Coda: Feminist Precedents for text interventions
In their use of text for installations and as paper documents, both Dora Garcia and Tcakova and Chisa’s work bears comparison with Jenny Holzer’s Truisms series, started in 1977.
Janet Lyons in her book on Manifestos regards Jenny Holzer’s work as a prime example of a feminist manifesto as an artwork:
Jenny Holzer’s Truisms were originally arranged alphabetical as a list. She began the public showing of this work by pasting pieces of paper with different truisms on the streets, like “adverts” or broadsheets or a campagin. The piece was also presented in many different kinds of LED displays:- on Times Square electronic billboards and as installations using multiple LED strips, presented on staircases or as filling rooms in different museums. It has also been presented as large-scale light projections, as posters and in print formats.
The following quote, as well as presenting how the piece started, discusses the piece in terms of address: who is being addressed by this work? What is the voice or mandate being proclaimed?
Holzer began writing the “Truisms” while she was a student in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP) in New York. Many of the phrases originated from what she described in a 1985 interview as a “self-help maneuver”: her attempt to boil down each book on the program’s notoriously rigorous reading list into a one-liner, a way to “convey knowledge with less pain.”2 Holzer also composed an equal number of statements expressing positions at ideological odds with those derived from the critical theory that dominated the ISP’s curriculum. “There’d be left-wing ones, there’d be right-wing ones, there would be loony ones, there’d be heartland ones,” Holzer explained of the mix of phrases.3 Holzer’s aim was egalitarian: to translate complex theories into plain language. By giving each statement equal visual treatment and presenting them anonymously, she seemed to offer no judgment, instead inviting readers themselves to evaluate the ideas conveyed in this accessible, succinct way.
Leah Pires ‘Issues & Commentary: Truisms and Lies’ Art in America magazine Oct 1, 2018 https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/issues-commentary-truisms-lies/#fn2
Truisms is neither a long-form poem nor is it a novel. What does this collection of statements amount to? Many of its statements have been remade into posters, t-shirts, projections, as well as LED displays in different formats, scales and sizes.
As a collection, the ambiguity of who is being addressed and from what particular perspective is part of the appeal of the piece. Holzer herself suggested that developing this kind of anonymity was a means of fostering multiplicity, so that the statements could not be attributed to the 20-something female that she was in 1977.
How do Dora Garcia’s and Tkacova and Chisa’s works play with ambiguity in terms of address?
Do they gain strength because we can read them as “the artists’ voice?”
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