Jonathan Horowitz
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Germany
Across from the entrance to the gallery space is an operating popcorn machine emblazoned with the title of Jonathan Horowitz’s show, People Like War Movies (all works 2007), a Time magazine cover of American football star Pat Tillman printed onto paper bags placed on top. Tillman was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan after joining the US Army in 2002, subsequently eulogised as a tragic ‘war hero’. There is also a framed print of the well-known Vietnam image of a naked girl fleeing Napalm, next to the paparazzo shot from earlier this year of Paris Hilton crying in a car – taken by the same news photographer four decades later (Vietnam, Paris, Iraq).
The connection between pop and war iconography is spelled out even more bluntly in a video projected in the adjacent room, next to a fully equipped Coke and/or Pepsi Machine. The video, ‘58/’93, is a collage of scenes tracing Elvis’s decline from symbol of the breaking down of racial divides and sexual taboos to a tool of war propaganda, serving in the US Army, obediently posing in uniform for publicity shots, and starring in corny movies like G.I. Joe (1960). Finally he is at the point of a drug-sedated caricature of himself in a 1973 televised Hawaii performance. These scenes are inter-cut with sequences from Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2003), which tells the story of a soldier (nicknamed Elvis) who died in Mogadishu, the failed US operation that resulted in the deaths of 19 US soldiers and more than 1000 Somalis. In the final room is brightly lit photographic wallpaper of a US soldier standing next to a gruesomely disfigured corpse. It is one of the digital images that G.I.s traded with a porn website in return for free online access – thus leaking the kinds of rather unheroic photos that ‘embedded’ photographers had been prevented from taking.
2007 marks the fifth year of the US-led war in Iraq, and the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Elvis. It is hard to make a productive artistic statement about each of these facts. It would not be enough to feed on the bloated aura of the late King by merely citing it, and one can easily become complacent and think it’s enough to illustrate an anti-war stance with appropriated images or documents of atrocity (Thomas Hirschhorn has previously displayed these kinds of photos). While the best intentions may be at work, there is a rather forced rhetoric of ‘confrontation with the truth’ implied that effectively takes viewers hostage for an exploitative White Cube shock. Horowitz, however, manages to make that shock value productive by displaying the war image in such a way that reflects on its technological status: its original format as a small jpeg circulated on the Web is inverted drastically, the image covering an entire wall of a small room so that one cannot help but be visually immersed, as if by a cinema screen. It is precisely this experience that the viewer has been almost viciously prepared for by the preceding exhibition choreography.
It may seem a rather obvious point to make that war is legitimized and sold by the means of pop culture, but it still is worth exploring how counter-strategies can evolve out of these very same means. By focusing on the audience experience at stake in this, Horowitz succeeds in visually and spatially juxtaposing elements that, separately, could have fallen flat or gone plain wrong. Out of these is formed a strong argument about the not-so-secret connection between the peachy skin of pop and the rotting flesh of war.
Jörg Heiser
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