David Horvitz’s date of birth is always recorded differently in the wall texts of his shows. Whether through books, mail, email, the internet, clock, telegram, Twitter, or Wikipedia, his work reflects upon and interferes with systems of circulation, adapting them to unexpected purposes. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
David Horvitz
Yu-Chieh Li: Last week you passed me an envelope of seeds of some kind and said I should spread the seeds anywhere I want. It seems that I became your mail carrier, spreading some message unknown to me for you around the city. It makes me think of how On Kawara observed himself through a recording of the route of his activities on city maps in his project I Went in the pre-internet age. You take an opposite position, because the seeds travel with their carrier, and land somewhere, like a footprint for my journey. Compared to your other works, which could be called “mail art,” for which you mailed found objects or notes to Zanna Gilbert, which she subsequently displayed at the cubicle at MoMA, this seeds project is more intangible, less controllable.
David Horvitz: They’re California poppy seeds. If you want to see what California used to look like, look up the poppy fields of Lancaster. The hills are orange when the flowers are in bloom. Maybe I’ll see some in New York, and maybe they will be the seeds you have thrown. Just don’t throw them too early, wait until after winter. But this wasn’t an artwork. This was from our wedding! Or, maybe it was. Who knows?
A mailed found object by David Horvitz. © 2015 David Horvitz.
YL: It’s a beautiful thought—if it is not intended to be a work. That idea of letting things grow through time intrigues me, as a primitive way to sense time passing. For example, mail also inscribes time in a medium, through the travel of stamps. How did you start to make the connection between mail and art practice? After all, we’re in a post-internet age.
DH: With the internet you are only sending information. Maybe the information turns to language, or maybe it turns images. It is communication, but it is constructed from information. Whereas in the mail you send something from your hands to someone else’s hands. There is matter and tactility in this form of communication.
Lewis Hine, Frank Hastings, 107 Hampshire Street, Cambridge, 1917. An image used in the project #VadeMecum (5992. I Will, with Pleasure, Take Letters for You.
YL: That makes me think about how you materialized tweets and carried them by train from San Francisco to Washington D.C. Do you mind talking about that? What messages do the tweets actually carry when they are turned into hard copies?
DH: That project was commissioned by Creative Time. They commissioned three artists to do Twitter projects. It was funny, they asked me to do a project, and they really wanted me to make photographs. So I told them they had to buy me an iPad. They asked me to use my iPhone, and i told them, I don’t have an iPhone. And I still don’t. I still tweet using my dumb phone, typing in each message slowly, letter by letter. It’s nice, it creates a slowness to writing something. There is room for reflection in the slow construction of that small amount of text. Maybe it’s like writing a haiku. But yes, my project was about thinking back to the beginning of electronic communication, to the first moment when a message was sent that was not carried by someone, or some animal. Though, there are instances in history where communication was not carried: lighthouses, light messages, smoke signals, balloons, bells, etc. My project was thinking about the message in motion, about what happens to it, where it goes. It does have a journey through signals, cellular devices, wifi, and so on, but I wanted to examine the history of this, and think about the weight of a message. And to think about distance, about the distance between two people.
A statement sent out via email by David Horvitz at the Biennial in Limerick. © 2015 David Horvitz.
YL: In terms of communication, like you, I prefer a slower kind. I hope the rhythm of this dialogue is comfortable to you. We’re using a Google Doc, so the chat is comparable to letter writing. I’m interested in the time difference between sending and receiving messages through various ways of communication: you receive a letter written, perhaps, by someone a month ago, a telegram sent a week ago, or nowadays a voice message left to you minutes or even seconds ago. Although this interval shrinks as communication technology has improved, you still receive a message created from someone in the past, and then respond to this person living in the future. You said you were exploring the message in motion, perhaps with an emphasis on spatial distances. Have you ever explored this time lag that I mentioned?
DH: This is not letter writing! This is done in between moments of work, when we have some free time. We click on the tab that is open on our computer, and maybe there are twenty other tabs open (there were 60, but the computer crashed and they were all lost). And everything is asking for attention, and we can’t move. OK<<<< maybe I am just talking about myself. Or am I? You actually touched on two things I’ve written in the past. It was weird, like a déjà vu moment… Maybe you’ve done your research and you’ve already read them! Did you? I did a piece in Ireland where I stayed synchronized to California time, but while physically in Ireland. So my breakfasts were at 8am CA time… Which was already the afternoon. And my dinners were at dawn… I sent out emails during this project, where I was reflecting on the idea of correspondence.From a conversation I did with Kristina Lee Podesva, I said, “I find it fascinating how because of digital technology—because of its instantaneous speed, because of this machine of memory—we can carry on a coherent conversation scattered over space and time. It reminds me of two people playing chess in different locations and sending their next move to each other through the postal mail.”
David Horvitz. Dublin Foxes. 2014. 64 pages, 18 × 28 cm, blue and red Risographic print, soft cover, edition of 100 copies. © 2015 David Horvitz.
David Horvitz. Dublin Foxes. 2014. 64 pages, 18 × 28 cm, blue and red Risographic print, soft cover, edition of 100 copies. © 2015 David Horvitz.
YL: I did read about your project at the biennale in Limerick but I didn’t know this interview. Yes, there’s a weird déjà vu! At Limerick, you were in fact disrupting the technological time between correspondences, and that was made possible through your body, your location, and your time. I smiled when I read your poem, “Maybe this has nothing to do with time, / and everything has to do with foxes.”
But everything is about time. Because you, the artist, became a new measurement for time, and intervene in the process of message circulation. At least in both The Traveler’s Vade Mecum and the project for Limerick.
DH: Do you know about the piece I did in Warsaw and Brussels? The gallery opened on the same day my friend gave birth. It was announced that the opening would be at the moment of birth. Obviously, you can’t predict this. So no one knew when the opening would be. The gallery couldn’t even make a Facebook event page because you have to know when something will happen to have an event. You can’t have an event that is unpredictable, spontaneous… So that’s about time, and about schedules, and about a different kind of schedule. Like the schedule of the body, or of a baby’s body, or maybe of the moon or something else.
David Horvitz. somewhere in between the jurisdiction of time. 2014. © 2015 David Horvitz.
YL: I think it’s interesting to ask “When does the clock stop ticking and what ways of life are audible after hours?” In your project in Warsaw, the artificial convention by which we measure time has obviously ceased to work. Chance—or things that happen without a calendar—is more real and tangible than logical time itself. Human beings have invented different ways to tell the unknown and measure the unmeasurable. (What’s your personal oracle?) You have turned the abstractions of time and space into tangible works: somewhere in between the jurisdiction of time (2014) is about this unmeasurablility. You materialized the longitudinal line in the Pacific where time for Alaska and French Polynesia’s Îles Gambier diverges, through bottling the water along the line in glass containers. You can never be sure which side of the line the water belongs to. They’re floating along this fabricated line. And I think the performance for Let us Keep Our Own Noon (2013) goes back to the ancient notion of human beings measuring distance through sound. So they are about time and space, basic philosophical questions that are dealt with by the earliest civilizations.
DH: With bells, time had a sound. Time was aural. With clocks, time is visual. With vision, it is about space, defining time in terms of space. If you look at an analog clock, time is told by the hand moving through space. The same how a shadow would move across a sundial. With the bell, time is marked in time. It’s there, then it’s not. The moment is over. Imagine a clock that appeared at noon, and disappeared. And what about smell? Was time ever smelt? Actually, yes, I’ve read about a Chinese incense clock.
YL: How does the time for waiting for a baby to come smell, sound, and look?
DH: It has something to do with the moon. A lunar clock. Or a hormonal clock.
David Horvitz. Let Us Keep Our Own Noon, 2013. © 2015 David Horvitz.
Postscript: This conversation was completed across time zones when David was in New York City and Yu-Chieh traveled to India and Hong Kong. At that time David and his partner Zanna were waiting for the coming of their daughter Ela. She was born in an Uber car on the way to the hospital, at 5:52 am on March 30. When Ela unexpectedly came to the world in the back seat while the car was still driving, David reached over and picked up Ela. The timing was not calculated. Afterwards, David told his friends and the press, “I had always wanted to catch the baby.”
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