ABSTRACT
When the New York artist Jenny Holzer first infiltrated the city and the visual field of urbanites, it was with banal sayings like “Abuse of Power Should Come As No Surprise,” “Money Creates Taste,” and “People Are Nuts If They Think They Control Their Lives.” It was not the art audience she wanted to reach with her posters and subsequently with texts displayed on electronic signboards but, on the contrary, the disinterested people of everyday existence. Holzer wanted people to stop short while they were walking capriciously through the streets of Manhattan or elbowing their way through the crowds at Times Square. With her so-called Truisms Holzer wished to catch people’s attention while they were waiting for the last train or at the moment they were grabbing their luggage in the transit zone of the airport to rush out into the metropolis. Some of The Truisms sounded like slogans from an ultra-conservative politician or doomsday prophecies in ad-man’s phrases, others like well-worn folksy proverbs or the critical, sardonic statements of revolutionary minorities. On the face of it, Holzer’s Truisms seemed all the more puzzling because the mutually independent sentences were always reproduced in clusters, so that a polyphony of different voices would emerge, a polyphony that excluded the possibility of tracing the messages back to a single author. Moreover, the mutual differences or downright incompatibility of the statements undermined the notion that speech is a medium for truth. As the American philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto has pointed out, Holzer’s fusion of text and image raises issues concerning truth and falsity in ways that are pertinent to the field of rhetoric and poetry rather than to the field of illusionism in the visual arts. 1
