Jenny Holzer: Retro

Famed for her LED message boards and the declarative, politicized cast of her linguistic materials, Jenny Holzer (born 1950) has in fact employed a great variety of media in her subversions of dominant ideologies. Among these media are granite and marble benches, enamel signs and even, as this handsome catalogue for Holzer’s 2010 show at Skarstedt Gallery reveals, a sarcophagus. Jenny Retro covers a decade of Holzer’s oeuvre from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, underlining the diversity of media in some of the artist’s most iconic works. It shows how each medium elicits differing types of language composition, from the direct provocations of the ephemeral LED message boards to the horrific cracked narratives of the stone benches with their rhetoric of enshrinement and permanence. Surveying works that vary thus from the fleeting to the fixed, Retro also underscores the temporal scale of Holzer’s bold and influential oeuvre.