an immersive environment of light and sound  in Dia Beacon keyed to Black history and “where we can go from here.”

A powerful and overdue exhibition at El Museo del Barrio links Amalia Mesa-Bains’s genre-defying installations  for the first time.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the immersive “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” exhibition features fragile dresses inside airtight vitrines, overcoats growing grass and pat-’n-sniff walls. But does it work ?

Looking for more art in the city? Here are the gallery shows not to miss in May .

All licences support Tate

Jenny Holzer born 1950

From inflammatory essays, [no title].

• Free Entrance and Discount Admission
• Dissabtes MACBA
• The Possible Museum
• L'Internationale
• Guest Researchers Programme
• Virtual Tour
• 2024 Season

Spiralling essay

Jenny holzer is recreating one of her most famous works at the guggenheim.

Jenny Holzer, Untitled (Selections from Truisms, Inflammatory Essays, The Living Series, The Survival Series, Under a Rock, Laments, and Child Text), 1989. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Back in 1989, Jenny Holzer created a landmark in text-based art. Taking the form of an LED display that spiralled through the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the work was the longest single sign in the world when it was created. Now, almost thirty-five years later, the Guggenheim are celebrating Holzer’s 1989 masterpiece with a whole new work.

The new manifestation of Holzer’s electronic sign, Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1989/2024) , will, once again, transform the building with an updated and expanded display of scrolling texts, featuring selections from her iconic series, such as Truisms and Inflammatory Essays . Taking up three revolutions of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda in the 1989 exhibition, the new installation will climb all six ramps up to the building’s oculus, realising the artist’s original vision. The artwork will highlight the incisive use of the written word across time and media in Holzer’s practice.

In addition to the LED sign, an adjoining exhibition will feature a selection of Holzer’s works from the 1970s to the present day, including paintings, works on paper, and stone pieces. During the exhibition’s opening week, Holzer’s For the Guggenheim – a light projection commissioned by the museum in 2008 – will be displayed on the building’s façade.

Jenny Holzer For the Guggenheim, 2008. Photo: Kristopher McKay © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Jenny Holzer: Light Line will open on May 17th and run until September 29th at the Guggenheim Museum, New York 

TAGGED WITH

Jenny Holzer restages 1989 projection piece at the Guggenheim in New York City

This month at New York's  Guggenheim Museum , artist Jenny Holzer is having her landmark 1989 light projection restaged in the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright -designed building’s rotunda. The installation celebrates her innovative text-based art alongside pieces from the early 70s to today that were included in the museum's new Light Line exhibition. 

"Developed in close collaboration with the artist and her studio, the new sign was the subject of an ambitious research project. Guggenheim conservators reverse-engineered the 1989 LED hardware and computer program, which helped inform the new manifestation. This investigation documents future variability and technology upgrades, and contributes to scholarship and methodologies for the preservation of technology-based artworks," a press release stated.

The Fifth Avenue projection follows a 2019 effort by Holzer at the Guggenheim Bilbao and includes selections clipped from her famed ‘Truisms’ and ‘Inflammatory Essays’ series. 

Holzer was recently included in the list of 'TIME 100' honorees with architects Lesley Lokko and Marina Tabassum . The L ight Line exhibition is open now and remains on view until September 29th.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by JENNY HOLZER STUDIO (@jennyholzerstudio)

Similar articles on Archinect that may interest you...

Related Archinect Profiles

Global

indonesia">Indonesia

united_kingdom">United Kingdom

We got you covered. Don’t miss out on the latest news by signing up for our newsletters.

By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy .

Download Our App

• dark_mode" data-event-name="menu_navigation" data-custom-event="null" class="dark-mode icon-type d-none d-lg-flex nav-item">
• login">Login
• sign_up">Sign Up
• search" data-event-name="menu_navigation" data-custom-event="null">
• Food & Beverage
• Movies & TV
• Tech & Gadgets

Jenny Holzer's Pertinent Messages Relight the Guggenheim's Rotunda

Her spiraling ‘light line’ installation takes on added relevancy today as it did when first presented 35 years ago..

American artist Jenny Holzer is reprising her seminal 1989 installation, Light Line , across the Frank Lloyd Wright -designed rotunda at the Guggenheim museum in New York. Nearly 35 years since its inception, the electronic text-based installation has been updated with modern technology, and more notably, decades worth of haiku-like observations and fragmented epigrams, dubbed “Truisms” by the Brooklyn-based artist, pertaining violence, systemic injustices and threats to democracy.

“ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE” and “BAD INTENTIONS CAN YIELD GOOD RESULTS” are several of her most notable texts within the show — messages that hold the same relevancy today, as it did when first coined over three decades ago. There are a number of obscure pairings intended to spark dialogue, such as “SEX, BOREDOM MAKES YOU, NATURE’S WAY.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Guggenheim Museum (@guggenheim)

What to Read Next

A Day in the Life of PUMA Mostro’s Extravagant Revival

AIREI Set the ASICS GEL-QUANTUM KINETIC on Fire (Again)

Kiko Kostadinov Sets ASICS GEL-QUANTUM ZIENTZIA "Knicks" Release Date

Ted Pim Surveys the Framework of Transformation in ‘Never Odd or Even'

Billie Eilish Channels ’90s Fashion in “Lunch” Music Video

Twitter Is Officially X.com, A Year After Rebranding

Wales Bonner x adidas Originals SS24 Celebrates the Legacy of East African Runners

PlayStation 5 Sold 5-Times the Number of Xbox Series X and S Consoles Last Quarter

Culture Curator Daisy Morris Shares Her Top Tips for Creating Content On-The-Go

SLOP and ISTO.'s New Collaboration Is Inspired by Culinary Excellence

Popeyes UK's New Breakfast Wraps Come With a Cajun Twist

Sporty & Rich Presents Three adidas Handball Spezial Colorways

District Vision x New Balance’s FuelCell SC Elite v4 Is a Minimalistic, High-Performance Race Shoe

The Air Jordan 5 "Black Metallic" Rumored To Be "Reimagined" in 2025

United kingdom.