David Horvitz

From David Horvitz's 'Every Egg Roll in NYC,' a project in which Horvitz ate an egg roll from every Chinese takeout restaurant in New York City. It took him two years to complete.

David Horvitz is a Brooklyn-based watercolor painter, photographer and performance artist, known for his often bizarre and absurdist DIY instructional projects, including work on Wikipedia. He was born in Los Angeles, California in 1980, and educated at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. He has published several books, and his exhibitions have been shown at major galleries and museums, including Art Metropole, the Or Gallery, and the New Museum. In 2011 he was nominated for the Discovery Award at the photography festival in Arles, France. His works are always released directly into the Public Domain with a Creative Commons license. An example is his ongoing series of watercolors depicting objects he has shoplifted, in which Horvitz paints small objects he has stolen, and then publicly releases the images online.

Discovered lost Bas Jan Ader film

In 2009 Horvitz released the artist-book Rarely Seen Bas Jan Ader Film, with Los Angeles based publisher 2nd Cannons Publications. A few years prior Horvitz discovered a lost film by Bas Jan Ader, the Dutch conceptual artist who was lost at sea in 1975. The film was found at the University of California at Irvine, where Ader had taught before his disappearance. Before becoming a book, the video had circulated online on various sources, including Youtube. The video had been repeatedly removed, which Horvitz claimed was from the requests of the gallery who represents Ader's estate. ^[1]

241543903 project

On April 6, 2009, Horvitz posted a picture with his head in a freezer on his Flickr account. He said he got the idea after telling his friend Mylinh Nguyen to try sticking her head in a freezer to cure her sickness. He picked the number 241543903, which was the part number of his refrigerator.

He then posted the following instruction on Tumblr: "Take a photograph of your head inside a freezer. Upload this photo to the internet (like Flickr). Tag the file with 241543903. The idea is that if you search for this cryptic tag, all the photos of heads in freezers will appear. I just did one". By January 2010, there were hundreds of Flickr photographs filed under the tag "241543903" and the idea soon spread to other social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.^[2]

In November 2010, the meme was mentioned in Horvitz' book of instructions titled Everything That Can Happen in a Day, published by Random House.

Wikipedia projects

Wikipedia Reader

In A Wikipedia Reader (2009) Horvitz asked a group of artists to conduct a Wikipedia search and then to continue onto other articles through linked words, "creating a string of ideas that could be printed and presented as a series of articles in a newspaper-like format. The resulting collection represents 23 of these mental maps, which chart the artists' short journeys through the wilds of the collectively edited online encyclopedia. The book was commissioned by the Art Libraries Society of New York.

Public Access

In December 2010 and January 2011, Horvitz and Ed Steck drove the whole California coast up the Pacific Coast Highway, starting at Border Field State Park on the Mexican Border, and ending at Pelican State Beach on the Oregon Border. At each of 50 chosen locations, Horvitz took pictures of the ocean view, standing with the frame of the shot. "All of these images were then placed onto the Wikipedia articles about the different locations".

The intent was that these images would begin to circulate in this public place as visual information surrounding the geographic location, as a kind of metadata for the locations. Another thought that emerged from this project was a play between the ideas of omnipresence and remoteness. There is an omnipresence to the internet. It is a site of the instantaneous flowing of information between different locations. Some of the locations I ventured to were remote. They were out of cell-phone signal, away from cities, and sometimes even miles from highways. They were accessible, but took effort to get there.^[3]

This provoked opposition in the Wikipedia community, as its members tried to work out the identity of the uploader (who was contributing from different IP addresses and account names), and his or her purpose. Some of the photos were cropped, and most of them were deleted from Wikimedia Commons, the hosting site which had been facilitating their use on Wikipedia.

A text about the event by Steck, and the photos taken for Public Access are now on view at "As Yet Untitled: Artists and Writers in Collaboration" at SF Camerawork in San Francisco. Included in the exhibition are also poems written by Zach Houston, a poet and friend who accompanied Horvitz on half of the road-trip.^[4]

The Xiu Xiu Polaroid Projects

From 2005 to 2007 Horvitz made the Xiu Xiu Polaroid Projects while working as tour-manager on tours with the indie rock band Xiu Xiu. On the band's web-site, Horvitz asked attendees of the concerts to bring in unused packs of polaroid film. While on the tour, he shot all the photographs, and then mailed the pictures back to the people who gave him the film. This was all done for free. It is estimated that roughly 10,000 polaroids exist in these projects. This would be considered one of Horvitz's early distribution projects. Horvitz has written inside the introduction to the book about the project:

The polaroid projects with Xiu Xiu were about distribution. I made the photographs on the tour, while traveling, with film brought to each concert by people I didn't know, who read about the project online. The images weren't just of the band, there were photographs of roads, trees, food, the sky, motel beds, parking lots, billboards, my bleeding nose. They were from those moments, mostly thought of as dull, while traveling from show to show. I used this time and space to make these images. It is a time of waiting, of an extreme sense of the quotidian. In the end a solid body of photographs were made. But after they were all sent back to the people who had brought the film, this solidity existed only in a scattered state, as distributed content. In a sense, the same places where the photographs were made - throughout North America - is the same place where the photographs ended up. It was as if they were depicting their destiny. I own none of these images, and may never see the originals again.^[5]

Pinocchio Taken Down by Security Action and Video

In July of 2008 a video was posted to Youtube showing two people dressed in Pinocchio costumes running out of the Hessel Museum on the Bard College campus. A security guard chases after them, and tackles one of the Pinocchio's to the ground. The action was later identified as done by Horvitz and a friend, who apparently ran out of the museum wearing part of an art-work by artist, Paul McCarthy, that was currently on display in the museum. It is not known if any legal actions were brought against Horvitz and his friend. On a website, the two stated:

On July 19, 2008 we extended Paul McCarthy's video/ costume piece, Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma (Party Pack), which was being exhibited at the Hessell Museum on Bard College's campus, to the outside world.^[6]

Gallery

• 

  Watercolor Shoplifting series (November 5, 2011. Stockholm, Sweden. American to European Outlet Converter, Pomegranate, Persimmon.).

Exhibitions

• 2011: Exhibition at Rencontres d'Arles Festival, France for the Discovery Award (laureate)

References

• Horvitz, D., Everything that can happen in a day, Random House 2010 ISBN 978-1-935613-06-0 (1-935613-06-5)
• Horvitz, D., My Grandmothers Recipes, Morava Books 2011 ISBN 978-83-926924-7-8
• Horvitz, D., Rarely Seen Bas Jan Ader Film, 2nd Cannons Publications 2009 ISBN 978-0-9820559-5-3
• A Wikipedia Reader, Brooklyn, NY: ASDF 2009.
• Public Access
• Xiu Xiu: The Polaroid Projects: The Book 2009

Notes

1. ^ Los Angeles Times
2. ^ Google image
3. ^ Public Access
4. ^ Rhizome | Something Fishy on Pelican State Beach
5. ^ Xiu Xiu: the Polaroid Projects: the Book
6. ^ http://davidhorvitz.com/pinocchio/

Persondata
Name	Horvitz, David
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Date of birth	1984
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