Jenny Holzer has been called visual artist, poet, propagandist, aphorist, andcrank. None of the descriptions actually get to the heart of her language installations, words chosen as parables and sayings which she has been displaying in public spaces, galleries, and museums for over a quarter of a century, printed in block letters on leaflets, engraved in plaques, carved in stone, bleeping on LED displays, emblazoned on T-shirts and caps, and flashed in television ads. One of her most quoted "Truisms," as she calls them, "ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE," has now entered the lexicon of the land, a phrase that--like the plethora of information Holzer implicitly criticizes in her art--has become internalized, part of the modern landscape. Holzer creates, Arthur C. Danto noted in Nation, a very "state-of-the-art art and a symbolic condensation of our national culture--up-to-the-minute in technology, populist in format, moralistic in tone."

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