Projections and Protections

LED signboards have become a signature material for Jenny Holzer - an artistic means of disseminating a message in a public forum and provoking a response in viewers. LEDs allow Holzer to convey her subversive messages whether its describing torture, or lamenting death and disease.

Her work sometimes blends in among advertisements in public space but it definitely doesn't go unnoticed. Sometimes you wish it was like a show where the announcer warn you of the strobe lights to lessen the shock - but regardless the message sinks in.

Since the late seventies, she has been working in the street and in public buildings, using media from LED displays to posters and stickers applied to telephone booths or parking meters, that enable her work to blend in the landscape. Text functions as social commentary on that environment they fit into, stimulating awareness of our social conditioning conveyed in the very environments and media in which we may be confronted by them.

As a communications professional I find her work extremely interesting - I find it speaks to the adage coined by Marshall McLuhan that the medium is the message. Like McLuhan Holzer tasks herself with understanding the effects of technology as it related to popular culture, and how this in turn affected human beings and their relations with one another in communities.

Holzer's work has been shown worldwide in prominent institutions and last week the Whitney Museum in New York opened a survey of her latest work. The exhibit is well worth your $15 admission and runs through May 31st.