Holzer

Jenny Holzer
Lustmord, 1993 - 1994
ink on skin, Cibachrome print

Jenny Holzer is one of the most distinguished contemporary American artists. Her installations and texts disturb and provoke the public as only few works by her contemporaries do. Over the last twenty years, she has written eleven series of texts: Truisms, Inflammatory Essays, Living, Survival, Under a Rock, Laments, Mother and Child, War, Lustmord, Erlauf and Arno. The texts were presented in public places in American and European cities and in major world museums of contemporary art. Her installations are a result of a plethora of different influences, from advertising neon signs to minimalist surfaces and industrial aesthetics. Her environment is the public space, while her main themes are death, sex and war, although not necessarily in this order.

Lustmord is a turning point in Jenny Holzer's creativity, because this was the first time that the artist used the human body as a tool of expression. Nevertheless, the work is not based on the conventional principle of body art, but, according to Renata Salecl, it is "an expression of contemporary disbelief in the authority or power." In the Lustmord project, there is no authority, which would help us understand the logic of rape. Because of the absence of the subject's identity we reach a point where the subject decides his/her destiny/story on his/her own, although all he/she has to rely on is his/her skin. But Holzer complicates our perception of rape even more, taking it even further: the statements are written from three different points of view - that of the victim, the observer and the rapist, respectively.

Bojana Piškur

(from the catalogue The Art of Eastern Europe. A Selection of Works for the International and National Collections of Moderna galerija Ljubljana, Innsbruck, 2001