Дженни Холзер: Сөз өнерінің шебері

American conceptual artist

Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950) is an American neo conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays. Holzer belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980, and was an active member of Colab during this time, participating in the famous The Times Square Show.

Holzer was born on July 29, 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio. Originally aspiring to become an abstract painter, her studies included general art courses at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina (1968–1970), and then painting, printmaking and drawing at the University of Chicago before completing her BFA at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio (1972). In 1974, Holzer took summer courses at the Rhode Island School of Design, and entered its MFA program in 1975. She moved to Manhattan in 1976, joined the Whitney Museum's independent study program and began her first work with language, installation and public art.

Holzer is known as a neo conceptual artist. in the form of word art (also known as text art.). The public dimension is integral to Holzer's work. Her large scale installations have included advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other architectural structures, and illuminated electronic displays. LED signs have become her most visible medium, although her diverse practice incorporates a wide array of media including street posters, painted signs, stone benches, paintings, photographs, sound, video, projections, the Internet, T shirts for Willi Smith, and a race car for BMW. Text based light projections have been central to Holzer's practice since 1996. From 2010, her LED signs started becoming more sculptural. Holzer is no longer the author of her texts, and in the ensuing years, she returned to her roots by painting. Holzer only uses capital letters in her work and frequently words or phrases are italicized. She has stated before that this is because she wants to “show some sense of urgency and to speak a bit loudly." 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. She was an active member of Colab during this time, participating in the famous The Times Square Show. Other female contemporaries include Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Charlesworth, and Louise Lawler. The subject of Holzer's work often relates to feminism and sexism. Her work discusses heavy subjects such as sexual assault against women. She has said that she gravitates towards subjects such as this due to family dysfunction she has experienced and because she claims “we don't need work on joy.” They first appeared as anonymous broadsheets that she printed in black italic script in capital letters on white paper and wheat pasted to buildings, walls and fences in and around Manhattan. She printed other Truisms on posters, T shirts and stickers, and carved them into stone benches. In late 1980, Holzer's mail art and street leaflets were included in the exhibition Social Strategies by Women Artists at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, curated by Lucy Lippard. In 1981, Holzer initiated the Living series, printed on aluminum and bronze plaques, the presentation format used by medical and government buildings. The Living series addressed the necessities of daily life: eating, breathing, sleeping, and human relationships. Her bland, short instructions were accompanied by paintings by American artist Peter Nadin, whose portraits of men and women attached to metal posts further articulated the emptiness of both life and message in the information age. Inflammatory Essays was a work consisting of posters Holzer created from 1979 to 1982 and put up throughout New York. The statements on the posters were influenced by political figures including Emma Goldman, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Tse tung. Sponsored by the Public Art Fund program, the use of light emitting diodes (LEDs) allowed Holzer to reach a larger audience. The texts in her subsequent Survival series, compiled in 1983 85, speak to the great pain, delight, and ridiculousness of living in contemporary society. She began working with stone in 1986; for her exhibition that year at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, Holzer introduced a total environment where viewers were confronted with the relentless visual buzz of a horizontal LED sign and stone benches leading up to an electronic altar. Continuing this practice, her installation at the Guggenheim Museum in 1989 featured a 163 meter long sign forming a continuous circle spiraling up a parapet wall. Holzer uses the passages she had read while being a part of the Whitney Independent Study Program by simplifying them for public consumption and applying them to her phrases. This series not only provokes thought in her audience through the constant reminder of death and sorrow but also exposes them to sources they normally wouldn't come across. In an interview Holzer mentions that she uses the first person “I” simply to give the impression that a dead person is speaking and therefore make the installation more interesting to her audience. In Laments Jenny gave a voice to 13 different dead individuals, to say everything they might not have gotten the opportunity to while alive. She touches on topics like motherhood, violation, pain, torture, and even death on a personal level to these 13 individuals Although Laments focuses mostly on the darkness of humanity and the tragedies we face daily there is also hidden optimism in the 13 laments. In 1989, Holzer became the second female artist chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in Italy (Diane Arbus was the first, shown posthumously in 1972). At the 44th Biennale in 1990, her LED signboards and marble benches occupied a solemn and austere exhibition space in the American Pavilion; she also designed posters, hats, and T shirts to be sold in the streets of Venice. The installation, Mother and Child, won Holzer the Leone D'Oro for best pavilion. The original installation is retained in its entirety in the collection of the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the organizing institution for the American Pavilion at the 1990 Biennale. After taking a break from the art world, Holzer returned with controversy in 1993. Holzer came out with her Lustmord series, taking the title from the German word meaning "sex murder". Holzer created the series as a response of the Bosnian War, specifically the widespread rape and murder of women. The work feature three poems that retell sex crimes from the perspective of the victim, the observer, and the perpetrator. Lustmord has taken many different forms from texts written in blue, black, and red ink on the skin, to the Lustmord Table, a series of different bones of the body laid on a wooden table, with silver bands wrapped around them, engraved with the text of the three poems. While Holzer wrote the texts for the bulk of her work between 1977 and 2001, since 1993, she has mainly been using texts written by others, including literary texts from such authors as Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, Henri Cole (USA), Elfriede Jelinek (Austria), Fadhil Al Azzawi (Iraq), Yehuda Amichai (Israel), Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine), Khawla Dunia (Syria), and Mohja Kahf (Syrian American). As of 2010, Holzer's work has been focused on government documents, concerning Iraq and the Middle East. Holzer's work often concerns violence, oppression, sexuality, feminism, power, war and death; the artist often utilizes the rhetoric of modern information systems to address the politics of discourse. Her main aim is to enlighten, illuminating something thought in silence and meant to remain hidden.

At the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007, Holzer presented a series of mixed media silk screen prints; each of the 15 same size, medium large canvases, stained purple or brown, bears an all black, silk screened reproduction of a PowerPoint diagram used in 2002 to brief President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and others on the United States Central Command's plan for invading Iraq. Holzer found these documents at the Web site of the independent, nongovernmental National Security Archive (nsarchive. org), which obtained them through the Freedom of Information Act, and has used them as source material for her work since 2004. Other paintings depict confessions or letters from prisoners of all kinds and their families (parents pleading that the Army discharge rather than court martial their sons); autopsy and interrogation reports; or exchanges concerning torture, as well as prisoners’ handprints and maps of Baghdad. Holzer concentrates on documents that have been partially or almost completely redacted with censor's marks.

Holzer's first dance project was in 1985, “Holzer Duet Truisms” with Bill T. Jones. In 2010, she collaborated with choreographer Miguel Gutierrez for the Co Lab series at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. There were 10 dancers who performed in a room in which Holzer's words were projected along the walls.

Solo exhibitions of Holzer's work have been held in institutions such as the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2009), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2008). Other solo shows include Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1988); Dia Art Foundation, New York (1989); Guggenheim Museum, New York (1989); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1991); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2000); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2001, 2011); Barbican Art Gallery, London (2006); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2010), and DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art (2010). She has also participated in Documenta 8, Kassel (1987), as wells in group exhibitions in major institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum, Den Bosch, The Nederlands, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Holzer will participate in the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012). According to the website for the 2015 'Dismaland' art installation led by Banksy, Holzer contributed works to the project. Holzer had several solo exhibitions in the past several years. In 2014 her work was in Jenny Holzer: Projecto Parede at the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) of São Paulo in Brazil in 2014 as well as Jenny Holzer: Dust Paintings at Cheim & Read in Chelsea, New York which exemplified her use of government documents as a source for her work. In 2015 she was in Jenny Holzer: Softer Targets at the Hauser & Wirth, Somerset in Bruton, UK which featured new work and other pieces from the past three decades. Also in 2015 she had a solo exhibition at the Barbara Kreakow Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts as well as War Paintings at Museo Correr in Venice, Italy. Then in the winter of 2016 17 at Alden Projects in New York, Holzer had the solo exhibition REJOICE! OUR TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE: Jenny Holzer's Street Posters, 1977 1982, which showed her language based posters that were pasted on the streets of New York. In 2018, Holzer had the exhibition Artist Rooms: Jenny Holzer at Tate Modern in London. She has the entire second floor of Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (nine galleries) from March 22 to September 9, 2019 for "Zera deskribaezina" (It is irreversible). Holzer is one of six artist curators who made selections for Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection, on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from May 24, 2019 through January 12, 2020.

In the early 1980s Holzer bought a farm in Hoosick, New York. and began dividing her time between there and a loft on Eldridge Street in Manhattan. but still maintains a studio in Brooklyn. Her private art collection includes works by Alice Neel, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, and Louise Bourgeois. When asked if she considers herself to be a political artist, Holzer stated:
I'm an artist, and a person who is political; I make some separation here. I do not represent that art is as straightforward and immediately effective as voting or doing community work, and I don't think art always can or should be pragmatic and utilitarian. At times, however, art can fuse a dreadful or wonderful reality with dreadful or wonderful representation so that people realize and feel what is, and then act.