Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 14 Number 1, April 2013

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On the Materiality of Language in Jenny Holzer’s Work

by

Navjotika Kumar

Kent State University

Stillness and motion mark the deployment of language in Jenny Holzer’s work. These states of being reference the character of language as a lasting deposit, an indelible mark or inscription, as well as a perpetual flow and flux. They are realized in Holzer’s work through the display of language in mediums like stone and bronze that connote endurance and stasis and electronic and digital mediums associated with transience and mobility despite their capacity for storage. As manifest in these different mediums, language appears both as a palpably material, tangible embodiment and as an elusive, evanescent force. These contrasting modes of presentation imply fundamental differences in our relation to and experience of language, and of the imbrication of text and image. They raise questions about the extent to which changes in the materiality of language based on its deployment in static versus digital mediums imply shifts in modes of remembering or in constructs of memory, embodiment, and identity in the artist’s work. Thus, for instance, can this work, or its presentation of embodied versus digitized language, be viewed in terms of the functioning of the psychic or mental apparatus or, by extension, of the unconscious and consciousness by which this apparatus is constituted?

Writing in 1925, Freud proposed a model for the working of the unconscious and consciousness, or of the operation of memory, in his essay “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad.” He used this simple toy or device based on its capacity for both the endless reception and permanent retention of the marks inscribed upon it. Like the mind that has, as he noted, “an unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and nevertheless lays down permanent – even though not unalterable – memory-traces of them,” the Mystic Writing-Pad enabled its visualization, or was used to manifest the relationship between the perception-consciousness (Pcpt-Cs) system and the unconscious.[1] Thus, Freud likened the top-two layers of the pad consisting of a transparent sheet of celluloid overlaying a translucent wax paper to the Pcpt-Cs system. Since these layers could receive ever-new inscriptions and also be fully cleared of them when pulled away from the underlying wax-slab, they were analogous to the Pcpt-Cs system that likewise “receives perceptions but retains no permanent trace of them” and hence reacts “like a clean sheet to every new perception.”[2] Furthermore, the wax slab upon which the writing from these layers was etched and stored permanently was likened by Freud to the unconscious that he viewed as a timeless storehouse for the enduring preservation of traces of stimuli received by the Pcpt-Cs system.

In light of this model, mediums like stone and bronze that manifest the permanent inscription and retention of language from Holzer’s various series may be regarded as constituting the “foundations of memory”[3] in her work or, conversely, the aphorisms and other sayings they preserve as signifying the unconscious – indeed signifying it as a site or locale where “nothing is ever lost or destroyed,” that is “outside of time,” and “structured like a language.”[4] This function is implied by how regardless of their varied modes and venues of circulation the artist’s texts such as, for example, the truism “Protect me From What I Want,” may also be found embedded in enduring, static mediums. Thus, while this truism first appeared on the Spectacolor board in Times Square in New York City and on similarly temporary displays in other cities, as well as variously circulated over the years in more or less transitory mediums like baseball caps, t-shirts, condoms, sneakers, and a BMW art car, it is also permanently engraved on a marble bench. In this regard, it is noteworthy that crucial to Freud’s theorization of memory or the unconscious as the site of memory was, as Mary Ann Doane has noted, its “resolute materialism,” or the fact that “memory traces [were] conceptualized as an actual etching into a material.”[5] Hence, as Freud’s very specification of a stylus to inscribe the Mystic Writing-Pad suggests, not only was the forceful pressing and breaking through of a trace into a material substrate crucial to his conception of memory, but also the very resistance itself that was offered by the latter. This resistance as figured in the act of engraving is insistently offered by marble and bronze - mediums that, like the unconscious, must be cut into and that function in Holzer’s work to immobilize her otherwise free-floating sayings or to durably register and store them as lasting imprints. Moreover, suggestive too in this regard is the artist’s frequent strategy of juxtaposing her static, unchanging inscriptions with those she mobilizes electronically. Hence, as manifest, for example, in installations like “Laments” where engravings on marble sarcophagi are juxtaposed with texts moving in LED signs, or in “Under a Rock” where sayings on granite benches appear with those in LED signs, or in the famed “Guggenheim installation” where inscriptions on circularly arranged stone benches accompany the electronically circulating truisms on the spiraling ramps of the museum, her strategy of conjoining stasis and motion, the immutable and mutable recalls the relation of the unconscious and consciousness as imaged in the Mystic Writing-Pad. As in this device that entailed a periodic and discontinuous meeting of the layers that for Freud connoted the unconscious and consciousness, so too in these installations there is often contact between the persistent, unchanging surfaces of inscribed stone and the passing reflections cast upon them by texts continually moving or appearing and disappearing in the accompanying LED signs. Evocative of the working of consciousness that was deemed by Freud as “the site of all that is transitory, in flux, impermanent,” Holzer’s moving and reflective electronic texts have a different character and function then than those set in stone for purposes of permanent retention.[6]

The association of enduring inscriptions in tactile mediums like stone with the unconscious, or with the function and site of memory, is powerfully demonstrated in our time by Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, D.C (1982). As with memorials in general which “tend to emphasize texts or lists of the dead,” or foreground “the lives lost,” this one too inscribes all the names of the war dead and those missing in action on two walls of black granite whose highly reflective, mirror-like, surface has been likened by Margaret Iversen to the celluloid surface of Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad.[7] Meeting at a 125-degree angle at an approximate height of ten feet and gradually tapering from their vertex towards the Washington and Lincoln Memorials, these walls were designed by the artist to “allow visitors the chance to see themselves with the names.”[8] In so doing, or by reflecting visitors, clouds, skies, the Washington Memorial, the surrounding grounds, and the ever-changing scene, they “might be thought to figure consciousness” which too manifests the constant “flickering-up and passing away” of stimuli. In contrast, as Iversen notes, “the indelible, opaque names correspond to the marks on the wax slab” of Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad. As such, the Memorial is “a figuration of these two systems superimposed” so that even as its reflective surfaces render it associable with the flux of consciousness, the names etched into them represent, through their permanence and stasis, “perpetual memory held in active consciousness.”[9]

That this memorial serves then as “a sort of national gravestone” where the public can remember and commune with those lost is evident from how its base routinely gathers all types of mementos, flowers, small flags, and letters to the dead whose inscribed names, moreover, many visitors often touch, caress, and trace over to take away as relics. It is, however, the space itself created by the layout and conception of the Memorial that further reinforces how it positions viewers to experience its embodied inscriptions as the site of enduring memory. Embedded within the earth in a V-shape, it is “analogous to a book,” according to the artist.[10] Invisible from a distance, and often encountered unexpectedly, it nevertheless “demands that you enter into its space or miss it altogether.”[11] This space which speaks to its viewers through what Lin has called “pages” that unfold from the central axis where the two walls meet, or from what she likens to a “spine … in a book,” is one whose intimacy is accentuated by her use of an unprecedentedly small text type “less than half an inch” for the over 58,000 names etched into the walls. While this small scale engenders a “very intimate reading in a very public space,” the names themselves focus attention on the individual lives lost.[12] Given that an important aim of the Memorial for Lin, no less for the Veterans who commissioned it, was that it remain apolitical, the focus on individuals not only ensured this but the “use of names [became] a way to bring back everything someone could remember about a person.” That is, rather than depend on an object or image for purposes of remembrance, the artist was drawn to “the strength in a name,” or its ability to “bring back every single memory you have of that person.” Deeming it capable of producing a more “realistic,” “specific” and “comprehensive” memory of an individual than a photograph that merely “captures a specific moment in time or a single event or a generalized image that may or may not be moving for all who have connections to that time,”[13] Lin’s use of names, of words etched in stone, had to do with her conception of them as an “interface” between “two worlds, one which we are a part of and one we cannot enter.” [14]

As an interface that mediates between these worlds – be it worlds of the living and the dead or of consciousness and the unconscious – the names on the wall were used by the artist to enable a process of remembering and mourning, of acknowledging and accepting death and loss. In fact, their very placement or chronological listing by year of death was crucial to this goal in so far as it provided symbolic closure for a war that had neither an official beginning nor end. Thus, at the intersection of the walls, on the top of the right one, were incised the names of those who died first in 1959, and on the bottom of the left one of those who died last in 1975. This chronological bracketing was not meant, however, to enforce a linear or sequential mode of reading the story of the war or the names. On the contrary, such a reading is thwarted by how language is rendered fluid by shiny granite surfaces that superimpose it upon reflections of viewers, no less by how the Memorial begins not at “the two tips at which one necessarily enters into its space,” but instead at the intersection of the walls.[15] This unusual arrangement entails a reading directionality that proceeds from this intersection along the right wall and then invisibly loops through the earth and resumes at the end of the left wall only to move back again towards the vertex of the walls. Constituting a virtual “narrative circle,” this directionality has the effect of at once disturbing the unidirectional mode of reading mandated by a book and yet of preserving its experience of language in so far as this is marked by a sense of containment and closure.[16] 

It is precisely this sense of containment and closure, or association with the structure of a book and the linearity of its mode of reading that is challenged by the proliferation of language in Jenny Holzer’s work. Instead of offering a predictable directionality of reading, this work often situates viewers in all-encompassing environments as manifest, for instance, in Mother and Child (1990) where electronically and digitally mobilized texts co-exist with those inscribed on marble floors. Featured at the Venice Biennial in 1990, this installation occupied four chambers at the American Pavilion. Whereas the first and second antechambers consisted of diamond-patterned marble floors and benches inscribed with sayings from Holzer’s series like “Truisms,” “Inflammatory Essays,” and “Child Text,” the other two chambers displayed electronically mobilized texts from the same series in combination, at least in one of the rooms, with texts inscribed on a marble floor. Bathed in an intense orange-hued light, and brightly aglow by language moving in different colors, both these chambers were replete with spatial ambiguities generated by kinetic reflections that seemed to open up and disappear into the floor. While the resultant effect of disorientation was heightened in the chamber called the “Last Room” by digital texts in various foreign languages, it was palpable as well in the “The Child Room,” where mobilized sayings from “Child Text” superimposed upon, indeed seemed to break through and disappear into those inscribed into a highly polished marble floor. Akin to Lin’s Memorial where shifting reflections moving upon and seemingly penetrating into the resistant substrate of the shiny granite walls evoke the relation of consciousness and the unconscious, in this room too the play of mobile stimuli passing over and through an enduring, inscribed, surface may be viewed in similar terms, or those offered by the Mystic Writing-Pad. Only in this room, not only were the texts of a different character than the names on Lin’s Memorial, but also it was mobile words rather than shifting images that fell upon and coursed through the bedrock of static language. Rather than suggest, however, an opposition of word and image, this installation, like others shown by the artist in Chicago (2007), Berlin (2001), and Moscow (2008), seems to transpose their characteristics in a way that recalls that they were, as Michel Thévoz, has noted, indistinguishable “at the dawn of humanity.”[17] The interchange between them occurs in these installations based on how Holzer transposes the attributes typically associable with an image upon her words or, conversely, renders her words visual. The intimate relation of words to the visual is attested no doubt by pictographs but also by the very way that writing, or what Walter Ong claims is “the most momentous of all human technological inventions,” serves to move “speech from the oral-aural to a new sensory world, that of vision.”[18] It is the attributes of this sensory world of vision that are used by Holzer to transform her words into veritable images. Thus, through her use of motion, color, light, tonality, brightness, and reflections, no less her considerations of scale, space, and font type, she presents her work not merely as texts, but as text-as-image. That the visuality of her work, moreover, exceeds simply optical or retinal stimulation and impacts viewers’ entire bodies in a phenomenological surround is confirmed by how they are often drawn to physically experience language, or even to lie down and bask in its glow as at the Berlin installation. Mounted on the ceiling and seeming to course beyond the Neue Nationalgalerie’s architectural frame and into infinity, language here, as in the Chicago installation where it moved across the floor and apparently through the gallery’s walls on conveyor-like LEDs, entails being read as it slowly slips by or speeds away. Rather than require focusing solely on its content, it addresses viewers visually but also carnally as words and texts move about, surround, hit, and pass through their bodies. If, as Thévoz has proposed, “the history of writing is the history of normalization,” of “regimentation and repression,” given that its relation to the body has been repressed through its steady standardization “by typography, photocomposition and finally computer digitalization,” then in these installations it is this relationship which comes to the fore.[19]

Yet, even as these installations foreground the relation of body and language it is to produce a loss of control, a radical destabilization of viewers. Immersed within a matrix of shifting reflections, colors, and light that as much distort space as seemingly give it amplitude and intonation, viewers are confronted with trajectories of moving words and messages that they can neither fully process nor remember. Prone to a feeling of information overload, they are in fact intended by the artist to experience a sense of “vertigo.”[20] In so far as this word connotes a bodily sensation of dizziness, or of being out of balance, and also the spinning of one’s surroundings, it aptly suggests how viewers’ bodies are positioned in relation to language in a veritable hyperspace. As described by Fredric Jameson such a space, evocative of the abstract and difficult to imagine “world space of multinational capital” and vast global communication networks, is one where “clear coordinates are lost or ambiguous, so that the position of the subject is always unclear.”[21] Characterized by “groundlessness,”[22] it collapses “critical distance” or the ability of the subject to occupy a stable and locatable vantage from where to make sense of its environs.[23]

While positioned thus in relation to Holzer’s flows of electronic and digital words - a positioning implied too in her Moscow installation comprised of twenty-two, double-sided, semi-circular, pink and purple LED signs that circulate sayings from her various series – viewers’ experience of her texts in static mediums suggests a different relation to language and memory. Hence, as in Lin’s Memorial, Holzer’s inscriptions in stone are, as the artist notes, “absolutely available” to viewers or persist over time and can always be returned to.[24] Their stability is akin to that of a book or a body each of which is, as Katherine Hayles has observed, a form of “information transmission and storage that incorporates its encodings in a durable material substrate.”[25] Just as it is not easy to change the information printed in a book or genetically encoded in a body once it has been materially inscribed, so too language set in stone or other enduring mediums is not malleable or changeable like that which can be programmed in Holzer’s LEDs. As such, the stability of this language, language that has a “resistant materiality,”[26] tends to induce “a view of ideas as fixed and permanent [so that] this Platonic sense of the permanence of ideas is reflected in the mind itself, whose flux is stabilized and focused as a result.”[27] Consequently, its experience, like that of a book, is contemplative and meditative given that it “fosters a sense of mental privacy in which the individual mind is felt to be the locus where ideas originate” and “individual contemplation [a] means of gaining access to ideas that are regarded as transcendent truths.”[28]

     In striking contrast, viewers destabilized in Holzer’s hyperspace by the onrush of electronic and digital language are compelled to recognize it as malleable and manipulative: rather than coalescing around or revealing transcendental truths it constructs subjects through a perpetual babel of voices. This recognition is facilitated by her very use of digital media whose fundamental characteristic, as Lev Manovich has noted, is its constant changeability, variability, or “programmability.”[29] Given that it is by “nature a numerical representation in that all information is represented in a 0-1 digital code,” this media, indeed all media including language and images that are represented through it are transcoded alike into the format of binary numbers and thereby made infinitely manipulable.[30] The implications of this for the relation of word and image are of course remarkable in so far as both become closely aligned by their mutual transformation into so much data or computer code and, furthermore, by the translation of the image into text which now functions both as “one media type among others,” and also as “a metalanguage of computer media, a code in which all other media are represented.”[31] Thus, at one level, numerically mediated to exist “as a computer file that consists of a machine-readable header, followed by numbers representing color values of its pixels,” the image “enters into dialog with other computer files”[32] in terms of its “size, file type, type of composition, file format and so on[33] On another level, it becomes accessible through “so-called natural language, which is addressed to humans,”[34] rather than being computer code, and that then represents it in the user-friendly terms of  “content, meanings, or formal qualities.”[35] In this regard, Holzer’s production of the text-as-image noted previously implies an even more thoroughgoing imbrication of the two than that suggested by her imbuing of her digital texts with the qualities associable with images like colors, tonality, light and reflections. Inherent to this production that relies on the use of LEDs to generate these latter qualities and to continually program texts from her different series to variously conjoin and circulate, is the structural oneness of both linguistic and visual signifiers, of word and image, when transformed alike into computer code. Known to underlie all “computer-mediated communication,”[36] and the digitization of all media, this code is key to the “computerization of culture.”[37] Invisibly underlying the seamless flow of language it is notoriously difficult to decipher even by programmers and “inaccessible to most people.”[38] It is deemed by Hayles as the “unconscious of language” in that it is pervasive but manifest only when the “easy flow of writing and reading human-only languages on computers” is interrupted by its sudden emergence to correct spelling and other errors or to make “decisions we have not consciously initiated.”[39]

As such, the malleable materiality of computer-coded or programmable language accentuates the inherent propensity of language to flow, to exist fluidly, or to move, circulate, and connect. It enables language to readily and variously branch and associate so as to potentially exist in an ever-expanding, non-hierarchical, and non-linear network, or as a hypertext that viewers can enter at any point and roam at will through interconnecting nodes and links. In likewise allowing texts from her various series to freely co-exist or associate in an installation, Holzer’s digitization of language marks a paradigmatic shift in the conception of memory and the unconscious signified by her use of mediums like stone and bronze. Representing a wholly different site or locus than connoted by these latter mediums, or endowed unlike them with a potentially infinite capacity to receive and retain language, the virtual space constituted by her digital texts and the polymorphous networking of their cacophonous voices engender a type of memory, an electronic or digital unconscious, that is wholly “external to humans.”[40] Thus, unlike the Mystic Writing-Pad that posed certain difficulties for Freud in that it constituted, as Doane has observed, “a finite space” or one that would soon “fill up,” the space generated by language liberated from a palpable material substrate, realizes his “desire to think both [the pad’s] receptive layer and the retentive layer as infinite spaces”[41] or, by extension, the unconscious as a “space of unlimited storage,” a space that is “thinkable but not localizable.[42]

That such a placeless place is effectively conjured in Holzer’s work by the example of a database, or what is “becoming a if not the dominant cultural form of our times,” is due to the way her electronically and digitally mediated texts seem to organize and become accessible to viewers.[43] In this regard in a database or what is a “container of information,”[44] everything is stored “as a list or collection without any dominant order”[45] and is “continually being sorted and assembled together” in response to the needs of particular users.[46] Likewise, in the virtual space of Holzer’s digitized texts there is no hierarchy amongst them or in how they are selected, linked, displayed, and shuffled. Moreover, their reshuffling or shifting assemblage of contradictory messages seems responsive, indeed addresses and yields insight into the presumed psychic make-up of her viewers. Comprised of a seemingly open-ended listing or collection of received ideas, or of clashing injunctions, certitudes, insinuations, and judgments, these apparently anonymous messages more than intimate the possibility of wandering non-sequentially within the “horizonless conceptual space”[47] of hypertext, or even conjuring the “verbal life of the human race as one continuous, anonymous code without essential reference to a human presence behind it, which [either] feels it must answer to anyone [or] necessarily awaits an answer from anyone.”[48] Thrust amidst these messages in a Holzer installation without “any clear axes or established directions [or] vanishing points to help position”[49] them, or to allow them to step back and “conceptualize a vision of the whole,”[50] viewers must confront and negotiate their relation to a panoply of what Mikhail Bakhtin termed “authoritative” and “innerly persuasive” discourses.[51] While the former was regarded by him as representing all those voices that are “inherited and unquestionable,” that demand “unconditional allegiance”[52] - voices from one’s culture, tradition, family and other social forces and entities that constitute the milieu in which one grows up – the latter was deemed to consist of “other people’s voices that we have learned” or “assimilated to the point where [they are] ‘half-ours and half-someone else’s’.”[53] As such, innerly persuasive voices are really authoritative voices that have been re-accented, reworked, and reabsorbed. They manifest not only a vitiation of the “absolute authority”[54] of authoritative discourses but also how the “interaction and dialogue [of the two] shape the history of the psyche and the development of the self.” [55] It is this dialogic interaction, or intense struggle as their matrix of words enters “a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments, and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet [others],” that is evoked in the polyphony of Holzer’s texts.[56] Hence, for example, in the clash of disparate voices listed alphabetically in her Truisms – voices that can as much assert, “you must disagree with authority figures” as “absolute submission can be a form of freedom” – or, in the varied tonalities of paranoia, anxiety, apocalyptic fervor, retributive vengeance, moral outrage, revolutionary zeal and so forth in passages from her “Inflammatory Essays,” the psyche and self are revealed as constituted, or ideologically positioned, by the “coercion that is usually hidden in language.”[57] Thus, inherent in the multiple viewpoints, positions, values, and attitudes expressed by the artist’s sayings is a recognition of both as an effect of the rifts and tensions within inner speech that is really in fact authoritative discourse or “outer speech that we have learned to perform in our heads.”[58] Just as much as the latter can be weakened by “giving it a new aura, developing new meanings in it, placing it in dialogue with another voice that it may adumbrate as its antagonist or [by] entirely distorting it,” so too Holzer’s work shows that the former can be distanced and re-inflected at least when its contesting axioms are placed in a constant albeit unresolved or ever-open play for hegemony.[59]        

This positing of inner voices and the truths they encode as “open,” “not finite” or capable of “ever newer ways to mean,” is demonstrated by Holzer’s creation of an online website “adaweb.com” that allows anyone to access her truisms, make changes to them or propose alternatives which are then incorporated in alphabetical order as a part of them.[60] By bestowing upon viewers the agency to change their relation to language through re-writing or recoding the truths embodied in her aphorisms, this website attests to the dialogic dimension of her practice. Like the varied intonations of so much of her writing that create “a kind of portrait in sound of the addressee to whom” she is speaking, the give-and-take instituted by this website images viewers as collaborators in re-configuring the cultural truths, fears, and paranoia encompassed by her sayings.[61] By allowing their “plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness”[62] to co-exist and re-accent those that it articulates, the website evinces more than just how an utterance  “is never originary.”[63] That is, just as the artist’s sayings themselves are wrought from her encounters over the years with diverse voices – voices exemplified in her enumeration, for instance, of influential writers, amongst them, William Blake, Samuel Beckett, Emily Bronte, Rosa Luxembourg, to name just a few - so too viewers’ responses on her website are shaped by hers. In other words, these responses exemplify how an utterance “is always an answer to another utterance that precedes it,” and as such is both conditioned by it as well as qualifies it, no less shapes the one to come.[64] Based on its positioning then as always unfinished, as capable of growing and changing “in response…to other innerly persuasive voices,” the website posits too that selfhood “is not a particular voice within but a particular way of combining many voices within,” and that the unconscious itself, the seemingly indelible signifiers that comprise it, is changeable rather than fixed as suggested by the artist’s language inscribed in static materials like stone.[65] 

In so far as it enables this recognition through a collective transformation where credit for individual contributions, or the private ownership of and relation to language, is superseded by a sense of jointly transforming its premises, Holzer’s website, indeed her work as such, manifests, as Hal Foster has noted, “that meaning is a rhetorical construction of will more than a Platonic apprehension of an idea – that, however directed toward truth, it is finally based on power.”[66] In so doing, or bringing to the fore viewers’ own insertion and entanglement in language and the means to change it, the work also undermines the author-function or presence within it of an identifiable, unified, singular entity whose creation it is. Attested to by the multiplicity of contradictory voices the artist’s sayings encode or, conversely, by the impossibility of identifying these with a consistent, self-same, persona whose positions they exemplify, this erosion of authorship and its implications for the malleability of psyche and self become clearer in light of the subject-effect of language that is both materialized in an enduring medium and yet also continually re-materialized in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ portraits of couples and institutions.

These portraits, such as, for example, Untitled (Portrait of the Wongs), 1991, or Untitled (Portrait of the Stillpasses), 1991, are painted, respectively, on the inner and outer walls of the owners’ homes or, as in the case of the artist’s own self-portrait, Untitled, 1989, at various museums. They typically flow around the perimeter of a room or building and are comprised of the significant personal events and dates in a couple, individual, or institution’s life interspersed with important public events and dates inserted by the artist. Resulting from a close collaboration, a dialogue, between him and his patrons, these language portraits are neither disrupted by any punctuation nor organized chronologically. While embodying the remembrance of key private moments as these intersect with important public ones, they image the drift and flow of memory as it unfolds not linearly but selectively or in a way that is full of gaps and reversals that reveal the valence and registration of indelible impressions. A key aspect of these portraits is the “certificate of authenticity” that accompanies each and allows their owners to change them – or the moments and events they recollect - over time and as needed. In thus permitting the “original” portrait that resulted from his collaboration with his patron to be changed and erased over the years, the artist relinquishes his author function as a portraitist. In doing so, he empowers the portrait’s owners to reconfigure and re-member themselves or, by extension, to regard self-identity not as permanent, fixed, and unchanging but rather as malleable as the language that they (re) materialize to re-construct it. Thus, even though seemingly still and embedded within the architectural schema, these portraits attest to how apparently fixed self conceptions and truisms can be infinitely modified. They place the onus for this modification upon their owners and compel them to re-think the very idea of self as constituted within language. In this regard, Feliz Gonzalez-Torres once noted:

When we think who we are, we usually think of a unified subject. In the present. An inimitable entity. This is a mistake that happens, according to Lacan, during our misconception when we at a very tender age discover our image in a mirror “the mirror stage”, and think of ourselves as one a-historical phenomenon. We are not what we think we are, but rather a compilation of texts. A compliation of histories, past, present, and future, always, always shifting, adding, subtracting, gaining.[67]

This dispersion and continual fluxion of the subject is also implied in the work of Jenny Holzer regardless of whether the multiplicity of texts that constitute it appear in static or fluid mediums. Whether physicalized in stone or mobilized in electronic and digital mediums, these texts are ultimately representative of the site which is their ultimate locus: the psychic space of whoever encounters them. Regardless of their preservation in traditionally enduring mediums with a limited storage capacity, or newer ones like databases (and iPads) with a potentially infinite reception and retention capacity, their subsistence is always omnipresent and virtual. Captured in Holzer’s more recent Xenon projections on the facades of buildings, within their interiors, and upon various natural landscapes, their virtual presence is shown to violently disfigure, destabilize, and hold these structures hostage and yet also to be morphed itself in the process. Hence, as suggested by its very impenetrability, or the temporary, surface-play of immaterialized words projected on material, enduring, surfaces that in turn distort and refigure them - and by Holzer’s practice as such - the ideas, indeed the psyche and self, reified by language remain always open to dissolution and reformulation.