Above top: Jenny Holzer, two pieces from Redaction Paintings (2006) — As Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times, these are "the hardest-hitting, least hypothetical texts of Holzer's career."

Above bottom: Adam Daley Wilson, a piece from The Art of Mental Illness Exploitation, pages 4 and 5 of Federal Complaint (2025). Court-placed text and performance art; subsequent re-photography and appropriation of Redaction Paintings. Single channel video, 56 seconds; oil on canvas diptych, 8 x 11 ft (96 x 132 in) (243 x 335 cm).

Text-based art as advocacy and activism.

A brief history of advocacy art through documents.

Artists Creating Text-Based Conceptual Art Using Primary Source Documents as Advocacy and Activism:

A distinct category within activist art over the past century involves artists who employ primary source documents—governmental reports, legal documents, classified files, internal corporate memos—and present them—in the plain text words of the documents themselves—as the material of the work itself, and as the conceptual substance of the work itself.

Such artistic practices, rooted in conceptual art, postconceptual art, and postminimalism, offers the viewer plain texts themselves as art—language as art, language as meaning, language as visual—and not in need of traditional aesthetics. The evidentiary authority of the primary document—real words, written by real persons, become the art itself, and ultimately transcend conceptual art and fall within the aesthetics of modern art, postmodern art, and even contemporary art. The following presents just the briefest of art histories of such practices.

Primary-source texts as the research behind conceptual art advocacy and activism:

Consider the work of Mark Lombardi, whose diagrammatic drawings from the 1990s map networks of power, corruption, and financial malfeasance. While Lombardi transforms text into visual flow charts, thereby creating a visual aesthetic, his research relies heavily on primary documents—court cases, legal complaints and legal filings, newspaper investigations (itself the art of journalism), and declassified government records—rendered into austere, almost bureaucratic diagrams that operate as conceptual maps of influence—all from plain text documents.

Primary-source texts as the art itself: The art is the document and its plain language:

Or, for a more direct engagement with the display of primary documents, consider the work of Jenny Holzer, including her Redaction Paintings (2006), where Jenny Holzer (a) used the plain texts of primary-source declassified U.S. government documents; (b) enlarged them and (c) partially redacted them, and then (d) presented the oversized redacted documents, black on white, as minimalist paintings. Holzer’s work in this series (and related works such as Lustmord) turns the primary document itself into the central visual and advocacy element, both inviting and compelling viewers to confront the raw language of power, secrecy, and harm—in the words of the documents themselves. This may be seen as the text-based activist act of letting documents speak for themselves—letting them speak directly to the viewer for interpretation and consideration.

Other artists who show what facts look like—not through pictures, but through words:

Trevor Paglen may be seen as using primary documents and their plain text in his research-based photography projects tracking government programs, the policies and implementations of mass surveillance, and the documentation of data infrastructures. Paglen frequently incorporates the texts of technical manuals and leaked government and corporate documents into exhibitions, where the documents, and their plain language words on their pages, are placed by the artist not as supplementary or background materials but rather as the aesthetic and substantive core of the artworks.

Another example is Martha Rosler, including in her early works critiquing the Vietnam War and later projects on gentrification and urban displacement. In works like If You Lived Here... (1989), Rosler curated public exhibitions that incorporated plain text documents and primary source documentary language—tenant union newsletters, legal documents including eviction notices, and official municipal government reports. Rosler incorporated these plain text documents directly into gallery spaces, blurring the line between curatorial research and activist art.

Yet another example is Taryn Simon; in her project The Innocents (2002), which presents photographic portraits of wrongfully convicted individuals, Simon presented the full texts of legal documents, legal testimony, and court records that purported to comprise legitimate foundations for the fraudulent convictions. The texts of these plain text documents is not merely illustrative, and it is no longer merely substantive—the evidentiary facts, memorialized in the words themselves, become the aesthetic. The words themselves are both evidence and aesthetic, all at once. The simple words on simple documents, in black in white, show what something looks like better than a thousand pictures ever could.

Plain words on plain paper showing what something looks like—better than a picture ever could.

This approach briefly summarized in this art history—where the evidentiary weight, procedural formality, and aesthetic austerity of the document itself becomes the visual and conceptual center—has appropriately proliferated in the past 30 years in many countries, addressing secrecy, detention, surveillance, state violence, war, racism, and more. Journalism and its words are now art. A legal complaint filed in court is now art. The plain words on the paper are now document-as-artwork.

Documents not just as evidence, and not just as conceptual art, but also as visual art. Art that, on its face, demonstrates and establishes the need for advocacy and the need for activism itself. In each artist’s practice, the power of the work is the simple stark juxtaposition of two things (a) the unaltered primary document words and (b) an aesthetic and substantive declaration by the artist that says: I as the artist need not say more. Because the words themselves show all that is needed to be shown.

The artist practicing in this area, with the medium of the primary text document, has made art that simply shows what something looks like.

It is then, as it is for any piece of art, for the viewer or listener to receive, interpret, and do whatever the viewer or listener or reader may chose to do with it. The words are now always there, showing, for a next person to see, and a next after that.

Additional Categories of Advocacy and Activist Art Approaches in the Past Century

In addition to the category of text art briefly summarized above, other distinct artistic practices of activist and advocacy art, through and with primary source document texts,have emerged over the past century:

1. Archival Art and Institutional Critique – Artists like Fred Wilson and Andrea Fraser interrogate the politics of document archives themselves, re-contextualizing institutional records, acquisition documents, and catalogues to reveal wrongs in museum document contexts. This may be seen as differing from the direct presentation of primary documents in that it focuses on the epistemic framing of those documents within cultural institutions.

2. Data Aesthetics – Developed by Eyal Weizman, this related medium treats the artwork itself as a fact investigation, using satellite imagery, environmental modeling, and open-source data analysis to reconstruct and demonstrate wrongs, including human rights violations. While these projects rely on documentary evidence, they do not present it in raw form, but rather use it to generate reconstructions.

3. Narrative and Documentary Film and Video Art – Filmmakers like Laura Poitras and Hito Steyerl (in her earlier work) have blurred the line between documentary film and gallery installation, incorporating direct primary-source footage, leaked documents, and voiceovers in ways that fuse primary texts as both evidence and aesthetic form.

These additional categories, while not exhaustive, illustrate how advocacy and activist art in the past century has evolved into a broad constellation of practices, ranging from the evidentiary display of primary documents to speculative fiction, immersive installations, and embodied social action.

Activist Art and Advocacy through Artist-Placed Public Documents: Text-Based Performance Art.

See also this research paper via Medium and this brief article via Medium on a related artwork.