30 April - 30 May 2009
FREE STORE
In Jonathan Horowitz’s third show at Sadie Coles HQ, everything is recycled. A new film titled Apocalypto Now is made entirely from found documentary footage and fragments of TV shows and films. Scenes from classic movies are interspersed with obscure bits of media detritus, forming pointed critical connections between disparate fictional and historical accounts. Out of this montage approach, Horowitz constructs incisive new narratives which powerfully reflect on important topical cultural and political issues. The star of the piece is Mel Gibson, a figure whose avowed Catholic faith is at apparent odds with his public relation catastrophes. The presentation of the film is carbon neutral, with a solar panel just outside the gallery space harnessing energy to fuel the piece. In another work, a ‘Free Store’ has been built out of recycled plastic planks. This modular sculpture comprises a series of bins, and visitors are invited to recycle their own possessions by bringing something to place in or on one of them, and taking something away by way of trade. In its broadest sense, the Earth can be interpreted as a ‘free store’: as with Horowitz’s sculpture, it requires a social contract from man in order to function, and in extreme interpretations, survive.
Working in video, sculpture, sound installation, and photography, in the first instance, Horowitz’s work often constitutes an investigation of media, something perfectly surmised by his 1990 video Maxell, in which the name of the eponymous videotape manufacturer was copied and copied until it became illegible. Later into the 1990s, Horowitz’s work took a distinctly more political turn as he began to derive material from a wide spectrum of political ideas and motivations – from race to Aids, from Congress to veganism, and from war to body politics. Throughout, Horowitz’s art is characterized by a confluence of the personal and the political. Using simple mechanisms – juxtaposition, superimposition, or the foregrounding of a given medium’s structural properties – Horowitz conveys significant meanings. In his photographic piece Official Portrait of George W. Bush Available for Free from the White House Hung Upside Down (2001) the act of quite literally turning the leader on his head conveys a mordant political message. A poignant sense of humour often pervades, as in Go Vegan (!) (200 Celebrity Vegetarians Downloaded from the Internet) (2002). Here, as elsewhere in Horowitz’s work, a specific media fixation or cause becomes an eloquent microcosm for the ‘bigger social picture’.
Jonathan Horowitz was born in New York in 1966 and studied at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. He currently has a solo show at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, as well as at P.S.1., New York. Other solo shows include Jonathan Horowitz/Silent Movie/MATRIX 151, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, 2003, and Time, Life, People: Jonathan Horowitz at Kunsthalle St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2001. Horowitz has been included in numerous key group exhibitions of recent years including Good News for People who Love Bad News, Studio 495, Swiss Institute, New York, 2007; Lines, Grids, Stains, Words, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007; and also in 2007, Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation, the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, touring to Shanghai Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, organised by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art. He lives and works in New York.
07 September - 07 October 2006
Rome
For his second show at Sadie Coles HQ, Jonathan Horowitz takes the eternal city as his subject. Rome, as the keystone of western civilisation, becomes for Horowitz an all encompassing imaginary construct; the embodiment of the ideal society, the epitome of decadent society. By extension he considers its status as the model for totalitarian and democratic governments, from Napoleon to the US founding fathers, from Mussolini to Hitler. Working across a variety of media, the exhibition centres on a new video, which weaves strands from documentaries about ancient Rome, Mussolini and the making of the movie Ben Hur, considered the greatest achievement of Hollywood epic cinema. The gallery will also house a Modernist monumental arch. Through this (re)construction Horowitz brings into focus the highly politicised role of Rome’s architecture; from the epic grandeur of its classical foundations through to Mussolini’s reprisal of this legacy of monument building, creating a whole fascist / modernist mini city, EUR, with its own Colosseum, St Peter’s and so on, which sought to re-imagine and reincarnate ancient Rome. Horowitz highlights the pivotal role of architecture in government’s aspirations to stamp values on the cityscape and through the ‘changeable commemoration’ feature of his arch, he highlights the way in which architecture is created or retrospectively reconfigured to express political ideals. This anti-fascist monument / advertising hoarding hybrid, constructed from recycled plastic, throws into relief the opportunistic hijacking of visual signs to political sloganeering ends, manifested not least in the uneasy balance between the ‘Fascist style’ and modernism. Taking the iconic forms of antiquity - pillar, arch, idealized human form - and focussing on the overwhelming spectacle that defines the ‘Fascist style’, Horowitz questions its proximity to more generic trends in popular culture. Horowitz’s democratic use of readily available materials is in keeping with the everyman political spirit that lies behind the work. Here, as elsewhere Horowitz takes received values and images, prodding them, deflating them, and in so doing forcing us to reassess them.
17 October - 16 November 2002: Pillow Talk
For his first show at Sadie Coles HQ, Jonathan Horowitz presents Pillow Talk.
The installation centres around the video work It’s Magic/Acting the Part: the Biographies of Doris Day and Rock Hudson. On two separate monitors the life stories of these two film icons run parallel, each one freezing to accommodate the other. Horowitz appropriates footage from television biographies of the stars’ lives, focusing on their final television reunion, when Rock appeared as the first guest on Doris’s talk show on the Christian Broadcasting Network. Suffering from dementia caused by HIV related illness, Rock showed up at the studio in a shockingly haggard state. Rock had not yet revealed his condition to Doris or the rest of the public, but when images from the recording were broadcast around the world, Rock was forced to acknowledge that he had AIDS.With this admission the heterosexual, macho image Rock had maintained throughout his life was instantaneously shattered. As the footage demonstrates, his life and career would become a footnote to his homosexuality and death. In contrast, as portrayed in the Doris Day biography, the adversity that Doris experienced in her personal life served to reinforce her professional accomplishments and make her character more sympathetic.In It’s Magic/Acting the Part, Jonathan Horowitz explores the peculiar balance between the public and private lives of stars of the small and large screens. In an age in which viewers believe they know intimately the actors they are watching, television becomes the only vehicle through which these actors can communicate with each other and perhaps even themselves.Extending his focus from the romantic fiction of the Rock and Doris partnership, Horowitz examines the weird world of the celebrity couple. A mattress lies on a plinth in the gallery, on which rest two pillows silk-screened with the names of an improbable romantic pairing. On the walls above are photographs of over 100 sets of pillows, each bearing the names, in different typefaces, of more odd-ball partnerships: Dumb and Dumber; Leverne and Shirley; Liza and David; Ben and Jerry. Horowitz highlights the pivotal role romantic couples play in popular culture and assesses the way this has forced people, and in particular gay people, to identify with the most unlikely characters. Horowitz employs video to deliver a sharp critique of the socio-political manipulation of television and the impact it has on our lives.