Television Texts

“Abuse of Power comes as no surprise.” With this sentence the video »Television Texts« by U.S. artist Jenny Holzer begins. In red letters on a black background, the sentence fragments appear one after the other and are spoken simultaneously by a computer-generated male voice. In the process, the letters move dynamically toward a vanishing point, as though they are being sucked in by the television. The messages, sometimes flying in from the right or left, are in different fonts and separated from each other by the noise of the TV picture.

Holzer’s »Television Texts« are neither advertising nor teletext. The messages come from different series of works, but they are all based on her earliest and most famous work – the Truisms. This series of works consists of a total of three hundred truisms. The artist collected aphorisms such as “Men don’t protect you anymore” and disseminated them in public spaces from 1979 onwards using various media. Most famous of all is her use of the LED billboard in New York’s Times Square in 1982.

In »Television Texts«, Holzer appropriates mass media strategies to reach large audiences perceived as passive. With messages revolving around issues such as politics, gender, sexuality, and power, she hopes to encourage mass audiences to think for themselves instead of blindly trusting the content being broadcast. The formal appearance of the typeface reinforces the power of the language, so that the »Television Texts« move between expressive messages and hypnotic visualization.