David Horvitz
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Wish you were here
David Horvitz interviewed by Jacqueline Clay and Katie Hood Morgan

David Horvitz is an artist based in New York, whose projects use mail, envelopes, and exchange as primary platforms, alongside email, blogs, RSS feeds, and social networks. His work rethinks the boundaries of the art community, the validity of authenticity, and the possibilities for a dissolved and complicated voice.

Jacqueline Clay and Katie Hood Morgan
Can you talk about how you developed your web-based practice?

David Horvitz
I can trace back to the exact moment I began thinking seriously about using the Web in my practice. I didn’t study art when I was in college, but I took a lot of photo, video, and art theory classes, and I was prolific in those classes. But I would also do these online things, just for fun. One example was that I used to publish my photographs as Craigslist Missed Connections ads. Things like this didn’t fit into my classes or my perceived spectrum. But I was friends with my photo teacher, and I would show her these things I was doing online. At one point I had to make a portfolio, and I put all of my photo and video work in it. My teacher asked, “Where is all that other stuff you are doing?” That was when it clicked that that was an essential part of my practice. It later began to dominate my thinking and activities.

JC and KHM
Much of your practice takes place on the Internet in various ways: you share parts of your everyday life on Tumblr and Twitter, or post videos you come across (just today, a YouTube video of someone cooking bok choy).

DH
I liked finding that bok choy video. It wasn’t made for a TV show or cooking website, and the cooks weren’t famous. It was just a normal family showing people how they cook their bok choy. This is what is great about the Internet. It goes two ways: you view, but you also create what is viewable. Instead of using one resource for information, like a book, there are hundreds of variations. It’s folk knowledge.
I employ these technologies and communication infrastructures in both my art practice and daily life practice. A few days ago I was walking through Crown Heights in Brooklyn as the sun was setting. The light made everything look perfect. I came across a lady standing on the sidewalk looking through a box of Bosc pears. I watched her hands as she looked for the perfect one, making a decision as to which one she would eat. I described this moment in as few words as I could and tweeted it. I don’t know who reads my Twitter, or why, but it’s nice to know that this trivial moment was communicated.

JC and KHM
Does this quasi-public elaboration of your practice trouble your sense of privacy?

DH
When you say “trouble,” I think of the burden of always being connected, of being in immediate reach. If I have a daily email list of a thousand people, what happens if they all respond to an email? I can’t respond to or even read every response. I use these technologies to create a more direct connection with someone; this is great, but it can also be a burden. This burden is a complicated matter. It is only a burden because it consumes time and puts you on call. Much of my daily work is spent doing emails hours a day. For my 2009 email list I contacted about 1,000 people every day. At one point there were roughly 4,000 people following the blog. Imagine if everyone on the list emailed back their thoughts. This never happened, but it was possible. I like the immediacy, but it can be overwhelming too.

JC and KHM
Does locating your artistic practice in information networks—in social networking, Twitter, email, and in the mail—connect you to previous artists who used the mail system? (On Kawara’s postcards come to mind, as does Fluxus.)

DH
I like Kawara’s work, but I don’t necessarily see the works I do through the mail as being connected to that history. When I use the mail, it’s about the distance, the communication, the movement from one person or place to another person or place—about the journey that a letter takes. I don’t take my art and then mail it, in those two steps. The mailing itself, the thinking about the distance—that is where the piece is.
I don’t really think about Fluxus that much as relating to my art practice. This is not my intention as an artist—to blur art and life. I relate to On Kawara’s work because of its existential and even zen readings. But when people bring up Fluxus, it’s usually because of my use of the mail (and email). When I use mail, it is about the communication, the delivery infrastructure, the distance in-between, the post-card, the mailing list, etc.

JC and KHM
In the case of your website there is an additional distance between conception and reception. How flexible are your expectations for the reception of your work? How do you gauge people’s reactions?

DH
I have been thinking a lot about what happens when an artist puts their art on the Internet. Immediately their audience goes beyond a strictly art audience. When you put art in a gallery, audiences recognize it as art. When you put art online, there is the chance that someone else, who may not know you are an artist, may stumble upon your work. Using my blog as an example, the work may not declare in an obvious manner, “I am art.” This is great because more people see your work, but there are negative aspects also. One is that your work is now viewed as pop culture, and therefore it is viewed less critically. I’ve received emails saying a new post I made was boring; reading my blog is just entertainment for some people.

JC and KHM
When researching your work we participated in your project David Horvitz thought about us (December 10, 2009, 9:55am—9:58am). This project questions the labor of thinking and our faith in the role of the artist. For instance, we have no way of knowing whether you truly performed this act.

DH
For that ongoing project I send out two emails: one when I start thinking and the other a minute later, when the thinking is done. These emails serve as proof, though I could easily send the emails while thinking about something else. But I didn’t, and that is where your faith is needed. The piece exists in my thinking about the viewer, instead of the viewer thinking about the piece. Then, of course, the viewer could think about my thoughts of them. It’s also important that the work is open, in that you can’t buy the piece in an edition of 10 or 100; you buy it, and it’s only for you.

JC and KHM
For this exhibition, your project Untitled (Bosphorus), 2010, involves writing and mailing 100 envelopes to a selection of the Wattis mailing list—a laborious task. How will your use of the mailing list connect to your interest in distribution? And why send the piece from Istanbul?

DH
Untitled (Bosphorus) plays with ideas of intimacy and also the labor, as you call it, of the personal. I hand-write each note, addressing them to individual recipients. The envelope will arrive unexpectedly without announcing itself as art, and may generate some confusion. The recipient may sit down for a few minutes trying to figure out who I am. They will only figure out what the envelope means if they go to the exhibition, or if they find out from someone else.
I am selecting names from the mailing list that the Wattis uses to send out promotional announcements. Using their list for my purposes, my project can be seen as a kind of hijacking or spamming. But I will not send announcements or advertisements; I will mail an image I took last October. The photograph depicts the Bosphorus Strait from a fisherman’s boat. I will mail it from Istanbul so the addressee will receive this unexpected photograph from Turkey from someone they don’t know.

JC and KHM
How does travel inform your work? Of all the other images from your travels, how did you arrive at the Bosphorus photo?

DH
I can’t give you a concrete answer. I was browsing through all my digital photographs, and the Bosphorus one is what I chose. This strait is a kind of imaginary boundary—it separates European Turkey from Asiatic Turkey. I paid two fishermen to take me out of the Bosphorus and into the Black Sea last October. Browsing through my photographs brought me back to that experience, and I chose that one for this exhibition. It was just a simple choice.

JC and KHM
What do you mean by “hijacking or spamming?” And how are distance, distribution, and the journey of a physical envelope different from an email or phone call?

DH
In a sense, they are all similar in that they all journey from one place to another. One may be through wires or servers as data, and another may be an actual physical object in motion. Both are a movement, and rely on a certain infrastructure. I chose the actual postal mail because of its objectness; a physical thing is transported from one place to another. I’ve done work with email announcement lists and I wanted to go to the predecessor, the postal mail list.

JC and KHM
You are also developing Untitled (Gift), 2010, in which the Wattis sends a gift to another arts institution. You have mentioned that you are interested in the idea of a gift as sacrifice.  How do you see your role as an agent between the selected institutions?

DH
I was speaking of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1986 film The Sacrifice, in which a discussion occurs over the gifting of a 17th century map. One character says that a gift must be a sacrifice for the one who gives it, for it to be a true gift. I don’t believe that this idea of sacrifice is happening in the gift exchange I propose. There is a work I want to make in the future, which may be very difficult, in which I would coordinate the unexpected and spontaneous giving of a piece from one institution’s permanent collection to another institution or organization. That would be a real sacrifice.

JC and KHM
We have been reading Marcel Mauss in conjunction with this project. He famously asked the question, “What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” The answer for him is simple: the gift is a toll or duty imbued with “spiritual mechanisms,” engaging the honor of both giver and receiver. How does his theorizing around the gift as fundamental to social and financial economies express itself in this project?

DH
Mauss was writing about gift economies in pre-capitalist societies. What I am curious about in this project is the off-balance that happens in introducing a gift in a non-gift economy, in a professional situation, in a professional relationship. Is something interrupted? Is there something awkward that occurs? When an unannounced gift arrives, how does the receiver respond, if at all? We don’t live in a gift economy, so I can only imagine how the gift can complicate, for better or for worse, the world we live in right now. A contemporary look at the gift economy is a kind of longing, and a kind of after-the-fact. So, it’s looking at the present, and thinking of alternatives. The Mauss describes a gift economy in earlier stages of human society, but the contemporary viewer will ask, where do we go now?

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