It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender

Jenny Holzer

4 Responses to “It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender”

  1. Amy Says:

    Dang, I’ve meant to tell you this all week, but I think I did a cartoony double-take when I saw that you’d posted a Holzer photo (not to mention the one that used to be my desktop wallpaper).

  2. Ezra Says:

    My double-take of the week is only tangentially related to you: I walked through the editing area and saw “chthonic” was their word of the week!

  3. Ezra Says:

    Oh, and I’ve heard about Jenny Holzer first about 5 years ago (on a New Media group outing, no less) when I saw the LED installation of hers that’s on permanent display at the MFA, and I wondered where she had been all my life. I sat down on the floor and watched the entire cycle (I think all the LED shows all the truisms, and the survival series?) while everybody else was at the Van Gogh exhibit which we were ostensibly there for (it was Grady’s idea).

    I was also thinking about her today: “Your oldest fears are your worst ones”. Someone reported a bug in searching for “AT&T”. It’s the exact same bug someone reported to me in 1998, when I did the search engine at ZDNet. My oldest bugs are my best ones.

  4. Chthonic youth Says:

    The MFA’s LED display makes me very happy (if slightly headachy from the colors). I first learned of Holzer when I was in college — I bought a Truisms T-shirt at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (which is pretty unwearable now, but I’ve accumulated a couple of nice books, plus a set of pencils from the Survival Series and Truisms highball glasses) and did some library research to learn more. Her work has stayed interesting to me over the years (moreso than, say, Sandy Skoglund’s or Barbara Kruger’s). Maybe I should get a tattoo.

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