Access a slow-looking exercise of this work.

Transcript
Narrator: "Living: It can be startling to see someone’s breath..." is a 1989 drawing by Jenny Holzer made of carbon on tracing paper, just over 3 feet wide by almost 2 feet tall. At the center of the composition, outlined letters each about an inch tall form a series of words that have been precisely traced onto the transparent paper in dark graphite. The letters are capitalized in a serif typeface, and some of their edges are blurred where the carbon has been rubbed into darkened smudges and fingerprints. Running about an inch inside the paper’s edges is a thin drawn line, creating a border around the composition. Narrated by a screen reader, the text, center-aligned and spaced over five lines, reads:  

IT CAN BE STARTLING TO  
SEE SOMEONE’S BREATH,  
LET ALONE THE BREATHING OF A CROWD.  
YOU USUALLY DON’T BELIEVE THAT  
PEOPLE EXTEND THAT FAR. 

On close inspection, at the composition’s lower-right corner, handwritten letters read “BENCH #6.” A simple, patinaed metal frame surrounds the work.

In the "Living" text series from 1980 to 1982, Holzer offers a set of quiet observations that reflect how individuals negotiate rules, expectations, landscapes, desires, fears, bodies, and selves. Living was first presented on cast-bronze plaques that echo official signage. Here, the texts are shown in the form of graphite tracings originally used to create stone benches.  

Holzer’s early stoneworks were engraved using a transfer method that involved copying text by hand onto sheets of vellum. These drawings are process works, at times showing the artist’s handwritten notations and other manufacturing marks. In some instances, lines of graphite are purposefully smeared by hand to give emphasis to the text and create gestural compositions.

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