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.
Jonathan Horowitz was born in New York and continues to live and work in New York state. Horowitz has been included in numerous key exhibitions of recent years including, The Eighth Square: Gender, Life, and Desire in the Visual Arts Since 1960, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany, 2006; Into Me / Out of Me, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY, 2006; Down by Law, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Realit;-)t. 30 Video Works from the Goetz Collection in Munich. From Olaf Breuning to Sam Taylor-Wood, Seedamm Kulturzentrum, Pfaffikon, Switzerland, 2005; Superstars: From Warhol to Madonna, Kunsthalle Wien and Kunstforum Wien, Vienna, Austria, 2005; 100 Artists See God, ICA, London, 2004; Genealogies of Glamour: The Future has a Silver Lining, Migros Museum, fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland, 2004
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.
Jonathan Horowitz was born in New York and continues to live and work there. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Greene Naftali in New York (2002) and at Kunsthalle St. Gallen in Switzerland (2001) and group shows in the U.S.A. and Europe, including at the Kunstverein Hamburg (2002) and The Americans at the Barbican Art Centre in London (2001).