THE SENTENCE AS PUBLIC ART, HOLZER

A text-based artwork by Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer, over more than thirty years, showed that a single sentence placed in public space could carry the cultural weight once attributed to painting and turned the sentence itself into a work of art.

From the Archive: Jenny Holzer

In 1977, Holzer began pasting printed texts onto walls in lower Manhattan, without allowing them to carry any indication of who made them, their titles, or that they were art. 

Jenny Holzer's "Protect Me From What I Want" (1986),
cast bronze

Each text was a single line. Abuse of power comes as no surprise. Money creates taste. Protect me from what I want. Romantic love was invented to manipulate women. Within two years, she wrote more than two hundred and fifty texts and placed them on doors, streetlamps, phone booths, and construction panels.

She called this series Truisms. The title was ironic, as many of the texts contradicted one another. Rather than presenting these sentences as her own views, Holzer chose to put different positions into public circulation and observe how they were received.

Jenny Holzer's "Protect Me From What I Want" (1984),
an art installation in Times Square.

This approach, which began with Truisms, also formed the basis of her later works. A single sentence placed in the right location could do what a painting does; it could stop a passerby, alter the perception of the space it occupied, and remain in memory. Once she realized that, as long as she found the right word and the right surface, it could do what a painting could do, she differentiated herself from the artists before her and approached the sentence itself as the work.

From the Archive: Jenny Holzer

Before her, works such as Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs from 1965 or Lawrence Weiner’s text-based works could appear similar to an outside viewer; however, they were generally part of conceptual discussions built around definition. Holzer replaced these discussions with the potential she found in a familiar thought and worked through the connections she established between her sentences and the places she chose. For example, Abuse of power comes as no surprise is, on its own, a familiar thought; however, when placed next to a government building, its meaning changes.
 In Holzer’s method, context comes forward; her approach was to produce sentences that could retain their meaning across different environments and to find surfaces where this transformation became visible.

By 1982, she began moving her work onto electronic screens. In March of that year, Protect Me From What I Want appeared on the Spectacolor display in Times Square, among advertisements and stock data. The technology had not changed, but a different kind of text appeared on this surface. Holzer recognized early on that moving LED displays were becoming one of the main surfaces of public communication and used this space as it was.

Jenny Holzer's The Child Room (1990) at Glenstone Museum, 2025
Photo by Glenstone Museum

Over the next twenty years, she worked with different materials: granite benches, stone surfaces, projections. In 1990, she became the first woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. In 2001, she projected text onto the Reichstag building in Berlin. She later carried out projections on structures such as the Louvre, Guggenheim Bilbao, and the Oslo Opera House. In each, she reinforced her method through combinations of words redefined across different locations.

Over time, some of these sentences entered circulation. Protect me from what I want appeared on posters, tattoos, texts, and social media.

Most people do not know the origin of this sentence. What Holzer did was not to prove that language could be art; this had already been done before. 

From the Archive: Jenny Holzer