Year: 2006
Material/Technique: LED Sign Elements
The concept of the work consisted in a large-scale electronic display with white diodes, integrated with the façade of the building. The text appears to travel through air, waving across and weaving the facade, broaching the material and the immaterial.
In the words of Jenny Holzer: “Instead of using my own writing for the Novartis project, I decided to incorporate an assortment of proverbs and aphorisms from around the world into the sign. My studio and I researched and compiled a selection of over 1,000 sayings such as ART HAS NO ENEMY BUT IGNORANCE, GIFTS ENTER WITHOUT KNOCKING, and THINKING IS VERY FAR FROM KNOWING. I wanted this most international of companies and campuses to flash with an array of knowledge people have had the good sense to make memorable. There can never be too much good sense, from as many voices as possible.”
Artist
Jenny Holzer (1950-) is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in New York. The focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces. 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.
Her studies included general art courses at Duke University in Durham, and then painting, printmaking and drawing at the University of Chicago before completing her BFA at Ohio University, Athens (1972). She later moved to Manhattan and began her first work with language, installation and public art.
For more than forty years, Jenny Holzer has presented her astringent ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Her medium, whether formulated as a T-shirt, a plaque, or an LED sign, is writing, and the public dimension is integral to the delivery of her work.
Holzer's work often speaks of violence, oppression, sexuality, feminism, power, war and death; and the artist often utilizes the rhetoric of modern information systems to address the politics of discourse. Her main concern is to enlighten, bringing to light something thought in silence and meant to remain hidden.