Untitled (Black Book).
Untitled. [Black Book]. N.p. [New York]: self-published, n.d. [ca. 1979].
Square 8vo.; text and one illustration printed on green paper, toned at extremities; plain black wrappers; stapled. Very good.
First edition. Holzer’s so-called “Inflammatory Essays” make their earliest appearance in this small, untitled, seemingly anonymous tract. The anonymity is key. While it is all Holzer’s writing, each piece also operates by appropriation. She draws upon texts written by Trotsky, Hitler, Mao, and other political figures, whose angry, revolutionary, bombastic, or nationalistic writing she distills into a depersonalized concentrate of fervor; anonymous, yet strangely recognizable. Holzer never gives voice to her own views, but rather inhabits numerous diverse ideologies temporarily. This work is a text-based analogue to work by some of the so-called “Pictures generation” artists, especially the photographs of Cindy Sherman, who was contemporaneously at work on her own breakthrough work, Untitled Film Stills, in which she similarly inhabited personae that were non-specific, yet recognizable. In the case of both, the work seems less artistic invention, than something appropriated from the cultural zeitgeist. For Holzer, the point was to reveal the underlying political codes of society. Her methodology, as she described it, was to “use what is dominant in a culture to change it.”
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