A sentence, for Jenny Holzer, isn’t about stating the obvious. It can be an arbiter of hidden meaning. It can declare unspoken rules. The legendary artist, who grew up in Ohio, is best known for Truisms, a sequence of maxims—money creates taste, abuse of power comes as no surprise—that appeared in the late 1970s. They were printed cheaply and affixed to billboards and shopfronts in New York City.
To make Untitled, a work from her 1980-82 Living series, she embraced the plaque: a symbol of authority associated with government buildings and cultural landmarks. You can
