American neo-conceptualist artist Jenny Holzer has been creating outsized text-based installations for more than 30 years, stripping the idea of language-as-art to its barest and then writing it large across the modern landscape, from wheat-pasting messages on buildings and signs in 1978 Manhattan to electric LED signboards in the 1980s to enormous light projections on the facades of monumental buildings throughout the world. Jenny Holzer: For Frankfurt, out on March 31 from Kerber and Distributed Art Publishers, documents Holzer’s work in October 2010, when she took her projectors to Frankfurt and projected a series of scrolling texts onto six of the city’s public buildings. The texts themselves are “related to either the city itself or the history of German Protetantism… drawn from the works of philosophers and writers,” but as you’ll see from the images below, their effect is obvious even to those who can’t read a lick of German.
