In 1967, as Roland Barthes published his well-known article regarding the notion "the death of the author" which refuted the foregrounded position of the authors as they were central to their literature or art projects. Through dethroning the very power of the authors, his famous maxim "the birth of the reader must come from the death of the author" questioned the structuralist perspectives toward the text through demonstrating the possibilities of the plurality in terms of meanings brought about by many a differed reader.
Since Jenny Holzer's art project is tethered to the use of linguistics. The poststructuralist notion that linguistics is an arbitrary system has been revealed in many a work of Holzer, such as the site-specific projection installation in which many of her Truisms are used. The readers of her work, instead of being total communicatees, are considered as active participants amongst the messages Holzer produced, that being said, she has altered the Western World's inveterate ideas toward what an art piece should be by superseding it with a semiotic system in which an art piece, with people interpreting from disparate contexts, could vary its signified connotation largely.
I base my site-specific project on a zigzag baseboard in a lounge where students are expected to view the work from different perspectives, some words (excerpted from Holzer's Truisms) appear to be distorted while others are seemingly erected, indicating the meaning plurality which is the central ideology throughout Holzer's pieces. The final outcome is juxtaposed by photos people collected from different positions in the lounge while perching on the stool, or sitting on the floor.