Visiting The Tate, I came across Jenny Holzer’s work, which is about the art movement dubbed “Appropriation”. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, the movement was becoming more and more prevalent. Though diverse, Appropriation includes repurposing images that are already created for a different artistic purpose or playing with the way art is communicated, which is seen as Nirvana used Holzer’s work in the image below;
Artist Jenny Holzer was fascinated with the latter, including the ways that large institutions aggressively advertise. Her collection of work called Truisms appropriates the large-scale “language” and medium of most advertisements. Holzer would take a one-line aphorism and place it somewhere in the public eye where one would usually expect to see an advertisement, such as billboards and theater marquees. In 1982 she obtained permission to use what was then the Spectacolor Board in Times Square and broadcasted snappy remarks such as “Private property created crime”, “Men Don’t Protect You Anymore”, and, in wonderfully ironic fashion, “Protect me from what I want.”
I’ve been looking more into Jenny Holzer’s way of advertising her messages after my visit a couple of weeks ago, and what exactly they’re saying. The ones that caught my eye were: “Men Don’t Protect You Anymore”, which were interestingly advertised onto condoms and cups at The Tate, which made me think about the meaning behind using contraception and how the cups could perhaps signify a ‘date rape’ theme, and “If You Are Considered Useless No One Will Feed You Anymore”, as well as “I Am Not Free Because I Can Be Exploded At Anytime”, which I think correlates with my theme of eating on camera in an ironic way, because I will be feeding myself but for the pleasure of someone else. The explosion will mean different things to my work, as I could go down the route of how eating as a “smaller person” could lead to binge-eating and unhealthy eating, as the articles I found at the beginning said.
saratrouble 