Talk:Jenny Holzer

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the meanings behind using text in her art?

Spinoza1111 03:26, 17 June 2006 (UTC)made a stab at this some months ago. Reviewing right now for POV - Ed Nilges

The tone and POV in this article is really overbearing. Unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with the subject to feel comfortable rewriting. MKV 06:27, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Contents 1 Excerpted material 2 more cuts 3 Twitter feed 4 Original research removed 5 reqphoto

[edit] Excerpted material

I've made some edits to this article, and tried to make it more clear. There are still a lot of areas that need to be rephrased and simplified.

I've cut and pasted the following paragraph from the very end as I'm not sure if it's relevant:

• To Wolfe, the Painted Word was Scholastic and Mandarin; Wolfe created an opposition between the idea of an intellectual elite and American popular culture (which despite its private ownership, Wolfe reintroduced as a res publica). However, Holzer started painting and writing at a time when the tools were available to anyone at local stores, and this means that Wolfe's categories may be insufficient as an analysis of what conceptual art is about.

Banzaiboy 07:27, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] more cuts

I apologize to the original writer of the entry but the article needs to be made more accessible to a general readership.

I've decided to remove the following paragraphs as well as they are geared towards a highly educated academic or art world audience, rather than someone trying to gain a basic understanding of this artist.

I also removed to them to pare down the focus on to Holzer and her work (and more about basic facts, rather than critical analyses and commentary). If social context for her work needs to be introduced, it needs to be done in a more straightforward manner.

Here are the excerpts:

• In a 1980 essay called "The Painted Word", Tom Wolfe accused modern artists of departing from the western tradition of representational art, with its supposed humanism of celebrating or criticizing the outside world in plastic form, and turning into self-reflexive and ironic commentators whose works were less art than a "statement".

• Wolfe was reiterating a common theme: that though the West had once celebrated the world, through a variety of movements from deconstruction to conceptual art, it was degenerating into scholasticism, or the Mandarin tradition of the "eight-legged essay" of ancient China.

• At the same time, however, Holzer was beginning to act precisely as charged, for the content of her works is pure text.

• In China, words as art are a highly conservative and traditional visual art. Holzer, however, took Western art back to the tradition of the illuminated manuscript presented in a public space.

Banzaiboy 07:49, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Twitter feed

Someone just added a link to a Twitter feed that has the appearance of being edited by Holzer. It seems to me that there needs to be some kind of verification that this is in fact being edited by her. Any ideas about how to get such verification? Do share. Otherwise, I think we should cut the link as unsupported. Doctormatt 02:38, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Since "fakesters" -- accounts that pretend to be from a celebrity or a fictional person but are instead controlled by someone else -- are so common on social networking sites like Twitter [1], this seems like a quite probable situation. Not only that, but Holzer's short text pieces are ideal for Twitter -- you can definitely see a motive for another person to add them.

I'll remove this factoid until we've got some backing documentation. --ESP 17:54, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Original research removed

Savidan 02:52, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

The arresting quality of Holzer's billboards is an exploitation of urban space, which took its modern form as a space solely for commerce. Accordingly, the viewer is usually prepared to see commercial messages. With Holzer's work, viewers are instead confronted with statements such as "it is in your self-interest to be very tender." These statements reverse the function of advertisements, whose objective is to sell a product to the viewer, often with disregard for their best interests.^{[citation needed]}

As in the case of the popular artist Christo and his large, public, and less confrontational installations, Holzer was concerned with urban space that was being reclaimed and re-gentrified by private interests around 1980. The city of New York had, prior to the 1970s, provided artists with access to public spaces for installations with tax dollars. The city was notorious for going bankrupt in 1976 and public funding for artists was reduced. By 1980, the turnaround from an initimidating, crime-ridden city was already occurring. This change, however, was made possible by corporate investment, and accordingly, Holzer had to negotiate space for an art with no real commercial prospects.^{[citation needed]}

By avoiding any one style of electronic or engraved calligraphy, and instead taking an interest in the appearance of text in a specific font, weight, place, or time, Holzer draws the viewer's attention to text itself. Her work reminds the viewer that any text, including an advertising message or government announcement, is never without a material existence, a place and time, and an author. The 1990 Gulf War inspired Holzer to make art that was more distinctly political. Since then, she has de-emphasized her participation in the American artistic scene. ^{[citation needed]}

[edit] reqphoto

I am requesting a picture of the artist herself.Zigzig20s (talk) 07:35, 8 March 2008 (UTC)