Jonathan Horowitz

Jonathan Horowitz’s current show at Barbara Weiss reinterprets the term “silent movie,” interweaving four Hollywood films about deaf-mutes and setting them to a sound track provided by a piano whose keyboard seems to be phantasmically operated. The montage juxtaposes scenes from Johnny Belinda (1948), The Story of Esther Costello (1957), the Helen Keller biopic The Miracle Worker (1962), and the Who’s rock opera Tommy (1975). In the chosen excerpts, images of violence and sexual penetration build toward a dramatic climax in which each protagonist experiences a kind of triumphant deliverance from the restrictions of disability. Movie posters on the gallery’s walls further the theme, casting Keller as a freedom-fighting punk heroine. As in Horowitz’s previous shows such as “Go Vegan!” (on view last year at Büro Friedrich), the moral message comes through loud and clear. But whose message is it, and what’s the intention behind it? The construction of meaning through the adaptation of media sources somehow works too well here to be taken at face value—you get the sense there’s something more complicated going on. And it is this disquieting ambiguity—more than the emotionally charged language of his film—that makes Horowitz’s appropriation strategy interesting.