Laments: The new disease came...

Jenny Holzer came to prominence in the early 1980s in New York City. Her breakout works were a series of hundreds of aphoristic and ideologically inconsistent one-liners called Truisms that she wrote after digesting a syllabus of critical and political theory. She arranged these text lists alphabetically on posters—for example, ABSOLUTE SUBMISSION CAN BE A FORM OF RELEASE above ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE—and wheat pasted them throughout downtown New York. Holzer considered the anonymity of the statements—not identified readily as art—as ways for the work to be noticed. How art can be useful—and how art can be used to question the ways ideas are propagated, consumed, acculturated, and participate in consolidating power—remain her animating concerns.

In the late 1980s, Holzer turned her attention to the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic. By 1989, when she displayed the thirteen sarcophagi and thirteen electronic signs called Laments at the Dia Art Foundation, nearly 25,000 people had died from AIDS-related diseases, and the Center for Disease Control reported almost 120,000 cases. There is still no cure, and at that time, there were virtually no effective treatments. Because gay men and people of color were the communities most devastated, there were and continue to be social, political, and moral dimensions to the AIDS epidemic. Resources were not dedicated quickly toward treatment and care; certain lives were deemed more valuable than others; the sick were being blamed for their illness.

Each Lament consists of two elements: a granite sarcophagus and an electronic L.E.D. (light-emitting diode) sign. The top of the sarcophagus has an all-capitalized text inscribed in a sans-serif font. The electronic sign streams the same language. Each sentence is told from the perspective of a different person, a form perhaps borrowed from the American author Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 short-story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, where a portrait of the town is revealed through twenty-two individual accounts. The granite sarcophagus is Holzer’s riff on a form found in ancient civilizations where a stone coffin would be elaborately carved with reliefs or transcriptions. These objects project a sense of power, endurance, and immortality. Interested in the language of Minimalism—particularly the boxes of Donald Judd—Holzer saw in her own work a slippage between sculptural forms that deal with perception and time and quotidian forms like the coffin that memorialize someone who has passed. Holzer dignifies these deaths as tragedies to be kept present, above ground, and in sight, as well as to affirm the validity and value of each life. For the artist, grief is not necessarily a private matter but a function of public display.