By Klaus Biesenbach
This article refers to the P.S.1 exhibition Jonathan Horowitz: And/Or
Jonathan Horowitz
Official Portrait of George W. Bush Available for Free from the White House, Hung Upside Down
2001
Framed color print, 12 ½ in. x 10 ½ in.
Image courtesy Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York
Klaus Biesenbach, who organized the exhibition
Jonathan Horowitz: And/Or contributed
the following foreword to the artist’s monograph,
published on the occasion of Horowitz’s
first solo exhibition at a New York museum.
Biesenbach examines the political deftness of
Horowitz’s work, achieved through a nuanced
use of media and meditative qualities.
It is a delicate task to confront the failures
and resolutions of our civilization in real time. In
an art context, the fragile nature of this undertaking
is compounded, given the capacity of images
to simulate the very iconography they critique, or
to narrow the distinction between documentation
and fabrication. At a moment when the global
media industry is exponentially increasing in accessibility
and power, it is the balance of a simple
gesture, combined with a complex understanding
of language and the construction of meaning that
enables Jonathan Horowitz to comment effectively
on the events of the world in which he lives,
even as they are occurring. An important example, Official Portrait of George W. Bush Available for Free
from the White House, Hung Upside Down (2001),
is clearly explicated by its title. In the silent act
of turning the visage of the current leader of the
United States literally on its head, Horowitz conveys
an extremely outspoken message with one
very loaded semantic gap.
In his video works, the use of text has
become an important measure of time in a
medium already characterized by duration. In the
work mon.–sun. (1996), a monitor continuously
displays a single word each day, denoting the
respective day of the week, here and now. The
word, which also functions as an image, appears
still and yet has a temporal existence. Eventually
the counter on the VCR comes to an end, and
the tape is set to automatic rewind. A new tape
is inserted for each new day. The result is both
intensely deadpan and poetic. In Maxell (1990),
the name of a videocassette brand well known at
the time, is displayed on-screen, playing from a
tape that has been copied many times over. Many
generations removed from the original, the tape
is but a trace; the logo, which once stood as a
symbol for cutting-edge technology, deteriorates
into a blur of static as it loses information.
Je t’aime (1990) depicts a rigid cigarette going
limp as the growing heat burns in. What begins with
the appearance of a libidinous advertisement, set
against a solid blue background, becomes a portrait
of consumption and decay until the subject is no
more than an empty carcass of ash, a vanitas composition.
When the work was produced in 1990,
the image of a lit cigarette was perhaps more omnipresent;
smoking was still more socially acceptable
and retained more glamour. The 1980s had come
to an end, and AIDS was still as widespread as it
was fatal; the 1990s promised (or threatened) new
extremes in the political climate, pop culture, and
technology. The start of the next decade could
have been compared to the excess and dissolution
of late Rome; as in the predicament of the Maxell
tape, (over)exposure would soon bring about complete
deterioration. Fittingly, the exhibition at P.S.1
concludes with Horowitz’s chapter of works about
Rome (tourism or “travel” posters, images of the
city that have a promotional quality).
At the core of Horowitz’s work are the concepts
of love and death. Images from television
that stay with us and define us, these are moments
of horror (war, scandal), discomfort (anxiety, humiliating
experiences), and pleasure (beauty, fantasy,
the sensation of celebrity and its idols)—and they
are all perceived in reality and memory through the
same pixilated filter.