Jenny Holzer is an artist who works with new media, in locations ranging from baseball stadiums to public transportation systems. This book surveys all her installations, including her celebrated marble benches and electronic boards at the DIA Foundation New York, street and gallery based exhibitions, permanent public monuments, and works on the World Wide Web. Starting on the streets of New York with simple fly-posters, she has gone on to disseminate her truisms, slogans, memorials and poems through a variety of media. They are enunciated by an unstable register of personae be it ad man, stand up comic, torturer, victim or evangelist. The sites for her work range from T shirts and golf balls, to dazzling electronic signboards at baseball stadiums or the Internet. Her work uses language to investigate ideologies, conscious and unconscious formations about identity and experience. Her complex and poetic texts can be shocking, humorous and intriguing in content; at the same time she draws on Minimalism's use of industrial materials, and deploys scale, movement and light to create art of great formal power and beauty. The book is part of a series of studies of important artists of the late-20th century. Each title offers a comprehensive survey of the artist's work, providing analyses and multiple perspectives on contemporary art and its inspiration.
