jenny holzer inflammatory essays pdf

Why Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays matter

The American artist and political activist, Jenny Holzer has racked up a reputation for herself for her Inflammatory Essays over the years. From 1977 to 1982, her text-based Inflammatory Essays were typically displayed for the public in the formula of simply worded statements printed in bold. As a result of her contribution to the artwork, her work has been presented countless times in different exhibitions and retrospectives all over the globe.

Inspiration

Holzer was not always known for her Inflammatory Essays . She did not start specializing in text as the foundation of her work until much later. Originally, she started her career as an abstract artist that was inspired greatly by the principles of abstract expressionism. Although she was fairly successful in this area, Holzer was always on the lookout for a more modern way to communicate the fast-paced contemporary culture that was on the rise during the late 1970s and 1980s.

Inflammatory Essays

Like numerous artists of her time, Holzer relied on mass media and advertising strategies to fuel her work. During the late 1970s, she came up with almost 300 honest principles, observations, and slogans based on commonly accepted truths and clichés. Initially, Holzer would distribute these slogans to the public through various media such as posters, stickers, and t-shirts before she later progressed to electronic displays.

The reaction of the public

Motivated by the need to include discernible content in her work rather than abstract content, Holzer started placing words in her pieces, typically in the form of scraps of newspapers, as well as book and magazine clippings. Before she started displaying her work on a massive scale, she would first test the effects of her essays on regular passers-by. She quickly realized that her work had the power to engage the public, even when the public did not have any intention of seeing it, moving them to think seriously and provoking them to start debates about certain issues. It was this profound realization that encouraged her to keep pursuing her work.

Jenny Holzer’s work on New York’s Times Square

In 1982, Holzer took her messages a step further by infiltrating them to the public via a massive advertising stunt in New York’s Times Square . The messages displayed by Holzer were varied to include an array of themes and topics, but generally, all the messages presented contradictory perspectives. Holzer did this with the hope of awakening the public to the truth to sharpen their awareness.

Artwork description and composition

As she was finalizing her year as an MFA student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Holzer restructured her formula. Instead of simply relying on newspaper and book clippings, she sought to include her own words and opinions in her work. She started by creating a series of one-liners intended to cleanse common truths experienced on a regular basis in contemporary western society.

She then assembled the series of one-liners into several posters. Among some of the statements she came up with include ‘ abuse of power comes as no surprise ’, “ money makes taste , “ protect me from what I want , ‘People look like they are dancing before they love’ and more, all of which she referred to as truisms .

From 1977 to 1987, Holzer pasted other photocopies around New York. Her Truisms series look quite similar to the Inflammatory Essays . When both series started to become commonplace and too expected, she started working on several political installations that she also printed on posters using capital letters. She allotted each Inflammatory Essay a paragraph for each poster with the hope of delving into more complex and controversial issues in society. Rather than refer to these political statements as truisms, Holzer opted to refer to them as Inflammatory Essays .

Holzer’s works have been displayed in various locations worldwide, and they have been translated into different languages. Later on, she began incorporating technology into her installations, using LED signs to display her texts in motion. The LED signs lent a sense of authority that was usually missing in her posters. Since then, she has continued to work on light-based installations utilizing surfaces of popular buildings as the canvas onto which her Inflammatory Essays and truisms are displayed.

Although some of Holzer’s work is displayed outdoors, some of her work is also viewed in art spaces. Even in these spaces, she takes the time to construct complex interactions allowing the museum to enjoy the works that are often comparing different mediums.

Whether she opts to display her truisms and essays via text or through technology-driven visual expression, her work has allowed her to express her opinions on modern culture. Relying on lighted signs, billboards , walls and so on, Holzer uses areas of public interest as the canvas of her work. Her works and essays are created to provoke a reaction from the public so that relevant debates and conversations can be discussed.

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Inflammatory Essays, 1979-1982

Convinced that art resides in the concepts it sets out to communicate and not the form of the artistic object, Jenny Holzer has turned language into her creative material. Her first incursions into this field were her famous Truisms . Under this name, in 1977 Holzer began to hang posters in the streets of SoHo and other parts of Manhattan with incisive messages on social contradictions, sexuality, violence and the abusive logic of power. Arranged in alphabetic order and in black capital letters on a white background, she uses them ‘to keep people awake’ , as the artist explains in an interview.

Over the years Holzer developed longer texts, such as the Inflammatory Essays (1979–82), a series of texts of one hundred words each, written in a more caustic and aggressive language than the earlier work. Printed on coloured paper, they create a very visual discursive mosaic. As the title suggests, they are ‘inflammatory essays’ on intolerance, violence, rampant consumerism, the relations between the sexes and the abusive use of power. The artist uses texts by political thinkers in the communist and anarchist tradition (Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Emma Goldman), but also texts by religious and liberal thinkers, or from popular literature. Besides their message, Holzer’s works are deeply poetic and have great powers of suggestion.

The first Inflammatory Essays were published in 1979 in a book entitled Black Book Posters . The texts were printed on green paper. Later Holzer edited the Inflammatory Essays in a poster format and hung them in the streets of Manhattan, selecting each location according to the nature of each specific message. Every week she hung new posters, printed in different colours each time, so passers-by would know they had been changed. These were signed posters covering the entire length of a wall in the manner of wallpaper and denouncing all forms of abuse (‘The most exquisite pleasure is domination. Nothing can compare with the feeling’), whether social (‘People must pay for what they hold, for what they steal. You have lived off the fat of the land. Now you are the pig who is ready for slaughter’), or psychological (‘Fear is the most elegant weapon. Your hands are never messy’). With her battery of meanings and forceful yet suggestive tone, Holzer’s flaming essays configure a cartography of meanings on contemporary contradictions. ‘Change is the basis of all history. The proof of vigor. […] “Nothing essential changes.” That is a myth. It will be refuted.’

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• Documentation

Jenny Holzer, Artist Inflammatory Essays , 1979–81

Jenny Holzer uses language to interrogate the effects of rhetoric, engaging viewers in fundamental questions such as "Who is speaking?" "Where does this text come from?" and "What does it mean?" Yet her texts—whether directives, confessions, or observations—elide authorial intentionality and unlock a sort of societal subconscious, from which bits of ideology, desire, fear, humor, and hatred pour forth. Holzer has authored dozens of textual series that—while distinct in personality, tone, and subject—often resurface in various material forms over time. Originally presented anonymously on the streets of New York City, the mass-produced short texts that make up Inflammatory Essays cover a variety of subjects that have been ongoing concerns throughout Holzer's career, including power, social control, abuse, consumption, and sex. Declarative and forceful in tone, they embody her distinctively crafted voice, one that is omniscient, detached, and yet enraged, shifting between multiple identities. 

Seattle Art Museum Connecting Art to Life One Blog Post at a Time

Object of the Week: Inflammatory Essays

Originally plastered around New York City without attribution in the late 1970s and early 80s, Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays were made to confront passersby. Though she was relatively unknown at the time, Holzer’s careful combination of poetics and politics soon drew international attention and acclaim. In 1990, she became the first woman to officially represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, and was awarded the Golden Lion—the Biennale’s top prize. Just six years prior, Seattle Art Museum’s Contemporary Art Council sponsored the installation of Essays along a wall at Second Avenue and Pike Street in 1984. The posters would resurface 16 years later at SAM as part of the 2001 exhibition, Art of Protest .

Each essay, comprising 100 words and neatly arranged in 20 lines, is laden with conflicting views. As Leah Pires recently wrote in Art in America , “The concision and conviction of the language invites easy agreement—a feeling that is quickly complicated by the contradictions that become apparent when the statements are read together.” The commercial history of offset printing, coupled with Holzer’s typographic choices (the essays’ typeface is reminiscent of billboard advertisements), suggests a mass-distributed message in an aggressively declarative tone. The first line in one essay reads: “FEAR IS THE MOST ELEGANT WEAPON, YOUR HANDS ARE NEVER MESSY.”

These texts do not mirror Holzer’s own sentiments, but are rather drawn from the writings of anarchists, dictators, and revolutionaries around the world. Such voices include Emma Goldman, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, and Leon Trotsky. Whether directly stated or implied through irony, Inflammatory Essays critiques power and control, sex and abuse—themes that continue to inform Holzer’s practice today. Her work is meant to provoke, but Holzer is well aware of the weight words carry. In a 2016 interview with Even Magazine , she says, “Later I found it necessary and proper at times to be careful…I’ll put tough stuff out, but not what might incite gratuitous, hideous violence. I’m pro-expression but not pro-murder…I think it is utterly irresponsible and reprehensible…to incite violence in a political campaign, or anywhere else. One should not do it. We are a murderous species. We don’t need encouragement. Once we get rolling, it’s hard to stop.” 

Produced 40 years ago, Inflammatory Essays feels eerily contemporary. In a polarized era marred by fake news, the quick dismissal of credible journalism, and our self-imposed curation of media, Holzer urges us to question the statements we are bombarded with on a daily basis. Through their challenging and, at times, aggressive statements, Inflammatory Essays continues to elicit critical public discourse by means of self-examination.

– Rachel Hsu, SAM Exhibitions Coordinator

Images: Inflammatory Essays , 1979-82, Jenny Holzer, offset posters on paper 17 x 16 3/4 in., Gift of the Contemporary Art Council of the Seattle Art Museum, 2012.9.20 © Artist or Artist’s Estate. Poster Project, Seattle, Washington, USA, 1984, © 1984 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Installation view Art of Protest , Seattle Art Museum, 2001, photo: Nathaniel Wilson. Inflammatory Essays , 1979-82, Jenny Holzer, offset posters on paper 17 x 16 3/4 in., Gift of the Contemporary Art Council of the Seattle Art Museum, 2012.9.16 © Artist or Artist’s Estate. Inflammatory Essays , 1979-82, Jenny Holzer, offset posters on paper 17 x 16 3/4 in., Gift of the Contemporary Art Council of the Seattle Art Museum, 2012.9.21 © Artist or Artist’s Estate.

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• Tag: Adolf Hitler , Art of Protest , Emma Goldman , Jenny Holzer , Leon Trotsky , Mao Tse-tung , object of the week , Venice Biennale , Vladimir Lenin

Jenny Holzer

Inflammatory Essays (Essais incendiaires)

[1979 - 1982]

Jenny Holzer (1950, États-Unis)

ln writing this series of provocative texts, Holzer was inspired by political theorists, religious fanatics and impassioned "folk" literature. In these hundred-word, twenty-line essays, Jenny Holzer explored a range of ideas extending from the far left to the far right in an aggressive and "delirious" tone. The subjects range from science to politics and the personal. "I wanted to talk about things that are very important to people, but in a non-didactic way.", the artist declared. These posters were originally displayed in the streets of New York in order to have a direct effect on a large public, a central aim in Holzer's work.

On display:

Museum, level 4, central aisle

• Art conceptuel
• typographie

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Photo credits : Georges Meguerditchian - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP

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Image presentation : l'Agence Photo de la RMN

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Detailed description

By the same artist.

Signal électronique

Survival Series (Série survivance)

[1983 - 1985]

How Do You Resign Yourself to Something That Will Never Be?

1980 - 1982

Interviews : l'époque, la mode, la morale, la passion

Art et publicité

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Inflammatory Essays

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What if all Discourse Today is an Inflammatory Essay?

2019, Gallery talk

When Jenny Holzer first hung her text-based Inflammatory Essays on walls around New York City, Walter Cronkite was still telling nightly news viewers, “And that’s the way it is.” Holzer contradicted that perspective with a polyphony of tone and content unified by style. Today contradiction and discord rule the public sphere. Are Holzer’s Essays just a mirror of our times now, or can we learn something about effective incongruity from her curated juxtapositions when they’re viewed in a museum?

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The Journal of Public Space. Vol. 7 No. 3 (2022): Art and Activism in Public Space

Andrea Marsili

Jenny Holzer's art revolves around outspoken texts that inhabit posters and signs, namelessly disseminated through the city. The ungendered authority voice in her first written pieces, Truisms (1977-1987) and Inflammatory Essays (1978-1982), allowed her to avoid any associations with femininity as traditionally understood, fuelling passers-by's critical reflection. Later in her career, in parallel with her efforts to establish herself on a phallocentric art scene, Holzer's production found placement within more institutionalised museum contexts. Nonetheless, anonymity still remains a constant in Holzer's work and is thus not secondary to her outputs. Yet, most of the time, this was partially overlooked by scholars in favour of different conceptualisations of her work. Hence, this article aims to bridge this gap in the literature by analysing how Holzer adopted voices different from hers in the early stages of her career. The goal is to understand the rhetorical strategies she employed to find a place in a male-dominated art world and cityscape. By inquiring the self-fashioning of an unnamed identity, it will be remarked how the notion of persona is constantly evolving through time and space. It will be further argued that she appropriated authoritative voices far from her own, adapting them to address the public by proposing gestures of activism on topical issues of undoubtful relevance, directly intervening in the public space.

Affective Atmospheres of Public Controversy: Intersectional Rhetorics of Media Surveillance, White Feminine Performance, and Digital Publicity of BBQ Becky

Myles W . Mason

This dissertation argues rhetorical studies can put affective atmospheres to productive use in studying contemporary public controversies as spaces of feeling that animate extended public engagement operating across various media. Rhetorical Studies has frequently focused on the moments of rupture that resist institutional adjudication and provide inventional space for counterpublic critique of hegemonic cultural discourses. Attending to affective atmospheres, however, profoundly reorients the rhetorical critic to work against the impulse to silo the historic, affective, and mediated facets of controversy to evaluate the intimacies of public life more fully. The felt entanglements of rhetoric, media, and race are experienced as the impressions of public life that condition and are conditioned by the extension, surfacing, and (attempted) disappearing of bodies in shared space. This dissertation takes up the viral Internet figure of BBQ Becky, a white woman named Jennifer Schulte who rose to infamy for calling 911 over two Black men grilling in a public park, to illustrate the rhetorical complexity of contemporary public controversy. BBQ Becky first appears to be a punchline borne of a cultural anomaly, but this dissertation reveals how Schulte’s actions are expected within white women’s cultural dispositions. My analysis spans across public goods, public space, and publicity to reveal the longstanding histories of anti-Black, settler colonial rhetorics that capacitate media surveillance to create specific affective atmospheres of white femininity that have become controversial. Focusing on three interrelated, rhetorical performances—the creation of 911 as a tool of racial discipline, the emboldened actions both of Schulte and Snider based in settler colonial notions of belonging, and the constitution of extended public engagement around BBQ Becky via Internet memes—I provide a critical affective analysis that challenges rhetorical assumptions of what constitutes a controversy and how they arise in public life. This dissertation argues controversial figures within Internet culture present fecund ground to understand how longstanding histories can be ruptured with impressing force to begin generating substantive renegotiation of various public goods in meaningful ways.

Brandon Inabinet

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Selections from Truisms, Inflammatory Essays, The Living Series, The Survival Series, Under a Rock, Laments, and Child Text

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Untitled (Change is the Basis...), from Inflammatory Essays

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Jenny Holzer American, b. 1950

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