Public Art Conference Archive—2004

Public Art Network Award Presented to Artist Jenny Holzer
"Public Art Beats War"

Marc Pally, artist and PAN Council Member, presented the 2004 Public Art Network Award to Jenny Holzer during the Public Art Network Luncheon on Friday, July 16, 2004. His touching presentation was accompanied by slides and video of the artist’s work. The following is a transcript of Marc’s presentation:

“Jenny Holzer’s current exhibition, Truth Before Power, in Bregenz, Austria includes a number of public site-specific installations. The site of her project’s focus is our planet earth and the specifics are its future viewed through the lens of United States Middle East foreign policy. Texts taken from CIA documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, poems by Henri Cole and Holzer’s original writing were projected onto the glass façade of an art museum, a castle, a dam and riverside palisades.

Taking that which is private, or even secret, and making it public goes to the heart of Holzer’s art. Jenny Holzer’s career is unique in American culture–her work bridges the speed and accessibility of mass culture with the idealism and complexity characteristic of fine art. From her earliest days in the late 1970s as a member of the artist collective CoLab, Jenny envisioned an art practice and a public without boundaries. To that end, she makes art that finds a home in both the sanctified spaces of museums as well as on t-shirts, telephone call boxes, websites, and all manner of public surfaces and spaces. Her earliest public works included the paradigmatic “Truism” series that became familiar imagery in myriad sites throughout the world and offered a caustic alternative public voice to the onslaught of commercial directives that define our media/social order. Her sly adaptation of the “message” lubricates a luscious ambiguity of author, authority and meaning.

We are honoring Jenny Holzer for honoring us. Her art honors our intelligence by being intelligent. It honors our capacity to think critically and broadly; it honors our capacity to embrace and decode contradictions. Jenny’s base may be the art world but her audience and stage are ever expanding. She creates her work as though the world were a town hall and she the editor of its global bulletin board, sending out messages of hope, dismay, recognition and confusion.

Jenny’s is a visual art that we hear and speak, hers is the resistant and celebratory voice of Tom Paine, Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith–I would add Paul Revere to the list for it often seems Jenny is ringing the alarm, urging us to be our better selves, to be informed, to take action and know that language is powerful and both a controlling force in our lives and an echo of our aspirations, sorrows, convictions and stories.

For expanding the boundaries of what art can be, for moving forward into new technologies and domains, for showing us potent ways of working with others, for offering an art of resistance and seduction, we salute you and delightedly present you the PAN Award for Public Art.”

Sadly, Jenny Holzer was not able to attend the luncheon due to an unforeseen personal commitment. She sent the following acceptance letter, which was read by Marc Pally.

“I can’t thank you enough for inviting me to be with you, and I couldn’t be sorrier about being unable to attend.

I accept this award on behalf of all of you who work so hard for public art. You make it possible for artists to show what they see, think, understand, lose, sweat, fear, adore, duck, recognize, resist, salute, conjure, and want to give to as many people as possible, and you do this day in and out. Please take my gratitude, and that of any number of artists and art lovers who are the beneficiaries of your good efforts.

I spent some time trying to write sweeping statements about public art, but each line I drafted sounded like a truism, of course. Here’s the only keeper for D.C.: PUBLIC ART BEATS WAR.”

More information about the annual Public Art Network Award and an online nomination form can be found can in the annual awards section. A press release is also available online regarding the 2004 recipent, Jenny Holzer.