Prophet girl chosen by the sun, do you heard the gods whispering those silent stardust words?

Cursed daughter, uttering insanities no one believes, do you regret taking the vow?

"People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?" (Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea)

I need a father. I need a mother, I need some older,

wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.

Keeping up the Pureness

2004 / Hanging Scroll, Color Pigment on Silk / 29.5x79.3cm

Inside me, something seethes. Inside me some feral animal claws at my ribcage, trapped.

I was always ashamed to take.

So I gave. It was no a virtue.

It was a disease.

When i was a child I said "I do not want to be a woman". Why, when it is so painful and so unhappy? But now that I am grown I am proud to be who I am. But, for the sake of all of us, let us try and change what that means, to be a woman.

(TW: Rape): “Lustmord,” Jenny Holzer. Ink on skin, 1993.

“Lustmord is the German word for a sexual murder involving rape. The phenomenon of a rape followed by a sadistic murder is not new, but its categorization in the annals of crime is relatively recent, and the term lustmord has only been used since the late nineteenth century. If one ventures to think of associations linked to sex murder, any number of cultural artifacts emerge: the historical inclusion of women as spoils of war, Richard Wagner’s liebestods, the paintings of George Grosz and Otto Dix, the Marquis de Sade, Jack the Ripper, Norman Bates in Psycho, and the more recent film, Basic Instinct in which the traditional sexual roles of aggressor and victim are reversed. It quickly becomes apparent that sex murder is an evil so persistent in western culture that it has been “tolerated” to a surprising degree. We want to believe that only the deeply insane, someone reduced to animalistic violence, could twist love into hate in such a sadistic manner, but humans have committed this heinous crime for centuries. Its persistence has driven society to build a protective shell that renders us relatively immune to the horrors of sex murder. We tend to look the other way, especially when it is happening to someone who is “other” or when it becomes part of a larger event such as the power struggles and displays of dominance associated with war. With LUSTMORD, Jenny Holzer peels back those layers of insulation and invites viewers into the dark corners of the human psyche associated with this crime.”

Text by Lynn M. Herbert