Curated by Klaus Biesenbach
Taking artistic opportunism to its logical, tongue-in-cheek extreme, Jonathan Horowitz’s most recent show was titled “Obama ’08” and featured a kitschy, Koons-y bronze of a certain Democratic senator from New York. The artist’s first solo New York museum outing—into which curator Klaus Biesenbach corrals more than fifteen years’ worth of video, sculpture, photography, and sound installations—promises the return of that statuette, Hillary Clinton Is a Person Too, 2008, along with many other sardonic delights. Check, for example, the dubious politicization—by insertion of incendiary slogans—of his celebrity portraits’ subjects (Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda), or the built-in obsolescence of Maxell, 1990, the artist’s video of a slowly degrading videocassette logo. Taking aim at a range of contemporary fools and follies, Horowitz calls foul on the strange attractors of fame, fortune, and popular media.
