By Alex Kitnick
This article refers to the P.S.1 exhibition Jonathan Horowitz: And/Or
Jonathan Horowitz
Hellen Keller Coin (Capitalist Scheme)
2003
Stamp on envelope with ink jet print, 10 in. x 9 in.
Image courtesy Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York
In 1999, the United States Mint began issuing a
series of quarters which exchanged the coin’s
long-standing eagle for a sequence of designs celebrating
each of the fifty states. For the most part,
the new “tails” have turned out to be little more
than dignified license plates, a gaggle of paraphernalia
comprised of some combination of landmark,
animal, and crop: where Wisconsin shows off a
cornucopia of a cow’s head, an ear of corn, and a
wheel of cheese with a “Forward” banner unfurling
below the scene of plenty; Florida displays a
floating accumulation of a spaceship, a sailboat,
and a grove of palm trees. Amidst this formulaic
conception of the state as a series of commodities
and memories, Alabama appears as the exception,
offering an image of Helen Keller seated in a chair,
her hand on an open book and her name spelled
out in an infinitesimal braille. Aside from Illinois’
miniature rendering of Lincoln, it is the only state
to identify itself with a person.
While in many ways the selection of Keller
seems a rather serious and dignified decision for
a commemorative coin, especially when seen
next to Mississippi’s banal sprig of magnolia and
Indiana’s touristy depiction of a race car, there
are reasons to question such a decision, and not
only because Keller spent the majority of her life in
Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. The
capturing of Keller on the Alabama quarter performs
heavy symbolic labor and covers up some
of the less savory parts of the state’s past. It is
not only Alabama’s history that is rewritten in this
move, however, but Keller’s as well. Pictured as an
emblem of diligence and hard work, the adversity
of Keller’s life story is enlisted here as a kind of
moral backing, giving the coin its worth. (“Her past
efforts teach us the value of a dollar,” one might
say). A more complete and complex knowledge of
Keller’s thinking, however, makes it clear how out
of place she is here—a fact that becomes apparent
to anyone who sees Jonathan Horowitz’s Helen
Keller Quarter (Capitalist Scheme) (2003). In this
work the Alabama quarter is presented in its first
day of issue envelope, matted on a green background
and captured in a gold-leaf frame ready for
installation in a numismatist’s well-appointed living
room. A quotation from Keller emblazoned in the
work’s lower register, however, turns the scene
strange: “A dollar that is not being used to make
a slave of some human being is not fulfilling its
purpose in the capitalistic scheme,” it reads. While
Keller’s commemoration on the coin functions
to conceal her socialist beliefs, Horowitz’s work,
through a simple maneuver, makes such contradictions
clear.
If Capitalist Scheme unlocks Keller from
the restraints of official history and realigns her
with her original views, other works by Horowitz
enter her into alternative media and narratives. In
a series of poster-like paintings titled Punk Helen (2003), a furious-looking Keller (an actress playing
her, in fact, in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker)
appears in lurid pinks and greens with a series of
militant quotes written below in a Sex Pistols-like
font. Though this punk aesthetic might be seen to
parody Keller’s thought as much as the Alabama
quarter evacuates it, reducing her convictions to
a well-worn and by now commodified cliché of
youthful rebellion, it also attempts to bind together
word and image in hopes of creating a functional
visual language of protest. As Horowitz has said in
an unpublished interview, “I don’t see aesthetics
as opposed to politics or critical thinking. What I’m
interested in is creating a visual, aesthetic language
that communicates. With Punk Helen there’s an
element of irony in the work’s “style of thinking”,
but that doesn’t make the piece a put-on.” In an
exhibition held at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in 2005
Horowitz dubbed this style of thinking “The New
Communism”. “In The New Communism, contradictions
abound,” Horowitz says. “The New
Communist philosophy eschews rigid idealism
and accepts contradiction and inconsistency—it’s
pragmatic. Helen Keller was a communist but Punk
Helen’s a new communist.”
But how pragmatic, we might ask, does
Horowitz really want to be? What is it exactly
that he is trying to communicate? And what public,
moreover, is he trying to communicate with?
It is notable that given Horowitz’s frequent use
of popular imagery, his work never reenters the
media from which it came; all his work—that I am
aware of at least—is made for and resides in the
art gallery. One might say that Horowitz uses the
white cube as a kind of laboratory for analyzing
and reworking media imagery, raising issues and
making connections that often fail to circulate in
the culture at large. But this work, it seems, is not
done with the idea of taking these messages back
to the streets. There is a way in which Horowitz’s
work retreats from the world even as it engages
it. It is full of in-jokes and poignant connections. It
appreciates its own cleverness and takes pleasure
in being coy, in communicating obliquely, in appealing
to a coterie or a community rather than giving
rise to a public. If the work’s method is indebted
somewhat to a political form of détournement, it is
even more deeply rooted in a fidelity to the artist’s
own subjectivity.
Alex Kitnick has participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University.