Jenny Holzer

The words become art for Jenny Holzer . Her main focus is the investigation of means to disseminate her ideas within public space,  in areas saturated with commercials and billboards. Since the late seventies, she has been working in the street and on public buildings, using media that would enable her work to blend in the landscape. She has been equally using LCD displays and posters and stickers (applied to such urban elements as telephone booths or parking meters). Her texts are smart paradoxical comments on that environment they fit into, stimulating awareness of our social conditioning as conveyed by the very landscape in which viewers may be confronted by them.

Jenny Holzer's Truisms are "truths" that lie at the boundary of truth and our perception of truths in the post-modern landscape. Holzer inserts her truisms into public spaces, on T-shirts, and electronic billboards placed in museums and galleries. As a fixture in public space, they are in jarring juxtaposition to the commodified world around us of mass media, advertising, product marketing, and all the various "non-truisms" that are fed to us everyday. In this sense, the Truisms are an act of artistic mediation, in that Holzer inserts her work and ideas into the real world where they activate critique and analysis of surrounding cultural, economic and political conditions. The full list of truisms can be found here.

The base for the text is from the notes here