Jonathan Horowitz @ Sadie Coles HQ, London

Jonathan Horowitz: Pre-Fall '17
Sadie Coles HQ, London
7 March - 6 April 2019

In his latest exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, Jonathan Horowitz presents a series of new works – spanning video, installation and digital printing – which address some of the defining issues of contemporary politics. Extending the threads of political critique, understated humour and allusion to both art history and mass culture that have defined his practice from the beginning, the exhibition stands as an incisive commentary on our current era.

In a new four-channel film video, Transfer of Power (Gucci Soul), Jonathan Horowitz juxtaposes four found video sources that reflect the complex dynamics between power, branding and appropriation. One video shows Kellyann Conway – the advisor and confidant of Donald Trump – on the day of the president’s inauguration, walking through the corridors of the Capitol in a Gucci coat. Her fashion choice was widely lampooned on social media at the time. Another shows a Gucci fashion show at Westminster Abbey in 2016, where Conway’s outfit first appeared. The fashion show was conspicuous for its near exclusive use of white models. A third video shows a Gucci fashion video from the same year, featuring an all-black cast of models wearing Gucci outfits and dancing to Frankie Valli’s The Night (itself an example of Northern Soul – a British appropriation of black American music). The grid is completed by the video for Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Apeshit (2018), which was shot in the Louvre and features luxury brands alongside masterpieces of western art.

Jonathan Horowitz’s video starts from the premise of ‘Trump’ as a pseudo luxury brand. In one sense, Conway’s outfit is an arbitrary, comedic accident. She likely bought the outfit simply because there is a Gucci store at Trump Tower. But it is not an accident that there is a Gucci store there. Like Tiffany, which occupies the other building on Trump Tower’s block, the power of ‘Trump’ is the power of a designer brand. Horowitz highlights the close interplay between power, fashion and mass culture, pointing to the larger social and historical realities that predetermine it. Conway’s power-dressing (like Trump’s corporatized, gold-plated image of himself) evokes the uneasy proximity between far-right politics and glamorous trappings that Susan Sontag famously identified in her 1975 article ‘Fascinating Fascism’, quoting Jean Genet’s maxim that “Fascism is theatre”. Playing concurrently, Jonathan Horowitz’s interwoven, collaged videos combine into a meditation on the aesthetics of power, as much the power of aesthetics (from Gucci designs to cultural heritage) to reflect and reinforce ingrained structures, including racial divisions and the privileged category of ‘high’ art – the ultimate luxury good.

The trappings of consumerist society are also the subject of a large-scale vinyl diptych, which extends the format of Jonathan Horowitz’s long-running ‘Coke/Pepsi’ series. In Coke/Pepsi Diptych (2016 containers), expansive grids of drinks cans and bottles – arrayed like Pop Art cyphers – create the impression of a pluralist utopia of free choice. The impression is belied by the knowledge that the two drinks conglomerates own all of the products shown – one panel consists of all Pepsi products, the other all Coke products. In another work, Power, Horowitz reproduces the iPhone pop-up menu generated by clicking on the ‘yellow fist’ emoji, showing the fist in five different shades. The individual shapes are printed on cut out of PVC board, creating the effect of a digital space come to life. The corporate decision to subject the symbol to a gradient overlay has resulted in a clash of registers: ranging from black to brown to Simpsonian yellow, the raised fist becomes loaded with different and contradictory imports, pressing the viewer to make a choice.

In a second video piece, Jonathan Horowitz has compiled the names of the eighty-seven accusers of Harvey Weinstein into a dissolving sequence of paired ‘credits’ accompanied by the soundtrack and background imagery from the title sequence of Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession (1954). The classic movie is ironically redolent of an era of innocence in which Hollywood myths (such as that of the movie’s star, Rock Hudson, as a heterosexual romantic lead) were indestructible and all-pervasive. Projected in the centre of a wall hung with red velvet drapes, the work is like a minimalist memorial. In the wake of #MeToo and wider debates over gender politics, the installation brings down the curtain on the deeply rooted abuse of power within the Hollywood film industry.

JONATHAN HOROWITZ (b. New York, 1966) has exhibited work internationally since the early nineties. Recent exhibitions include 1612 Dots, the Oculus, World Trade Center, New York (2017); Occupy Greenwich, The Brant Foundation Art Study Centre, Greenwich, CT (2016); projects at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit and the Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art, New York (2016); Your Land/My Land: Election ’12, staged concurrently at seven museums across the US (from the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles to the New Museum, New York, 2012); minimalist works from the holocaust museum, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland (2010-11); Apocalypto Now, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, (2009); and the retrospective exhibition, Jonathan Horowitz: And/Or, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2009). Jonathan Horowitz lives and works in New York.

SADIE COLES HQ
62 Kingly Street, London W1
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Raymond Pettibon @ Sadie Coles HQ, London

Raymond Pettibon
Sadie Coles HQ, London
3 October - 17 November 2012

Sadie Coles HQ’s fifth exhibition with American artist Raymond Pettibon comprises an extensive series of recent drawings which manifest his art at its most eclectic.

Densely hung across the walls, the drawings involve Raymond Pettibon’s characteristic integration of disparate imagery and fragments of handwritten text lifted and adapted from myriad sources. His style shifts fitfully within and between the works, ranging from graphic line drawing in charcoal (for instance, a rapidly crosshatched Bible) which invokes his early cartoons, to expressionistic and painterly forms executed in combinations of gouache, acrylic and crayon.

Raymond Pettibon’s chaotic agglomerative method is equivalent to the ‘cut up’ technique adopted by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs in their book The Third Mind (1977). In an extension of this methodology, certain of Pettibon’s recent works literally employ collage. In No Title (Re-up periscope), pornographic excerpts from different drawings mass together into a bustling orgy, while a scribbled cartoon of a gun being discharged provides a comic superscript.

Raymond Pettibon’s quotations, aphorisms and fragments of dialogue – free-floating and suspended from context – vary between bizarre interpolations and apposite subscripts. The result is a continual lurch in mood – from the sensationalist to the mundane to the absurdist to the poetically ambivalent. A blotted Rorschach design is given the wry tagline “Readers who have any tincture of psychology know how much is to be inferred from this”. In No Title (Be content at), John Ruskin’s instructions on drawing (“Be content at present if you find your hand gaining command over the curves”) accompany an image of a naked woman holding her breasts – perhaps a parodic affront to Ruskin’s supposed sexual reticence.

Religious and art-historical tropes are paraphrased and bastardised it the same way as quotations and words (“Tryck Whutuyp” written beside Christ on the cross, is an invented variant of “whattup” or “whassup”). Christ and skulls appear variously; and a bowl of fruit implies an improvised still life. Many of the works also revisit themes and figures which have recurred throughout Pettibons’ career. Baseball players appear in works such as No Title (A hop, skiyp,), showing a lumbering figure bowling, or in the form of a randomly inserted mugshot of Johnny Broaca. As in much of Pettibon’s art, the sordid underbelly of American life is glimpsed: No Title (Do I bother) pictures a seedy nightclub, the gobbets of text conveying the sexual tension between a singer and dancer.

Raymond Pettibon’s works muse continually on the power dynamic between image and text – the capacity for one to inflect or undermine the other. Certain drawings veer into an autobiographical and self-reflexive mode: No Title (Of myself what) portrays Pettibon in a sports jacket with the epithet “Team Comes First” (possibly a fictional self-image). The work No Title (Missing accomplices. They) plays on its own fragmentariness through a jumble of sound bites. These reflect the slippery interflow of voices – public pronouncements, internal soliloquies, media jargon, clichés, street slang and poetry – defining Pettibon’s art.

Raymond Pettibon was born in 1957 in Tuscon, Arizona, and studied at UCLA in Los Angeles. As a young graduate he worked as a maths teacher before embarking on an artistic career, designing album covers for Black Flag and becoming associated with the Los Angeles Punk scene. In recent years Pettibon has numerous major solo shows including Whuytuyp, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (2012); ‘v-boom’, Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, Germany (2007); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006); and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005). Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2010 Pettibon received the prestigious Oskar Kokoschka prize. Raymond Pettibon lives and works in Los Angeles.

SADIE COLES HQ
69 South Audley St, London W1K 2QZ
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Carl Andre Exhibition in London at Sadie Coles HQ - Sculptures in basalt and in tavertine

Exhibition: Carl Andre 

Travertine / Basalt 

Sadie Coles HQ, London 

19 January - 5 March 2011 

An exhibition of stone sculptures by CARL ANDRE is on view at Sadie Coles HQ in London. TRAVERTINE / BASALT comprising a sequence of works in Icelandic basalt and two major works in travertine.

Throughout his fifty year career, Andre has created sculptures by placing standard units of stone, metal or wood in simple geometric arrangements. In early works such as Equivalents (1966; eight different configurations of 120 bricks) and Cuts (1967; a negative variant in which eight voids were made by removing combinations of blocks from a grid), Andre articulated the concepts of horizontality, repetition and implied extension that have remained central to his methodology.

Andre’s ALTBASE series of floor sculptures, made in Reykjavik in 1996, consists of differently sized groups of basalt squares (12, 15, 21, 24), variously stepped and layered in order to occupy the same three-by-three grid. GRECRUX (Rome, 1985), one of Andre’s earliest works in travertine, uses fifty-three blocks to form a square-shaped Greek cross or crux quadrata. Its intersecting lines accord with the artist’s famous statement in 1970 that “my ideal of sculpture is a road. That is a road doesn’t reveal itself at any particular point or from any particular point … I think sculpture should have an infinite point of view.” SUM ROMA (Marseille, 1997) arranges the same material in a thirty-unit solid triangle whose stepped form recurs throughout Andre’s oeuvre.

Eschewing metaphorical connotations, the sculptures draw attention to their essential materiality and to the stone’s intrinsic aesthetic qualities. The travertine works recall the material’s use in iconic Modernist buildings and in Roman art and architecture – an association underscored by the title of SUM ROMA. Andre was indeed originally inspired to use travertine by a trip past the quarries on the road to Tivoli. In common with the majority of Andre’s work, these pieces also foreground the dynamic between work, viewer and architectural context. The artist has tellingly described the progression of his own work, and twentieth century sculpture in general, as a shift in emphasis from ”sculpture as form” to “sculpture as structure” and finally “sculpture as place”. 

Along with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre emerged in the 1960s as one of the key exponents of Minimalism. In the late 1950s he shared a studio with Frank Stella, whose minimal black paintings of that period provided a formative influence, and in the 1960s he worked as a freight brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad – an experience that shaped his interest in linear forms and materials excised from pre-existing masses and contexts. A similarly significant episode was his realisation during a canoeing trip that sculpture could be “as flat as water”.

Carl Andre’s work has been the subject of a number of museum retrospectives, notably at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1970; the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas, in 1978; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1978; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 1987; the Haus Lange und Haus Esters, Krefeld; the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, in 1996; and the Musée Cantini, Marseilles, in 1997. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘@’, Alfonso Artiaco, Naples, Italy, and ‘Carl Andre’ at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. In 2013, Dia Art Foundation, New York, will host the first major retrospective of his work in North America.

Books available at Sadie Coles HQ Bookstore: 

James Meyer ed., Cuts: Texts 1959 - 2004, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2005

Paula Feldman, Alistair Rider and Karsten Schubert, About Carl Andre: Critical Texts since 1965, Ridinghouse, London, 2006

SADIE COLES HQ 

4 New Burlington Place 

LONDON W1 

www.sadiecoles.com

This month Sadie Coles HQ also exhibited work of TJ Wilcox (Through 22 January)

TJ Wilcox Exhibition in London at Sadie Coles HQ. The artist presenting two new filmsThe Heir and Astaire and Yours, Patsy Cline together with collages

T. J. Wilcox: Starring Patsy Cline

Sadie Coles HQ, London

Through 22 January 2011

For his latest show at Sadie Coles HQ, STARRING PATSY CLINE (2 December 2010 - 22 January 2011) TJ WILCOX is presenting two new films – The Heir and Astaire and Yours, Patsy Cline (both 2010) – together with collages on folding screens that translate their imagery into elaborate decorative motifs.

The Heir and Astaire is devoted to the marriage of early 20th century American theatrical star Adele Astaire (sister of Fred) and Lord Charles Cavendish. A daringly modern pair for their era (when princes weren't supposed to marry showgirls), Adele and Charles embodied the innovation, freedom and extravagant modern luxury of Anglo-American society in the interwar years. The film traces Adele's showbusiness success, retirement from dancing and short married life at Lismore Castle in, Ireland, the seat of the Devonshire family. Silent sequences of photographs from Adele's childhood and married life are interspersed with an interview with the current Dowager Duchess of Devonshire at Lismore about the couple. Wilcox oscillates deftly between past and present, with historical and present-day images of the castle's swimming pool (now filled in) encapsulating the film's nostalgic tenor.

Yours, Patsy Cline pays homage to the tragic star of American country music, exploring the enduring appeal of her musical performances, song choices and personal narrative. Wilcox has said "I find it remarkable and rare that there is something so essential in her expression of wistful loss, sorrow and longing that it continues to capture people fifty years after her songs were recorded (often in one take)." In the film he has accumulated a mass of online covers of Cline's signature tracks ,which have been assembled and edited together to form a 'choir' of internet soloists devoted to the singer.

The video screens have been mounted on the backs of folding screens, in an arrangement that highlights the interrelationship of the surface for film projection and the collaged surfaces – each serving as repositories of personal and historical reference. Wilcox's screens are collaged with coloured foil and acetate, echoing both the structures and pattering of antique Chinese screens: in one, an intricately silhouetted willow tree spreads across the panels in the style of embroidery or inlay. The folding screens accompanying The Heir and Astaire are akin to decorative objects from Adele Astaire's glittering Jazz Age, and underline what a vital form the screen was in the decorative arts of the 1920s and 1930s (the works have grown out of Wilcox's interest in the furniture designs of Eileen Grey, the églomisé – or gilded glass – panels made by Jean Dupas for the celebrated French ocean liner SS Normandie, and the lacquer works of Jean Dunand).

Since early films such as The Escape (of Marie Antoinette) (1996), TJ Wilcox has re-imagined the lives of iconic figures from the recent and distant past who have been defined as much through myth as historical fact. This dualism is reflected in Wilcox's intertwinement of documentary and dramatic elements. He combines archival film and photographs and alternates between silent subtitles and subjective internal voices to form multilayered filmic collages. He has commented that his work "takes a historical subject and revels in its details but ultimately makes that historical subject seem totally unfixed and unstable. This makes you realize that all histories are fabricated.". His works serve as intricate studies of nostalgia and collective memory, at once deconstructing and celebrating historical paradigms and personae. .

TJ WILCOX (b. 1965, Seattle) lives and works in New York. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York (BFA 1989) and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California (MFA 1995). One-person exhibitions include the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunstverein Munich; UC Berkeley Art Museum; Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. His films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Modern, London

Book available at Sadie Coles HQ Bookstore: T.J. Wilcox ed., T.J. Wilcox Films, JRP Ringier, Zurich, 2006

SADIE COLES HQ

69 South Audley Street 

LONDON W1 

www.sadiecoles.com

02-12 > 19-12 2010 -- 04-01 > 22-01 2011 

Jonathan Horowitz: Pillow Talk at Sadie Coles HQ, London

Jonathan Horowitz: Pillow Talk
Sadie Coles HQ, London
17 October - 16 November 2002

For his first show at Sadie Coles HQ, JONATHAN HOROWITZ presents Pillow Talk. The installation centres around the video work It’s Magic/Acting the Part: the Biographies of Doris Day and Rock Hudson. On two separate monitors the life stories of these two film icons run parallel, each one freezing to accommodate the other. Horowitz appropriates footage from television biographies of the stars’ lives, focusing on their final television reunion, when Rock appeared as the first guest on Doris’s talk show on the Christian Broadcasting Network. Suffering from dementia caused by HIV related illness, Rock showed up at the studio in a shockingly haggard state. Rock had not yet revealed his condition to Doris or the rest of the public, but when images from the recording were broadcast around the world, Rock was forced to acknowledge that he had AIDS.

With this admission the heterosexual, macho image Rock had maintained throughout his life was instantaneously shattered. As the footage demonstrates, his life and career would become a footnote to his homosexuality and death. In contrast, as portrayed in the Doris Day biography, the adversity that Doris experienced in her personal life served to reinforce her professional accomplishments and make her character more sympathetic.

In It’s Magic/Acting the Part, Jonathan Horowitz explores the peculiar balance between the public and private lives of stars of the small and large screens. In an age in which viewers believe they know intimately the actors they are watching, television becomes the only vehicle through which these actors can communicate with each other and perhaps even themselves.

Extending his focus from the romantic fiction of the Rock and Doris partnership, Horowitz examines the weird world of the celebrity couple. A mattress lies on a plinth in the gallery, on which rest two pillows silk-screened with the names of an improbable romantic pairing. On the walls above are photographs of over 100 sets of pillows, each bearing the names, in different typefaces, of more odd-ball partnerships: Dumb and Dumber; Leverne and Shirley; Liza and David; Ben and Jerry. Jonathan Horowitz highlights the pivotal role romantic couples play in popular culture and assesses the way this has forced people, and in particular gay people, to identify with the most unlikely characters. Jonathan Horowitz employs video to deliver a sharp critique of the socio-political manipulation of television and the impact it has on our lives.

JONATHAN HOROWITZ was born in New York and continues to live and work there. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Greene Naftali in New York (2002) and at Kunsthalle St. Gallen in Switzerland (2001) and group shows in the U.S.A. and Europe, including at the Kunstverein Hamburg (2002) and The Americans at the Barbican Art Centre in London (2001).

SADIE COLES HQ
35 Heddon Street, London W1
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