Jenny Holzer's profound, menacing, and sometimes humorous "Truisms"  first appeared in the late 1970s in a variety of forms, but primarily as a type of street art with lists of her sayings wheat-pasted on city walls. 

Over the past three decades, Holzer has created an impressive oeuvre consisting of objects, sculpture, and public art...often revisiting the original slogans and sayings she first embraced during the first chapter of her career. Holzer focused on perhaps a dozen of the original "Truisms" and incorporated them into an array of media ranging from billboards to t-shirts, from marble benches to pencils. 

After nearly a decade in handling Jenny Holzer's multiples and editioned works, this is the first time we have seen a complete set of her "Survival Cups" offered on the secondary market. 

Here six Styrofoam cups are each printed with one of Holzer's famous Truisms. These cups were produced for an exhibition sponsored by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts and The Village Voice entitled "1984: A Preview," which ran from January 26th to March 12th, 1983. 

Survival Cups are one of the earliest examples ever of Holzer imprinting her Truisms on a mundane object (or any object besides poster paper for that matter). These cups are a tribute to the timelessness and urgency of Holzer's Truisms and represent one of the first iterations from Holzer's dynamic oeuvre. 

The Truisms included are:

"True freedom is frightful"

"Stupid people shouldn't breed"

"You can't see or taste many of the things that kill you now"

"You are so complex that you don't always respond to danger"

"You are trapped on the Earth so you will explode"

"The breakdown comes when you don't control yourself and want the release of a bloodbath"

Courtesy of Caviar 20