Matt Freed, Post-Gazette photos The blue lights of "For Pittsburgh" reflect in the glass panes of the clerestory under the roof. Click photo for larger image.

To the long list of reasons to build a convention center hotel, add this one: The building would look forever unfinished without it. The center was designed to link to the hotel; that's why it has a balcony to nowhere overlooking Penn Avenue at 10th Street.

It's also why Jenny Holzer's "For Pittsburgh" piece has minimal impact on Downtown. It wasn't designed to be prominent on the city side of the convention center. The piece of it that can be seen now is a temporary gift to that corner of the triangle.

Its real mission is to animate the fourth-floor walkway connecting the hotel and the center's promenade deck and to introduce visitors to certain primary texts related to Pittsburgh. Entire novels by Thomas Bell and John Edgar Wideman and a memoir by Annie Dillard scroll up the light-emitting diode tubes that line both sides of the center's sweeping roof. A zipper, Holzer calls it.

It's especially provocative when Dillard and Wideman are scrolling along side by side, having grown up in adjacent neighborhoods worlds apart. As I stood at the corner of 10th and Penn Wednesday night, Dillard recalled how "We all wore white cotton gloves" to dancing school, while on the Wideman side, the "East Liberty niggers and Homewood niggers" were all "dead and dying."

Likely it will stop first-time visitors in their tracks, but after it draws them in, it will need some interpretation. A small label should do the trick; nothing big enough to spoil the mystery and wonder it should first create. And how about asking Rafael Vinoly's office to design some chaise longues for the walkway's deck, so visitors can lie back and let whole paragraphs and pages wash over them?

With "For Pittsburgh" scrolling into the night sky, guests at its opening stand on the convention center's balcony overlooking 10th Street and the city. Click photo for larger image.

"For Pittsburgh," for sure, doesn't have the acerbic bite and one-liner accessibility of the truisms for which Holzer is known. They came out of her upbringing in Ohio, where maxims like "Children should be seen and not heard" were part of the wallpaper of life. Holzer made up her own truisms, distributing them first as guerrilla art pasted on telephone poles in New York in the 1970s. But as the establishment embraced her work, it began appearing more and more in sanctioned settings like museums and Times Square, where electronic billboards proclaimed "Money creates taste" and "Abuse of power comes as no surprise."

Today, Holzer works all over the world and still finds ways to smudge, if not always erase, the line between art and life. Her often anonymous and unannounced Xenon projections of challenging statements and questions have appeared on iconic buildings like the Louvre's glass pyramid and the Pantheon.

Now she has found a way to erase herself, replacing her words with other texts. Invited by Norman Foster to create a permanent work for his 1990s restoration of and addition to Berlin's historic Reichstag, Holzer displays parliamentary speeches given between 1871 and 1992 on a four-sided, floor-to-ceiling LED text pole -- a brilliant way, literally and figuratively, of giving back to the German people what has been forgotten.

Sometimes, a temporary Holzer installation can so animate a building as to make it to look undressed and a little dull without it.

"Motion is a friend," Holzer said at an illustrated talk she gave at the opening. "People are attracted to movement."

Her 1989 installation at the Guggenheim lined the tops of its spiraling walls with scrolling electronic truisms. Was Wright spiraling in his grave?

For her 2001 retrospective in Berlin, Holzer attached LED strips to the ceiling beams of Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie, the pavilion-like museum with glass walls and underground galleries. Reflection was another friend, creating echoes in the glass walls and making Mies' building dance. The same effect is at play to a lesser degree here, as the zipper reflects in the clerestory's panes.

The target audience of "For Pittsburgh" is newcomers to Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh literature, not bibliophile lifers like me. Don't get me wrong; this is a compelling piece by an artist whose work remains fresh, engaging and relevant, and one that invites exploration of the great body of Pittsburgh literature that deserves a wider readership.

But having read the chosen books, I confess to secretly pining for some sassy, subversive, site-specific truisms. Maybe someday Holzer can invent some just "for Pittsburgh." Like ...

"Your rivers and your hills are your culture."

"Too many billboards can be fatal."

"French fries on a sandwich are overkill."