Jenny Holzer's 'Lustmord' and the project of resonant criticism

Responding to the systematic rape and murder of thousands of women in brutal acts of ‘ethnic cleansing’ during the Bosnian War, Jenny Holzer produced the powerful Lustmord during 1993 and 1994. The project is complex and thought-provoking, not least because its texts, images and objects call to observers’ own bodies, insisting that they participate in the work rather than stand outside it. Lustmord thus redefines the conventional relationship between desire and the gaze, which locates the encounter between subject and object as a unidirectional function of lack. This work creates a different space, one which is troubling and powerful precisely because it sets up reciprocal, intersubjective relationships through spectatorship. Thinking about the implications of this project, its strategies and modes of making ‘history’, will concern me throughout this essay, but a few introductory comments by way of description are necessary first.