Jenny Holzer - Action Causes More Trouble Than Thought (2021)

Jenny Holzer - Action Causes More Trouble Than Thought (2021)

This work is such a wonderful look at how communication design principles can impact the reading of a work. Instead of stark, authoritative type (which would seem to fit the message being presented), Holzer uses elegant cursive: looping, ornamental script that carries all the baggage of handwriting, domestic craft, and sentimentality. The phrase itself sounds like a warning, but written this way, it feels intimate- almost tender. The message contradicts its own delivery: trouble rendered beautifully.

I find this fascinating through the lens of typography. Coming from a communication design background, I’ve been trained to think about how letterforms communicate beyond language and how a font’s rhythm and historical context shape meaning. Holzer understands this. She weaponises prettiness. The script feels feminine, polite, decorative, yet the content is sharp, reflective, and vaguely menacing. It’s the tension between flourish and authority that gives it power.

It makes me think of Kate Just’s knitted text works, where the softness of the medium complicates the directness of the message. Both artists use material and form to distort expectation, Just through slowness and tactility, Holzer through aesthetic contradiction.

For my own practice, this opens a new way of thinking about ornament. If typography itself can be a site of friction and can hold resistance, then perhaps decoration isn’t a distraction from meaning, but a vehicle for critical appraisal and analysis. Holzer’s script invites us to read beauty and danger in the same line.

Thinking about both artists makes me reconsider how text might operate in my own work. I often rely on visual rhythm and ornament to communicate feeling, but typography carries its own weight. It has the capacity to be both design and art and reveals its politics in the space between what’s said and how it’s made/presented.