The task of this dissertation is to assess the historical conditions that permitted Jenny Holzer to formulate a practice premised on language and conceptions of public space to break from historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde practices. My aim is to demonstrate the recourses sought by Holzer--through language, collaboration, and form--to reveal the operations of repression at work in the public spaces of place and language in particular moments of crises at the end of a--and at the ruined start of a new--century: the economic collapse of the late 1970s, the AIDs crisis, and the wars on terror following the events of September 11, 2001.