At the top of a staircase in the Tate Modern, one of the walls is covered in bright colours and contradictory texts. Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays (1979-82), plastered across this wall, serves as a sort of introduction to the rooms just along the corridor that house a selection of some of Holzer’s most well-known work. Standing at the top of that staircase, trying to make sense of these flashes of voices and ideologies, I overheard someone saying “you know, I have one of those essays on my bedroom wall.” It might have been a pick-up line. If it was, it probably would have worked on me. It can say a lot about someone if they have one of those essays in their house; fittingly, all of those things are contradictions. Maybe they’re secure in their beliefs and maybe they’re not; maybe they like to be challenged, maybe they want their feelings confirmed. These contradictions lie at the heart of Holzer’s work; a series of voices, shouting over each other, desperate to be heard.

There’s a formal simplicity to Holzer’s work. Her Inflammatory Essays, Truisms (1977-79), or phrases like “protect me from what I want,” texts on aluminium plaques that decorate the walls of one of the rooms in the Tate currently dedicated to Holzer’s work, are striking in their stark simplicity. They’re declarations. Almost. They’re simple; art and poetry stripped back to the bare textual minimum. There’s a similarity here to the current wave of Instagram friendly poetry. Consciously or not, instapoets share DNA with Jenny Holzer’s work, but the ways in which they use their common genealogy vastly differs. Holzer’s work is powerful and instapoetry comparatively weak.

Instapoetry, best exemplified in the work of Rupi Kaur, has been described as – from a commercial perspective – saving poetry by The Atlantic. But regardless of the number of units sold, this kind of poetry remains hampered, in terms of both form and impact, by its social media origins. One of the many voices in Holzer’s Truisms predicts our current relationship with technology: “Being alone with yourself is increasingly unpopular.” So instead, people are alone together on social media, sharing in experiences while being worlds away from one another. This isn’t an inherently bad thing, and social media has done more good than harm when it comes to bringing people together. But when it comes to art, there are some challenges that are more difficult to overcome.

The whole point of social media is that the experience is curated by and for the user. You choose who you want to be friends with, whose tweets you want to see, whose Instagram stories you want to have access to. This sort of thing gets criticised a lot, especially when it comes to politics; so often people are accused of living in an echo chamber, where their views aren’t challenged, and their biases are confirmed. But this doesn’t begin and end with political discourse; it extends to art as well. A lot of the poetry and poets that rose to prominence on Instagram write work that, not unlike Holzer’s, is stripped back to the bare minimum. These works comprise very few line breaks and are declarative in a similar way to something like Holzer’s “protect me from what I want.” But by largely existing in environments that are curated, this poetry has little impact. So much of the praise that the work of Kaur and her contemporaries get comes from the accessibility of the work; it isn’t like traditional poetry, not really bothering with rhyme, metre, or imagery. Instead they cut to the quick of it, giving one emotion, in one moment. The emotion is planned for, expected. If you follow Kaur on Instagram and see a new post/poem, you know what you’re getting. You’re ready for it. If you seek it out, you’re even feeling it already. And that’s the problem with Instapoetry; so often it serves as little more than an emotional confirmation bias. Kaur’s one-line poem “the world gives you so much pain and here you are making gold out of it” acts to simply reassure the reader about their actions, just like “people go but how they left always stays” acts to simply dull the pain of loss. This poetry offers only answers, without bothering to ask any questions.

This divide between conflict and confirmation bias, between Holzer and those who followed in her wake, comes from how and where the work is encountered. Where poets like Kaur exist in personally curated spaces like Instagram or Tumblr, Holzer’s work was originally designed to be shown in public spaces; on billboards, t-shirts, posters. Holzer’s work wasn’t meant for someone to seek it out, it was meant to confront them, to challenge their perspective, to grab them by the throat and force them to be exposed to ideas that are contradictory and difficult. Of course, the museum itself is a curated space, so here Holzer’s work perhaps falls more in line with the work of someone like Kaur. But even then, for the two of them to be perfectly comparable, things would have to change in the way that Holzer’s work is being shown at the Tate. Her Inflammatory Essays, instead of all existing on one, brightly coloured wall, would need to have each essay in its own individual room. That way the experience is even more curated, more like scrolling social media; you see something, decide whether or not you agree with the statement, and move on. But the nature of the display still forces you to deal with the contradictions at the heart of Holzer’s work. In the room of Truisms at the Tate, it’s possible to overhear people talking about Holzer’s work, what they agree with and what they find objectionable. I heard one person say to a friend that there was a certain truth behind Holzer’s declaration that “bad intentions can yield good results.” Her friend didn’t agree.

In American Art Since 1945, David Joselit argues that Holzer, by displaying her work in public places, creates “political complexity and moral ambiguity.” That she manages to shatter the spheres of public and private by bringing them together. Something like “protect me from what I want,” feels intensely private, the sort of confession that gets explored in poetry. But by displaying it on a billboard in Times Square as part of Messages to the Public (1982), this private feeling is forced into the public sphere, it must be confronted, it can’t be ignored or scrolled past. Holzer’s work exists in public spaces through what Joselit describes as information portals, the sort of thing that can get the message out to the largest number of people, like a billboard in Times Square. In theory, social media might be the next step in these information portals, but in reality the nature of user choice stops it from having the widest possible reach. Now, people can choose to see not only what they want, but also what they want to be protected from.

Holzer’s art probably wouldn’t work in the age of social media; it would feel like confirmation bias, like choosing the way in and out of a discussion. Just looking at one of her Inflammatory Essays instead of all of them at once. This is the problem of the instapoetry that seems so indebted to Holzer; it exists in a sphere that is entirely private, there’s no confrontation here. The simplicity of poetry by someone like Kaur, or Lang Leav, isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself. The work of other confessional poets, like Sexton or Plath, isn’t necessarily the most formally complex, but it never presents itself as being simple and easy to understand; it still forces a confrontation, challenges the reader to fight their way through the work, not just agree or disagree with it. Seeing Holzer’s “it is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender” changes it from a challenge to express emotion into a simple reminder. In a context like this, the similarity between Holzer and Kaur’s work becomes more noticeable; this declaration of Holzer’s would fit alongside “loneliness is a sign that you are in desperate need of yourself” from Milk and Honey.

About a month after first seeing Holzer’s work at the Tate, I went back to look at it again. And to buy an “Abuse of power comes as no surprise t-shirt.” This decision wasn’t quite as fraught as buying clothing with Barbra Krueger’s art emblazoned on it. On the contrary, it feels like a good way to remember the power of Holzer’s work, bringing it out into a public space. When I walked back to the underground from the Tate, I saw a building that was condemned or in some state of disrepair, like it hadn’t been in use for a while. But on a billboard along the side of the building’s façade, there was a line of text, declaring that “Another world is possible.” Challenging me to wonder if that was true; this inherently political idea in a time of division, concern, and fear. It felt like the perfect continuation of Holzer’s work, a private optimism made public, breaking barriers, and forcing confrontation, refusing to be looked away from.