Although best known for her arresting and contradictory texts, and her skillful manipulation of mass media channelsranging from text-laden, light-emitting diode (LED) signs to street posters, plaques, and even brief television spotsHolzer has demonstrated significant skill in conceiving and implementing site-specific installations. Her transformation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York into a moving spiral of electronic information and her widely praised pavilion at the Venice Biennale, composed of LEDs, benches and inscribed marble floors, have fused the textbe it a declaration, a challenge or a lamentwith the architecture and sculpture.
Holzer’s art came to prominence in the late 1970s and early eighties when she began to plaster posters of her Truism series throughout the streets of New York. This contradictory list, arranged in alphabetical order, seemed like a catalogue of cliches, but was, in fact, written and orchestrated by Holzer. The Truism dramatized a depersonalized and amoral information landscape throughout juxtapositions. Holzer has since produced a variety of texts with points of view ranging from inflammatory manifesto to feminist or parental concern to bleak resignation. In all of her work she links ideological statements with the forms and meanings of architecture.