(link)
The struggle to find new ways to flaunt text, to sediment it as a thing, transactable. at least instagrammable. Holzer's mimicking the advertorial strategy, of programmatic infiltration into, its ability to evolve new forms of advertising, ways to address you. "The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces." And Holzer has for years developed a rainbow of means to do so blinking. The recent resurgence along with Kruger as a voice and means for political activism - which, activism understandably, needs little in the way of grey area - seem odd. Holzer truisms had seemed almost koan like in their ability to use a sentence as a slogan to defeat sense. A protest sign must almost violently means what it means. It never really felt as though we were supposed to believe in what the truisms were saying, their rapid fire semantic blugeon and mass strategies seemed to exist as a question of how we were left to interpret something so explicit already telling us something. Now it seems in our political moment we are asked to maybe ask and believe in their bludgeon. Or maybe we've just been conditioned to not trust any text in public.
See too: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein