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dc.contributor.advisorBuchloh, Benjamin
dc.contributor.authorBreslin, David Conrad
dc.date.accessioned2013-03-18T18:13:56Z
dc.date.issued2013-03-18
dc.date.submitted2012
dc.identifier.citationBreslin, David Conrad. 2013. I Want to Go to the Future Please: Jenny Holzer and the End of a Century. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.en_US
dc.identifier.otherhttp://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10669en
dc.identifier.urihttp://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10436247
dc.description.abstractThe task of this dissertation is to assess the historical conditions that permitted Jenny Holzer to formulate a practice premised on language and conceptions of public space to break from historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde practices. My aim is to demonstrate the recourses sought by Holzer—through language, collaboration, and form—to reveal the operations of repression at work in the public spaces of place and language in particular moments of crises at the end of a—and at the ruined start of a new—century: the economic collapse of the late 1970s, the AIDs crisis, and the wars on terror following the events of September 11, 2001. The exemplary projects that I study in this dissertation—from her Truisms posters in downtown Manhattan in the late 1970s, to her collaborative work with The Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince, and Winters, to her work with electronic signs and stone sarcophagi to address the AIDS crisis at its most dire period in 1987-89, to her light projections whose moving impermanence reflect on the continuity of mourning as an activity—each demonstrate the impossibility of neutrality. Concentrating on works conceptualized for and realized (for the most part) in New York City over the course of a quarter century, my study uses the seeming consistency of geography, or at least the fixity of a longitudinal and latitudinal intersection, to indicate the seismic changes inflicted on the city and its residents by economic, legal, political, and violent actions—and, in the case of the AIDS crisis, criminal inaction. My dissertation argues that Holzer’s unflagging demonstration of threatened subjectivity is the necessary form of protest to an ever-more bureaucratized world.en_US
dc.description.sponsorshipHistory of Art and Architectureen_US
dc.language.isoen_USen_US
dash.licenseLAA
dc.subjectArt historyen_US
dc.subjectGender studiesen_US
dc.subjectAIDSen_US
dc.subjectContemporary Arten_US
dc.subjectHolzeren_US
dc.subjectLanguageen_US
dc.subjectNew Yorken_US
dc.subjectPublic Arten_US
dc.titleI Want to Go to the Future Please: Jenny Holzer and the End of a Centuryen_US
dc.typeThesis or Dissertationen_US
dc.date.available2013-03-18T18:13:56Z
thesis.degree.date2013en_US
thesis.degree.disciplineHistory of Art and Architectureen_US
thesis.degree.grantorHarvard Universityen_US
thesis.degree.leveldoctoralen_US
thesis.degree.namePh.D.en_US
dc.contributor.committeeMemberLajer-Burcharth, Ewaen_US
dc.contributor.committeeMemberLambert-Beatty, Carrieen_US
dash.contributor.affiliatedBreslin, David Conrad


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