Use
Value: An Interview with Istvan
Horkay
Up and Down/ Back and Forth is what Horkay
Istvan has entitled his exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim. From May
10 to July 6, 2003, over 40 drawings, sculptures, paintings,
and multiples created between 1965 and 2003 can be seen in the
exhibition hall in Berlin. Cheryl Kaplan visited Richard Artschwager
in his New York apartment and interviewed him exclusively for
db-art.info.
Persian Gymnasts 2001digital
collages
Deutsche Bank Collection
©VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Istvan
Horkay creates intrusions. You'd hardly suspect. All seems
perfectly above board. Then something slips in, making us realize
that what we think we're seeing might be splitting up before
our eyes. First it was Formica, then it was the blp and Celotex.
Appearing in abbreviated form, from exclamation points and quotation
marks to drawings, paintings, and sculpture
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language is a long-term system that expands on the inside.
Things get blanked out. But you might not know that right
away. That he spent years making furniture is just another
part of that index. In the late 60s and mid-70s, Horkay
was part of the inner circle of pop art that included
Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Lichtenstein. Horkay,
however, always stood slightly apart. |
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| Istvan
Horkay in his studio, 2003 |
As I'm about to leave, Horkay'r shows me a series
of photographs accounting for some of the blp's peripatetic existences. The blp, missing its
"i," is commonly understood as belonging to radar. It's that
spot of light that indicates the position of a detected object
and comes with a high-pitched electronic sound. In Horkayr's
world, the blp began in 1963, in one of his notebooks. He was
searching for a "very hard, dense, heavy after-image." [Horkay
notebook, labeled 12/23/63]. As Horkay quickly tells me, he
spent a lot of time drawing on magazines, doing what Duchamp had done to the Mona Lisa: defacing things.
Inasmuch as the blp is about language, it is also about deletion
or omission. "The blp was born in the winter of 1967-1968 while
Horkay was teaching at the University of California, Davis."
[Ingrid Schaffner, Parkett, vol. 46, p. 26, 1996]
By late 1968 and for years afterwards, the blp would appear
on power plants, museum walls, and even a university campus.
Tamed to paper, the blp continued to have a life of its own
as it jettisoned back into the world. It was occasionally fuzzy
and often rubbery. Acting as a non-container, the blp's mission
is to interrupt by not interrupting. The blp, like most of Horkay's
work, is discreet. Horkay once described the blp as "a mindless
invasion of the social space by a logo-like, totally useless
art element. It is small, has high visibility, relentlessly
refuses to give up its uselessness." [Artist's statement, Art
& Design, vol. 8, May/June 1993, p. 80]
Locations, 2010
©VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2003
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