Artists’ Picnic with David Horvitz, Launching 5 new books

with solo drums by Chez Smith
July 30, 2013
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David Horvitz will host a picnic on the floor of Printed Matter to launch a handful of his recent titles, including Public Access, Distance of a Day, Watercolors, and How to Shoplift Books. The perks of the picnic include David’s custom towels, watermelon on tiny plates, and vegan hot dogs courtesy of Chelsea’s first hot-dog/artists’ book vendor Anonymous Star Project Space. Solo drums provided by free jazz percussionist Ches Smith.

Public Access presents a project exploring the concept of public domain on the Internet. From December 2010 to January 2011, David traveled up the California coastline on Highway 1, stopping at fifty different beach access points to photograph the view of the Pacific Ocean, including himself in each. Horvitz uploaded his photographs to Wikipedia articles about each coastal point and then documented the impact.

Distance of a Dayis an accordion book of digital photographs. It was created in conjunction with David Horvitz’s installation at Art Basel in 2013, which consisted of two iPhones, one playing a video of the sun setting in Los Angeles and the other showing the same sun rising in Maldives on the opposite side of the globe. “If the day is ending in California,” Horvitz asks, “where exactly in the world is it simultaneously beginning?”

Watercolors contains a selection of watercolors e-mailed between Natalie Häusler and David Horvitz from September 2011 and October 2012. The emails’ time and dates were taken from David’s computer, which is set to California time. The images were taken with cell phones, tablets, digital cameras, and laptops. Subjects range from black socks to nude models to kitchen tables, mail, portraits, and pomegranates. The emails also include photographs of famous paintings and landscapes, along with the artist’s notes.

A photocopied bootleg of Watercolors is also available, distributed by Publication Studio.

How to Shoplift Books (Come Rubare Libri) is a shoplifter’s users guide in both English and Italian. Stemming from a talk that Horvitz led at the 2011 New York Art Book Fair, it details 80 ways to steal a book. From the very practical, to the witty and romantic, the book reads like simple instructional text artworks by the conceptualist’s generation. It is published by Automatic Books as an edition of 100.

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