JENNY HOLZER, For Frankfurt, Kerber, Bielefeld, 2011

Published by Kerber, Bielefeld, 2011/2012. Edited by Friederike von Bünau. Texts by Henri Cole, Rose-Maria Gropp and Peter Weibel. 21.5 × 27 cm, 128 pages, 41 colour illustrations. ISBN 978-3-86678-552-6.

Condition: Original illustrated boards, no jacket as issued. Visible surface wear from handling and circulation — rubbing, scattered abrasion, most pronounced on the rear board — consistent with genuine use rather than storage damage. Text block and plates clean and structurally sound.

A Protestant church foundation commissioned Jenny Holzer to overwrite Frankfurt. For nine evenings in October 2010, four hours a night, she projected scrolling text across six buildings — a church, a town hall, a literature house, a contemporary-art space — turning the city centre into a reading room with no seats and no fixed hours.

The words weren't hers. By 2010, Holzer had largely stopped writing her own text. Onto the Römer, in letters taller than the doors beneath them, she projected Adorno's own line from Minima Moralia: "INTELLIGENZ IST EINE MORALISCHE KATEGORIE." Onto the Alte Nikolaikirche, mid-sentence, unrelated crowds walking through it: Erich Fromm on conflict and catharsis, word for word out of Die Kunst des Liebens. Adorno, the philosopher inseparable from the Frankfurt School, returned to Frankfurt not through a lecture hall but as light on a civic façade. A church that spent centuries speaking doctrine spent nine nights speaking psychoanalysis instead.

Early Holzer manufactured anonymous-sounding statements and let them pass as public authority. In Frankfurt she runs the operation in reverse: she takes language that already carries enormous authority — Adorno, Fromm, Luther, Goethe — and puts it into a form built to disappear. A projection has no body. Switch off the machine and the sentence is gone. Fourteen years earlier, on the Arno riverbank in Florence, Holzer had made her first outdoor xenon projection; Frankfurt is what that method looks like once it has had over a decade to develop an appetite for other people's sentences instead of her own.

The catalogue is now one of the only stable forms this work has. The projections ran for nine nights and stopped. The buildings went back to being buildings. What's left converts light back down into ink: a 21.5 × 27 cm object standing in for façades that, for those nine evenings, were reading rooms the size of a town square.

Six buildings held the words for nine nights. This one has held them since.