Although American artist Jonathan Horowitz’s works employ just about every art medium under the sun – sculpture, painting, film and installation – they persistently seem to undercut the status of these crafts. Ditching their independence, they appear instead as an ensemble cast of emblematic objects and props, demanding to be unlocked, scrambled and gently heartened back into action by the viewer.
Like chess pieces on a giant checkerboard, Horowitz’s exhibition ‘Art, History’ brings together some heavyweight socio-political players from our recent past. The pieces range from a ‘Two-sided Israeli/ Palestinian Flag’, to a replica of the Auschwitz sign ‘Untitled (Arbeit Macht Frei)’ and includes a work that alludes to the gay-rights movement, ‘Pink Curve’, a vinyl sticker of a white ribbon that recalls campaigns for Aids awareness and violence against women, and ‘Crucifix for Two’ (all 2010), which evokes scenes of religious fervour.These are the provocative and polemical signs and symbols of rallies, pasts, films, politics, struggles, wars and disasters. But what does art have to do with them?
Mounting a noteworthy, if oblique, argument for the inability of minimalist aesthetics to fully respond to the horrors of the Holocaust, Horowitz draws this very question to the fore. Responding to the major exhibits at The Holocaust Memorial Museum – by the likes of Ellsworth Kelly and Joel Shapiro – the artist presents irreverent takes on four of the commemorative commissions. Subtly reversing relationships, repeating methodologies and introducing new narratives, Horowitz satirises their perceived failures to fully question, generate or remember.
Horowitz’s hard-nosed conceptualism can be off-putting. Yet even without fully unpacking all of these references, there is something pleasingly unsettling in witnessing the signs and symbols of our shared collective memory laid bare in this manner.