interviewed by Nicholas Zurbrugg
Nicholas Zurbrugg: Perhaps I could begin by asking you how you began to work with language. Do you happily accept the idea of being called a 'language artist'?
Jenny Holzer: It's a good partial description. Usually if I have to come up with a short title, I say 'public artist' to be a little more encompassing.
Nicholas Zurbrugg: What do you understand by 'public artist'?
Jenny Holzer: That title just reflects what I like to do, which is to put sentences in public places, where people take them at face value.
Nicholas Zurbrugg: What was it that led you to work with language rather than with painting?
Jenny Holzer: When I was a painter, I was an abstract painter, because that's what I loved. But then, I found that I wanted to be outspoken about things, and I didn't want to be a social realist painter, so I turned to language, as a way of being—when I needed to—quite explicit about things. Nicholas Zurbrugg: What was the first content of your language?
Jenny Holzer: The first series that I wrote was the Truisms. They were one-liners, meant to sound like real clichés, on almost every topic. I wanted to do a survey of the issues that people were concerned about, in a form that would be short enough to be displayed in public places where people can absorb only a small amount of information. Before I started writing the Truisms, I had tried to do public pieces—abstract Pieces—that I wasn't satisfied with because people only were puzzled by them. Which is something! It's not a bad thing to puzzle people, but it wasn't all that I wanted because I wanted... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline