Ever since the concept of art was created by humans, we’ve been using different media to express ourselves and our ideals to the masses. Most people think about art as being paint on canvas, or stone and masonry when this idea presents itself. Even music gets a shoutout in this discipline, but have you ever thought about words themselves as art? Not as poetry, but actual sentences or phrases used as art? For veteran New York artist Jenny Holzer, she’s based an entire career around using words and phrases to express her own artistic visions. And apparently her vision is being seen by others given she was just named one of Time Magazine’s Most Influential People of 2024.
The Modern
Since the 1970s, Holzer has been at the epicenter of asking questions or making statements in the form of phrases called “Truisms” that appeared on building walls, telephone booths, and construction barricades across New York City. She even went as far as printing her statements on T-shirts so the masses could read her sentiments. “My work has been designed to be stumbled across in the course of a person’s daily life,” she says. Starting with her well-known truism, “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE,” Holzer began to gain traction in the New York art scene. Eventually she would move on to creating phrases using LED technology, displaying the series of phrases on large billboards and in various galleries and museums across the globe.
One such piece of art, that has been on display at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth since 2012, is titled “Kind of Blue,” which resides in the museum’s first floor gallery. This almost Times Square-style ticker shows a series of phrases that run on a loop for 12 hours. In the artist’s words, she “routinely invites the reader to sort through the offerings and complete the thoughts; and to echo, amplify, or shrink from the feelings the work elicits.”
This piece of art was commissioned by the Modern in celebration of its tenth anniversary in the Tadao Ando building. According to a release, this display was made specifically for the custom double-height gallery it resides in so it would be visually open on three sides to water and sky. Lines of blue scrolling text move across the floor on LED strips, which hunker down on the floor like a river of words that blend in with the museum’s outdoor motif.
Known as a neo-conceptualist artist, Holzer’s work is presented in public spaces, which include words and ideas in the form of word art. According to Wiki, 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.
