Jonathan Horowitz

About

Visitors are invited to recycle their own possessions by bringing something to place in or on one of them, and taking away whatever they wish. 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, Horowitz's work often constitutes in the first instance an investigation of media. This is 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 — Horowtiz 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 poltical 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'.