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Jenny Holzer: Laments
Artwork by Jenny Holzer.
Jenny Holzer was born in 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio. She first came to prominence in New York in the late 70s and early 80s. Among other awards she has received, Holzer in 1990 became the first woman to ever win the Leone d'Oro at the Venice Biennale. Her work has been exhibited in most every major museum around the world, and she has created installations for public and private sites including the Reichstag and the Times Square Spectacolor billboard in New York.
30 pages, Paperback
First published March 2, 1990
About the author
Jenny Holzer
54 books118 followersJenny 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 1, 2024
”With only my mind to protect me I go into days.”
”I love my mind when it is fucking the cracks of events.”
”I have every kind of thought and that is no embarrassment.”
”I love my mind when it is fucking the cracks of events.”
”I have every kind of thought and that is no embarrassment.”
May 9, 2025
it's hard for me to connect to poetry but this makes it seamless
February 16, 2008
This author used up all of the cool word - read the book - it's super-tine (like 50 pages). Poetry and art combined.
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August 15, 2008
I reread this slim volume of poems once or twice a year. it's fucking brilliant. the originals are carved on stone sarcophagi. sample line: "I love my mind when it is fucking the cracks of events."
June 13, 2018
Dark prose.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews