KATE MOSS SNORTS LINE AFTER LINE

For his exhibition "People Like War Movies" in Berlin, although he does not really care for them Jonathan Horowitz agonized through war films and finally confronted viewers with brutal images of war over popcorn. For the series "19 Suspects" he reproduced pictures of suspected terrorists and turned the official portrait of former United States president George W. Bush upside down. The artist, born in 1966 in New York, appropriates images from the media for the purpose of demonstrating, for example, how the fear of terrorism is propagated and enemy stereotypes are contrived, or how they eliminate the boundaries between private and public when they show Kate Moss snorting cocaine.

One would like to peg Horowitz as someone who produces "political art." He once revealed in an interview that for him, everything is essentially political. But what he is more interested in is human interaction. Horowitz's approach to work stands entirely in the tradition of Andy Warhol, whose works also alternate between being a political statement and an analysis of human existence by appropriating press images and reproducing them in paintings and silkscreen prints. Warhol's "Race Riot" from 1964 is perhaps one of his most political: the picture, taken from "Life" magazine, shows Afro-Americans demonstrating for civil rights being attacked by police dogs. In 1983, media mogul Hubert Burda commissioned the work "Magazine and History," for which Warhol produced silkscreen prints of several covers of the weekly magazine "Bunte," furnished them with his characteristic coloring, and combined them to produce a collage.

Horowitz also stages found material that speaks for itself, manipulating it only by performing a minimum of interventions. The principle is simple: like Warhol once did, he holds up a mirror to society. For the work "Daily Mirror," which is currently being shown at the SCHIRN in the group exhibition "Paparazzi!" he took this literally. Viewers see themselves in a mirror together with the logo and headline of the September 15, 2005 edition of the "Daily Mirror": "Cocaine Kate: Supermodel Kate Moss Snorts Line after Line." The potentially scandalous model has been one of the paparazzi's favorite stars since the 1990s. The headline promises even more baffling pictures on the inside pages. Yet viewers only see their own image--Horowitz removed the picture on the cover and a smaller one on it, which featured Kate Moss allegedly snorting cocaine.

Warhol's Grandson, a Child of the Pictures Generation

With "Daily Mirror," Horowitz boldly comments on what the paparazzi aesthetic draws on: voyeurism, the dissolution of the private in the public, the idle wish of people themselves being a star--all phenomena of the media society that so fascinated Andy Warhol. However, he is not only Warhol's grandson, but also a child of the American pictures generation, which in the 1980s began appropriating and manipulating photographs, films, and the covers of popular magazines for the purpose of critically reflecting on political and social conditions.

Horowitz addresses a broad spectrum of themes; the list of issues he handles primarily includes the cancers of our current day and age--from homophobia and hypocritical politicians to the environmental sins of industrial society. And he is a staunch vegetarian as well. A goody two shoes in the guise of an artist? Horowitz did not study at an art school but received a BA in philosophy in 1987. This may be why there is a grain of greater complexity in his works than in those of many of his fellow artists.

Klaus Biesenbach organized a first retrospective of Horowitz's oeuvre at New York's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 2009. The earliest work it presented was a video from 1990 that features nothing other than the word "Maxwell," the name of a company that produces videocassettes. Horowitz repeatedly copied the videotape until there was nothing else visible except blurred lettering, in doing so commenting on the obsolescence of the medium. Videotapes are a thing of the past, but the tabloids tenaciously hold their ground. Millions of people continue to read the "Daily Mirror."