“Being Alone with Yourself is Increasingly Unpopular”: The Electronic Poetry of Jenny Holzer Leisha Jones (bio) Internationally renowned visual artist Jenny Holzer has built a storied career appropriating, writing, moving, and projecting text toward both poetic and political ends. She has famously repurposed the advertiser’s text scroll, marquee, billboard, and building surface to engage mass forms of communication in the service of art. Working in and through ‘found’ art practices made famous by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Sherry Levine’s appropriations, Holzer re-invents the postmodern sign as ad-poem or public aphorism through text grafts, ranging from the philosophical to the mundane. In her text scrolls, projections, and web works, Holzer dissects the language of the cultural mandate in midair, challenging the weighty dominance of word on page toward a surface of pixel and speed. She also interrogates site-specific locales by literally reshaping them in texts, layering official repositories of history under the contradictory stories of individuals. Holzer’s primary strategy of appropriation, both of form and of content, offers a feminist corrective for the marginal and the margin by recontextualizing and foregrounding noncanonical voices in public institutional spaces. This essay examines the lineage of Holzer as a hybrid producer of electronic literature, and investigates the morphology of her most enduring work, Truisms, in light of the electronic literature genre. While some of Holzer’s work falls outside the parameters of this “born-digital” oeuvre,1 I argue that versions of her Truisms series produce [End Page 423] some of the same effects on readers or viewers as their generated for the screen counterparts, such as the experience of text as object, the semiotic fluidity of words in LED motion, the decentering of language as a tool for chronological communication, and a schizophrenia of the ever-present in which the flow of information in the timeless space of the virtual continually exceeds practices of meaning-making. The technological forms Truisms takes across the span of Holzer’s more than 40-year career also chart her development as an electronic artist and writer. She morphs Truisms from paper flyer to LED text scroll to xenon projection to interactive webwork, and with each incarnation Truisms is born anew. Holzer introduced game-changing technologies to reanimate Truisms, with kinetic LED signs in 1982 and xenon projectors in 1996 (Schindler). According to an Art in America review of Holzer’s 15-year retrospective For Chicago, in 2008, she “increased the agility of her art, and over the years she has been able to accelerate and slow the words’ delivery with increasing precision, opening up a playful range of speed and pattern for writing that is often dark and angry” (Obourn). While the origins of Truisms may not strictly adhere to the born-digital criterion necessitated by the genre of electronic literature, the digital milieu and continued innovation of electronic work sustained over the course of Holzer’s career situates it in the emerging canon of electronic literature. Like other literary genre canons, electronic literature has key foundational works that are critically acclaimed and meet the born-digital mandate. It may seem odd to turn toward a contested holdover such as a ‘canon’ in a time when feminist, critical race, and sexuality scholars have all but disintegrated this old hierarchy of white men and token others (in theory more so than practice), but it is precisely this hangover of organized and recognized excellence that can function to familiarize and legitimize the new genre of electronic literature’s cultural and academic purchase. As such, the addition of Holzer’s Truisms to the literary category of experimental women writers, specifically as part of the history of electronic literature, reveals the nexus between the worlds of visual art and literature. “A Sense of Timing is the Mark of Genius”—Introductions Jenny Holzer’s art is exhibited and collected all over the world in places like Berlin, London, Basel, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, and Istanbul. Her [End Page 424] works are featured on the Museum of Modern Art’s website and in their collection, and lauded by venerable art critic Roberta Smith as “singular, consistent, and relevant . . . and influential.” Truisms and Inflammatory Essays, 1979...
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