"Jonathan Horowitz: And/Or"

Archival Iris Print of an Image Downloaded from the Internet with Two Copies of the New York Post Rotting in Their Frames

Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York

I usually avoid quoting from exhibition wall texts, but there's a line in the one greeting visitors toJonathan Horowitz's mid-career survey at P.S.1 that's just too rich to pass up. It states that Horowitz"critically examines the cultures of politics, celebrity, cinema, war and consumerism," which leads us to wonder, Is that all? The curators are hardly overstating the case: Horowitz means to take on the Manin all of his (its?) cultural permutations. (Racism? Check. The military-industrial complex? Double-check.)The question here is whether the artist's sometimes slight conceptual gestures match his ambitions as a social commentator. The answer is, Of course not, but it's nice that he tries so hard to call our attention to justhow fucked up things really are.

Horowitz, 43, is the very model of a (post-) modern artist: He's gay, and his work is deeply indebted to Warhol—especially to Andy's probing of what might be called, paradoxically, the deep superficialities of popularculture. On this score, Horowitz's level of trash connoisseurship is quite high: He makes some arrestingly obscure references, in particular to actress Patty Duke playing Helen Keller in the 1962 Hollywood film The Miracle Worker.

Still, Horowitz's sexual orientation wouldn't be worth mentioning were it not for the fact that his approach is, in part, rooted in the political aesthetics of 1980s AIDS activist groups like Gran Fury and ACT UP. In Archival Iris Print of an Image Downloaded from the Internet with Two Copies of the New York Post Rotting in Their Frames, for instance, he practically ranks Ronald Reagan's neglect of the epidemicas a national sin right up there with slavery. We see the titular examples of decomposing dead-tree media (one Post cover announcing the 40th President's death in 2004; the other showing Nancy Reagan bending downto give the Gipper's flag-draped coffin a kiss) hung over the gaunt countenance of an AIDS patient. There's no doubt as to who will stand the test of time in Horowitz's view—ironic, given how dated the piece feels. Yet thework is saved from tedium by the elaborately long title, and the method it describes. More than anything, it demonstrates that Horowitz is a process artist updating the genre as a sociopolitical critique. He doesn't always hit his targets, but even his misses result in interesting failures.

Not surprisingly, Horowitz's chances of success improve whenever his content veers closest to form. In Maxell, from 1990, a video projection displays the blue-grey afterlife of the eponymous VHS brandname, copied repeatedly until information loss has dissolved it into a snowy blur. Similarly, mon–sun, done six years later, features a '90s-vintage TV and VHS player perched atop a metal shelf that also holds an array of cassettes, each labeled a different day of the week. When played, the tapes spell out the particular day and nothing else. The idea is to pop "Thursday" into the deck on a Thursday, but it seems to me that not bothering would be more in keeping with the work's beatific nihilism.

Horowitz eventually deviated from creating Arte Povera out of the banalities of late-20th-centurylife, plunging instead into the tendentious territory staked out by works like 2005's Untitled (Support Art About Nothing and Maintain the Status Quo) and Untitled (Operation Iraqi Freedom), from 2007. In the former, Horowitz sticks a nearly invisible decal of a giant AIDS ribbon to the wall; in the latter, lenticular images flicker between gruesome combat wounds and jingoistic graphics from cable-news coverage of the war.

There are moments, however, when Horowitz achieves a poetic equipoise between process and politics, nowhere more so than in The Soul of Tammi Terrell (2001). Terrell, the Motown star who died at age 24 of a brain tumor, was best known for partnering with Marvin Gaye on the song "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." Here, in a two-channel video, Horowitz pairs a clip of the duo performing the hit with a scene from the 1998 chick flick Stepmom, in which Susan Sarandon, as a woman dying of cancer, sings along with the tune. A whole hostof questions seems to be raised—about life imitating art, or about the uneasy codependence of white and black culture—until you realize that all of them, Sarandon as well as Terrell and Gaye, are lip-synching. And thisseems to be Horowitz's brutally postmodern point: There's no such thing as "soul" anymore, only the growing gap between what's real and what isn't—and the loss of information in between.

More Art reviews >>