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Jenny  Holzer,  Barbara  Kruger,  Cindy  Sherman  Jessica  Chalmers  Published  in  Flash  Art  (Italy)  June  1997    

  The  most  important  women  artists  of  the  1980s  were  not  tampax  artists  like  some  of  

their  late  '60's  and  '70s  foremothers.    They  did  not  paint  or  mold  vulva-­‐like  forms  in  honor  

of  women  in  general  or  in  honor  of  particular  ones  like  Judy  Chicago  and  Hannah  Wilke  did.    

They  were  not  activists  -­‐-­‐  nor  did  they  talk  much  about  feminism  at  all.    Their  work  was,  

however,  absolutely  crucial  –  along  with  the  work  of  others  such  as  Sherrie  Levine  and  Mary  

Kelly  –  to  feminist  discourse  in  the  1980s.  Seen  as  being  on  a  par  with  the  rigor  of  

contemporary  theoretical  writing,  the  intellectual  impulse  behind  Jenny  Holzer's  truisms,  

Barbara  Kruger's  collages,  and  Cindy  Sherman's  film  stills  was  generally  considered  to  be  

about  (re)presenting  the  female  body  within  a  critique  of  masculinist  or  phallocentric  

ideology.  In  particular,  Kruger's  patchwork  of  clichéd  images  collaged  from  various  found  

sources  and  Sherman's  use  of  her  own  image  were  seen  as  commentary  on  available  modes  

of  self-­‐representation  for  women.  If,  at  the  time,  power  in  general  was  beginning  to  be  

understood  as  operating  through  media  enforcement  of  stereotypes  rather  than  purely  

through  economic  means  -­‐-­‐  these  artists,  masters  or  mistresses  of  the  idée  reçu,  of  the  

advertising  image  and  slogan,  of  Hollywood  iconography  -­‐-­‐  were  understood  as  deploying  

the  irony  of  cliché  against  that  power.  

  Jenny  Holzer  is  a  sentence  artist  long  devoted  to  placing  writing  in  places  outside  the  

museum  and  gallery  –-­‐  public  places  where  passersby  don't  expect  to  be  addressed  as  

anything  but  as  consumers  or  voters,  if  at  all:  low  along  the  rim  of  a  baggage  carrousel  

(Mccarran  Airport,  Las  Vegas.  1986),  in  among  the  anonymous  neon  advertisements  of  

Times  Square  (1982)  or  downtown  Las  Vegas  (1986),  or  on  parking  meters  or  a  garbage  can  

lid  (Philadelphia  and  New  York,  1983).    Like  advertising  copy,  Holzer's  sentences  are  aimed  

at  stopping  people  who  are  going  obliviously  about  their  daily  lives  -­‐-­‐  and  inducing  them  to  

read.  Unlike  ad  copy,  however,  her  words  come  unadorned  by  any  image  and  unmotivated  

by  any  obvious  material  end.  In  1989,  Holzer  told  Diane  Waldeman:  "I  knew  it  was  

theoretically  possible  to  leave  things  for  people  and  you  could  actually  stop  them  in  their  

tracks."  As  a  graduate  student  at  the  Rhode  Island  School  of  Design,  she  left  pieces  of  

paintings  lying  around  outside  for  people  to  find.  In  1977,  after  enrolling  in  the  Whitney  

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Museum's  Independent  Study  Program,  what  she  began  to  leave  around  were  the  sentences  

and  fragments  she  called  truisms,  sentences  that  remain  the  basis  of  her  work  to  this  day.    

It  comes  as  no  surprise,  then,  that  Holzer's  most  interesting  recent  work  ventures  on  

line,  onto  the  Internet  -­‐-­‐  that  "place"  which  is  at  present  being  tauted  as  being  or  possessing  

the  potential  for  being  the  most  public  and  accessible  international  crossroads  in  history.  

Her  project,  entitled  Please  Change  Beliefs,  can  be  found  on  äda  'web  (http://adaweb.com),  a  

site  devoted  to  producing  and  housing  on-­‐line  projects  by  artists  such  as  Holzer,  Julia  Scher,  

Lawrence  Wiener,  Vivian  Selbo,  and  others.  In  Holzer's  on-­‐line  project,  her  sentences  -­‐-­‐  

many  if  not  all  of  which  we  have  seen  previously  in  her  earlier  work  –  have  new  life  as  

hypertext  links.  In  the  point-­‐and-­‐click  world  of  HTML,  Holzer's  words  can  do  more  than  

communicate:  they  act  as  buttons  that  can  be  clicked  on  in  order  to  reach  other  

sentence/buttons  in  the  form  of  Truisms,  Inflammatory  Essays  (from  work  done  in  and  

around  1984)and  other  Holzer  genres.  As  with  her  LED  signs,  reading  is  controlled  by  the  

artist  and  occasionally  frustrated.    Her  LED  signs  are  programmed  for  quick  passage,  

synchronized  flashing,  among  other  effects.    Here,  too,  you  are  not  permitted  to  linger  over  a  

truism.    Discouraging  contemplation,  the  blinking  on-­‐line  text  changes  almost,  yet  not  quite,  

faster  than  you  can  read  it.  Holzer  may  want  to  stop  people  in  their  tracks,  but  encouraging  

the  kind  of  careful,  time-­‐consuming  reading  that  one  is  usually  encouraged  to  give  to  poems  

and  other  literary  work  is  not  what  this  work  is  about  either.      

A  new  aspect  of  the  work  is  its  interactivity.  You  are  asked  to  choose  one  out  of  a  list  

of  truisms,  alter  it  in  the  space  provided,  and,  having  clicked  on  the  proper  button  to  indicate  

that  you  are  finished,  you  are  moved  to  another  page  where  you  find  your  newly-­‐minted  

saying  added  to  a  master  list  of  both  altered  and  unaltered  truisms.  Some  of  the  altered  

truisms  in  fact  manage  to  capture  the  tersely  ironic  Holzer  style  -­‐-­‐  the  impersonal,  faux-­‐

ageless,  sounds-­‐like-­‐a-­‐cliché  of  her  truisms.  Some  fail  to  capture  her  style,  some  do  not  try  to  

capture  her  style,  and  others  mock  it.    The  äda  'web  truism  master  list  is  a  Borgesian  

catalogue  of  possibilities  whose  interest  lies  in  the  fact  that  it  records  an  on-­‐going  tribute  to  

Holzer  as  the  initiator  of  a  particular  form  writing.    This  is  a  form  of  writing  whose  politics  is  

expressed  through  slogans,  slogans  whose  difference  from  other  slogans  (it  becomes  clear)  

is  only  a  matter  of  minute  syntactical  adjustment.  This  is  sad  art,  revealing  -­‐-­‐  in  spite  of  any  

possible  democratic  motive  on  Holzer's  part  -­‐-­‐  the  ephemeral  quality  of  political  

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commitment  and  political  language  and  the  arbitrary  factors  that  determine  political  

interlocutors.  For  example,  in  the  following  (very  partial)  list  generated  by  the  Holzer  truism  

RAISE  BOYS  AND  BOYS  THE  SAME  WAY  on  äda  'web,  a  kind  of  inadvertent  conversation  or  

argument  around  gender  has  emerged.    Mixing  humor  with  conviction,  the  argument  is  

without  fire,  having  taken  place  between  slogans  which,  for  the  most  part,  were  probably  

added  to  the  master  list  only  blindly,  without  foreknowledge  of  the  other  entries  on  the  list:            

 

RAISE  BOYS  AND  GIRLS  AS  BOYS  AND  GIRLS  

RAISE  BOYS  AND  GIRLS  ON  DIFFERENT  DAYS  

RAISE  BOYS  AND  GIRLS  THE  SAME  WAY  AS  CABBAGES  

RAISE  BOYS  AND  GIRLS  TO  BE  WHO  THEY  ARE  

RAISE  GIRLS  AS  IF  THEY  ARE  BETTER  THAN  BOYS  

 

Since  their  heyday  in  the  1980s,  Barbara  Kruger's  name  has  been  frequently  linked  to  

Jenny  Holzer's  because  of  their  shared  commitment  to  borrowing  from  commercial  culture  

in  order  to  critique  it.  A  commercial  artist  in  the  '70s  for  Conde  Nast  publications,  Kruger's  

best-­‐known  art  of  the  '80s  appropriated  images  from  her  day  job.  One  thinks  immediately  of  

her  1989  poster  for  a  march  on  Washington  in  support  of  Roe  v.  Wade,  "Your  Body  is  a  

Battleground."  Or  the  attractive  face  of  a  reclining  woman,  leaves  covering  closed  eyes:  "We  

Won't  Play  Nature  to  Your  Culture."  Kruger's  slogans  are  catchier  than  the  Holzer  truisms,  

and  less  ambiguous  in  their  intention  to  mock  and  provoke.  "What  Big  Muscles  You  Have!"  

reads  one.    And  on  the  silhouette  of  a  woman  bent  over  with  pins  sticking  in  her  all  down  her  

back:  "We  Have  Received  Orders  Not  to  Move."  Her  feminism  is  a  politics  of  the  "we"  and  the  

"you"  –  of  the  "we"  women  and  a  "you"  posited  as  a  conflation  of  men  and  the  image-­‐power  

of  advertising.            

In  the  1980s,  Kruger  enjoyed  -­‐-­‐  as  did  Cindy  Sherman  -­‐-­‐  the  acclaim  of  critics  like  

Craig  Owens,  who  saw  the  work  in  terms  of  contemporary  philosophical  paradigms  about  

power  and  spectacle.  For  instance,  in  Owens'  essay  "The  Medusa  Effect  or,  The  Spectacular  

Ruse,"  he  credits  Kruger's  appropriation  of  advertising  strategies  and  images  with  the  power  

to  disturb  mass  cultural  control  over  representation.  Citing  Roland  Barthes,  whose  book  on  

reading  mass  culture,  The  Fashion  System,  was  published  in  translation  in  the  United  States  

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in  1983,  Owens  proposes  Kruger  as  a  political  artist.  If  commercial  culture,  he  writes,  derives  

its  power  from  the  use  of  stereotypes  -­‐-­‐  and  gender  stereotypes  in  particular  -­‐-­‐,  then  a  

practice  that  intervened  in  the  automatic  acceptance  of  those  stereotypes  would  end  by  

exposing  the  secret  rule  of  the  ideology  that  spawned  them.  Kruger's  pointed  texts  and  re-­‐

presented  images  were  seen  as  creating  just  the  kind  of  distancing  between  the  eye  of  the  

beholder  and  the  seductive,  oppressive  stereotypes  of  advertising.                              

Kruger's  recent  work  continues  to  address  the  darker  side  of  advertising,  although  it  

is  not  clear  where  the  politics  of  appropriation  lead  to  in  the  nineties,  when  popular  culture  

and  advertising  are  themselves  more  self-­‐critical  and  diverse  than  they  were  ten  to  fifteen  

years  ago.  At  a  1996  exhibition  in  Melbourne,  Kruger  took  up  three  rooms  of  the  Heide  

Modern  Art  Museum  with  an  exhibit  that  included  an  audio  component.  On  the  walls  of  one  

of  the  rooms,  there  were  written  commands  whose  tone  was  restlessly  pleading  and  

dissatisfied:  "Don't  hate  me.  Don't  leave  me  alone.  Don't  kill  me.  Don't  be  a  jerk."  There  were  

questions:  "What  are  you  looking  at?    Why  are  you  here?  What  did  you  say?    Who  do  you  

think  you  are?"  Several  complex  photomontages,  again  in  black  and  white,  of  crowds  and  

larger  faces  also  figure  on  the  Heide  web  page  that  commemorates  the  exhibition.  "Hate  like  

us,"  reads  one.  "Look  like  us,"  reads  another.  Two  installations  in  New  York  during  the  

nineties  also  took  this  familiar,  confrontational  approach.  Drawing  on  the  style  and  strategy  

of  the  early  successful  work,  Kruger  seems  to  have  reacted  only  slightly  to  changes  in  the  

American  popular  and  intellectual  landscape.  Of  course,  it  is  not  possible  to  say  for  sure  

whether  Kruger's  perseverance  is  simply  a  lack  of  sensitivity  to  her  environment  or  if  it  

reflects,  on  the  contrary,  a  greater  sensitivity  to  the  persistence  of  a  static  ideological  

structure  beneath  what  only  seems  to  be  a  diversified  commercial  field.      

Cindy  Sherman,  who  graced  the  late  seventies  and  eighties  with  her  spectacular  

untitled  film  stills,  lent  glamour  and  nostalgia  to  the  discourse  of  feminist  appropriation.  

There  was,  first  of  all,  her  intriguing  use  of  herself  as  a  model.  To  understand  the  magic  of  

this,  it  is  necessary  to  view  her  work  in  groups  so  as  to  see  the  way  in  which  her  look  

changed  through  the  manipulation  of  light  and  makeup.  Her  photos  show  a  girl  or  a  woman,  

caught  in  a  moment  of  distraction,  the  fascination  of  her  presence  in  part  a  result  of  the  

implication  of  an  absent  narrative.  In  many,  she  has  the  look  of  a  starlet;  in  others,  she  takes  

on  a  full  range  of  lesser  feminine  characters:  the  career  girl,  the  housewife,  the  beaten  wife.    

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In  each  stylized  pose,  no  matter  if  she  appears  as  a  sexual  tease,  in  starlet  guise  -­‐-­‐  or  bruised,  

crying,  or  just  in  the  midst  of  daily  work  –  Sherman  recreates  herself  in  quotations,  the  irony  

of  her  "as  if"  a  commentary  on  the  construction  of  female  identity  through  media.  Often  

discussed  in  conjunction  with  Laura  Mulvey's  1973  article  on  Hollywood's  complicity  with  

male  voyeurism  and  fetishism,  Sherman's  film  stills  describe,  like  the  article,  the  

predicament  of  female  self-­‐representation.    

Sherman's  work  has  always  tended  towards  horror,  if  only  in  the  form  of  a  nostalgic  

citation  of  cinematic  conventions.  In  the  film  stills,  the  lone  female  figure  often  seems  

vulnerable  to  attack  -­‐-­‐  standing  waiting  by  the  side  of  a  road  (Untitled  Film  Still  #48.  1979);  

putting  up  her  collar  as  she  walks  alone  in  the  cold  (Untitled  Film  Still  #54.  1980);  or  

turning,  startled  and  frowning,  to  catch  the  gaze  of  the  viewer  in  Untitled  Film  Still  #63  

(1980).  Often,  she  has  the  spunky  or  distracted  look  of  a  girl  who  only  vaguely  senses  what  

the  audience  already  knows:  that  she  is  about  to  confront  some  lurking  threat.  When,  

beginning  in  the  early-­‐  to  mid-­‐eighties,  the  horror  became  explicit  in  Sherman's  work,  many  

fans  were  disappointed.    Instead  of  the  elegant,  mostly  black-­‐and-­‐white  stills,  in  1986-­‐90  

there  developed  a  steady  stream  of  bile  and  goo,  vomit,  decay,  obscene  sexual  dolls,  ominous  

fairy  tale  images,  and,  most  recently,  masks.    One  of  the  most  striking  works  is  an  extreme,  

golden  face  (Untitled  #327.  1995),  part  of  which  or  all  of  which  is  mask,  and  part  of  which  or  

all  of  which  is  synthetic.  The  gold  face  is  wide-­‐eyed,  wide-­‐mouthed,  and  seems  to  be  calling  

out  forcefully  rather  than  screaming.  More  masculine-­‐appearing  than  feminine,  and  more  

the  androgynous  cyborg  than  gendered  human,  it  has  the  look  of  a  strange  god  in  some  kind  

of  inexplicable  pain.  A  narrative  that  would  make  sense  of  its  pain,  however,  is  not  implied  

through  the  citation  of  cinematic  conventions  as  you  would  expect  in  the  earlier  work.  

Rather,  there  is  a  sense  of  new  pain,  illegible  within  a  fractured,  uncinematic  Real.    

To  Hal  Foster,  Sherman's  "disgust"  work  coincides  with  a  dominant  or  growing  sense  

of  the  real  defined  as  trauma.  However,  there  have  been  intermediate  steps.    One  shot  -­‐-­‐  in  

which  Sherman  appears  as  a  reflection  in  sunglasses  left  in  a  mess  of  things  and  goo  

(Untitled    #175.  1987)–  serves  to  link  the  disgust  work  with  the  early  film  stills.  In  a  sick  

blue  light,  you  see  something  like  a  beach  scene,  with  a  rumpled  towel,  dirty  hat,  and  various  

non-­‐specific  lumps  and  out-­‐of-­‐focus  shapes.  There  is  still  a  cinematic  quality  here,  but  the  

specificity  of  certain  repellent  details  and  the  particularity  of  the  bluish  light  hints  at  the  

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garish  quality  of  later,  even  more  vivid  shots.    Later,  her  vomit  scenes  lose  all  reference  

outside  of  their  own  fuzzy,  meaty,  or  semi-­‐liquid  material.  Ultimately,  in  Sherman's  work,  

horror  becomes  a  vivid  display  rather  than  a  suggestion  of  psychological  terrors  and  

(masculine)  things  lurking  outside  the  margins  of  the  camera's  frame.  The  mask-­‐work  and  

the  perverse  dolls,  too,  preserve  this  sense  of  the  indiscreet  and  of  confrontation,  presenting  

the  ugly  details  of  their  patched-­‐together  faces  and  bodies  as  if  relishing  their  absolute  

contradiction  of  idealized  femininity.  

Unlike  Holzer  and  Kruger,  Sherman's  later  work  forgoes  the  discourse  of  

appropriation-­‐as-­‐subversion  that  made  her  name  in  the  late  '70s  and  early  '80s.  However,  

Holzer  and  Kruger,  whose  present  work  does  not  differ  as  substantially  from  the  work  that  

made  them  famous  in  the  '80s  as  subversive  artists,  do  not  thereby  retain  this  status  in  the  

context  in  which  their  work  is  now  read.  This  is  not  to  say  that  at  least  Sherman  and  Holzer  

are  not  actively  engaged  in  the  most  critical  issues  of  today.  Kruger  may  only  be  repeating  a  

successful  formula  from  the  past  -­‐-­‐  but  Holzer,  who  has  also  recently  ventured  into  the  off-­‐

line  interactive  realm  of  virtual  reality  environments,  and  Sherman,  who  is  purportedly  in  

the  process  of  making  a  slasher  film  with  Miramax,  have  not  lost  any  of  their  early  nerve.  

Rather,  their  loss  of  subversive  impact  reflects  changes  in  American  culture,  changes  in  the  

relationship  between  culture  and  politics  -­‐-­‐  and  between  the  commercial  realms  of  

Hollywood  and  advertising  and  what  used  to  be  called  "alternative"  culture.  In  a  world  losing  

its  sense  of  the  mainstream,  ironic  quotation  of  genre  or  stereotype  can  no  longer  function  as  

salient  politics.  And,  in  a  world  in  which  everything,  including  politics,  is  aestheticized,  

rebellions  against  visual  fetishization  such  as  Sherman's  horror  and  disgust  art,  -­‐-­‐  and  also  

mourning  work  of  the  sort  that  Holzer  created  recently  in  Lustmord  and  Black  Garden  -­‐-­‐  

make  more  sense.    

At  the  end  of  a  century,  prognoses  for  historical  change  are  typically  grim.  At  the  end  

of  this  millennium,  prognosis  itself  seems  burnt  out  through  overuse  in  advertising  and  

journalism.  How  can  any  artist  hope  to  play  the  role  of  social  conscience  in  such  a  context?    

In  a  live  on-­‐line  interview  on  HotWired,  Holzer  was  asked  if  she  "had  anything"  short  enough  

for  a  license  place.  "I  would  love  to  share  a  truism  with  everyone  I  share  the  highway  with,"  

typed  the  visitor.  Holzer  answered  quickly.  "How  about  THE  FUTURE  IS  STUPID,"  she  typed,  

"  -­‐  sans  vowels?"  

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