In the late 1970s, when artist Jenny Holzer was a student at the Whitney Museums Independent Study Program , she, like many students, wrote essays, which she described in retrospect as hot, flaming, nasty things . Only, unlike the average term paper, Holzers treatises bellowed in italicized, capitalized letters on neon sheets of paper, blatantly packed with quotes from Emma Goldman, Mao Zedong, Valerie Solanas, and Adolf Hitler.

These papers, dubbed Inflammatory Essays, followed a familiar recipe. Each featured 100 words divided onto 30 lines and adopted an unusual voice somewhere between a batty dictator, a leftist activist and a sage prophet. They read like a religious zealot warning a nonplussed college campus about the impending apocalypse or, quite eerily, like our new president tweeting quasi-nonsense into the abyss.

FEAR IS THE MOST ELEGANT WEAPON, one of Holzers essays reads. FORCE ANXIETY TO EXCRUCIATING LEVELS OR GENTLY UNDERMINE THE PUBLIC CONFIDENCE, CONFLICT OF INTEREST MUST BE SEEN FOR WHAT IT IS.

Holzer took her essays to the streets, wheat pasting the multicolored creeds all around Times Square under the cloak of night. Part conceptual art, part street art, the Inflammatory Essays were a new breed of text-based work. Impassioned verses removed from sincerity or fact, they served to rile up the viewer and set her loose without direction, like a child spun madly before a round of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.