The witty and poetic work of David Horvitz meddles with systems of language, time and networks. Eschewing categorisation, his expansive, nomadic body of work takes the forms of photographs, artist books, performances, the internet, mail art, sound, rubber stamps, gastronomy and natural environments. It examines questions of distance between places, people and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining or even erasing these distances, while circulating and operating independently of himself, penetrating ever more effectively the intimate sphere. When encountering his works – in the postal system, libraries, or airport lost-and-found services – our attention is drawn to the infinitesimal, inherent loopholes and alternative logics, and the imaginary comes to the fore. Like lullabies impressed upon our minds, Horvitz deploys art as both a series of objects of contemplation and as viral or systemic tools to affect change on a personal scale. Horvitz makes fictions that insert themselves surreptitiously into the real. He spoke to TANK after recently completing a residency at Garp Sessions, in the village of Babakale, Turkey, which is known as the “Westernmost point of Asia”.

Interview by Thomas Roueché

THOMAS ROUECHÉ How did you become an artist?
DAVID HORVITZ My father gave me a camera as a child. Fast forward a decade or two and I was taking photography courses at the University of California, Riverside. These classes were in the art department, and it was the first time I began to use photography to make intentional artworks. Before that, of course, you could say I was making art as well. Mail art, guerrilla postering, punk flyers, zines, street photography – but it wasn’t until Riverside that I started to contextualise it within other contemporary art practices.

TR Can you tell me a little about your work Mood Disorder, which you began in 2012? What have you learned from that project?
DH I learned that a lot of people need images of depression!
TR What was the process of producing the work?
DH I first made a photograph of me looking depressed on a beach in New York. I had looked at other stock images of sadness to make it a kind of generic cliché image. This was then put on the “mood disorder” Wikipedia page. Then, sometime later, I looked for the image using Google’s reverse image search function and I was able to see where the image had travelled to. Since Wikipedia is basically copyright free, people could use the image legally. So a legitimate publication that doesn’t want to get sued over image rights can use images from Wikipedia as free stock images.

TR How does a mental-health topic feel as a subject matter? Is there a precedent for this in your peer group or general thinking?
DH This is an interesting question. Another way I would like to turn it is: why did so many people ignore the topic of mental health when this work was originally made? It was always discussed in terms of photography, and photographs on the internet, and virality and dispersion of images, and so on, but exhibitions and curators rarely discussed the subject of mental health. My original intentions for this image came from a fascination with stock images of sadness, because usually in the advertising world you make images of desire, of states of happiness: you create a kind of distance in which the viewer or consumer sees and desires something they do not have. I was fascinated with public images of sadness because it turns that relationship around. Instead of wanting to be sad, it creates an image people can identify with. Obviously, stock images are not solely used for advertising and they may be used in newspapers and articles, but I was most curious about how they might be used in advertising. I also feel there is a direct connection with the internet and mental health, for example, with social media eroding the self-esteem of teenagers.

TR Some of your early work, such as 241543903 from 2009, still lives online. What is it like to have a work live solely in the changing architecture of the internet?
DH I once did a work [Donations to Libraries, 2010-] where I drove up the California coast and left books in libraries, and framed photographs in random places. I feel this is similar; it’s making a work that can just stay in the world. Obviously the idea behind the online memes is that they self-generate and can keep growing and changing shape, but with the books, one day I might come across them randomly, refinding them through some kind of serendipity.

TR You’ve described these digital works as seeds that are carried a long distance by the wind, through the wilderness of the internet. Do you think there is something wild, or even natural in the way that your works live online?
DH I like using metaphors from plant reproduction! I also like the word “broadcast”, which is used in the media and which originates in a seed caster casting seeds broadly into a field. I think a lot about nature and the wild, and so it’s hard for me to answer your question. I think one thing I like is to forget about things and let them grow on their own – like weeds, like an untended landscape.

TR What draws you to the ocean?
DH I grew up in California, on the coast, on the edge, half in water and half on land. It is my home.
TR What was it like being in Babakale at the residency? How did the Turkish coast compare to the Californian coast?
DH It was great – great dynamics between people, in an amazing place. Sitting with friends looking out into the expanse of the water, watching the sun set each night. Just spending time together. California is an ocean, not a sea – though in Los Angeles the Pacific can be calm because you’re in a bay – but that’s the big difference.

TR Your work at Protocinema in Istanbul revisited your 2014 work somewhere in between the jurisdiction of time [an installation of glass vessels containing seawater]. What is it that leads you to want to bottle the ocean?
DH The work is not actually bottled. It’s left open; it can evaporate; salt can form. The work can slowly disappear, and then be refilled. I’m more interested in moving water, displacing it, moving it from one place to another. I’m obsessed with the water aisle of grocery stores. Each of those bottles were from some very specific place. Though the food was, too!

TR By taking water from Babakale – the most western part of Asia, more west even than swathes of Europe – you seem to be interrogating the role of the Orientalist artist. What was it like to be practising in Turkey?
DH I’m an American with a family lineage that is half Japanese and half Ashkenazi Jew, so I’m half Asian and half European. As a joke I said the work was a self-portrait, but I wasn’t serious. I wanted to address the point between Asia and Europe, which looks different depending on what side you are, and is defined by only one side: Europe decides where Europe isn’t. So I was looking at this ambiguous location. I could have also done this in the Bosporus, but I feel foreigners like myself tend to fall in love with the Bosporus too easily. I mean, who doesn’t fall in love with the Bosporus! But I didn’t want the work to be too easy. I decided the place was going to be on the edge of Turkey. I like to bring up the word “disorientation”, because its etymological roots are “to turn away from the east”. It’s about a way of orienting yourself, physically orienting yourself, as well as in the political imaginary.

TR A book of your poetry was recently translated into Turkish. Tell me a little about it.
DH On the back of that book it says it’s a poem, but actually I didn’t write that, that was the publisher. I am still unclear as to whether it is a poem or not. I accept it if someone says it is, but I don’t know how I feel! Writing has shown up in a lot of my works – I like playing with words.

TR You went mushroom foraging in the woods outside Istanbul. What did you learn about the city while you were there?
DH We drove out to a forest outside of the city, though I think we were still inside the city of Istanbul. We paid an entrance fee to get in. After driving around for some hours, down small dirt roads in not-so-good condition, we ended up under one of the highways, and then all of a sudden we ended up in the neighbourhood next to the forest. We accidentally found a secret way out and into the forest. I found there was always a different way to get somewhere, or a way that you never knew was there, and that the borders between different areas were quite porous.

TR Your work takes in the gastronomic – I know you like eating fresh uni or sea urchins on the Pacific coast – how did you find the food in Istanbul?
DH The food is great, and is indicative of the place and its long history. I love Mexican food because its origins go back to ancient Mexico, whereas American food for the most part is relatively new and cut off from an indigenous past. Even French food – I am in France now – has that legend that “French cooking” takes off with Catherine de’ Medici coming over from Italy. Though I’m not very familiar with Turkey, I feel its culinary origins go back.

TR Can you tell me a little about your 7th Ave Garden project?
DH It was a vacant lot next to my studio in Los Angeles where a house had burned down. I had no real rights to the land, but I got permission from the landowner to make a garden there. He gives me water. I started putting mostly native plants, rocks from the demolished LACMA building, bells from old artworks, old glass moulds that were in my studio, furniture designed by the landscape architects I am collaborating with, like TERREMOTO. It is a site for gatherings, performances, readings. but it’s also a kind of native garden in the middle of my neighbourhood, so when the gate is closed and people can’t get in, it is still accessible to local animals and insects and birds.

TR What draws you to abandoned, wild spaces?
DH These places have their own ecosystems; they are alive. They may look empty, but there are weeds and other animals and insects that thrive in neglect. In the garden I maintain some of these plants that had found a home here before I started putting natives back in. Some people tell me I need to weed it. Why? They found their home here and are quite happy, and I don’t want to kick them out. ◉