Why David Horvitz is retracing Marcel Duchamp’s footsteps in Buenos Aires

In 1918, Marcel Duchamp set sail for Buenos Aires. He was leaving New York – where he had recently created what would come to be recognized as one of the most important artworks of the 20th century by signing a urinal ‘R. Mutt’ – to seek respite from the stifling atmosphere of World War I. In a map drawing he made at the time, North and South America are linked by a wavering path through the ocean. His destination is marked with a red dot that extends into a giant question mark.

For Duchamp, it was a chance to reset his artistic practice and find some pleasure in creating work again; his rather colonialist view, according to Daniel Ricardo Quiles, an art historian at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was that of Argentina as ‘virgin territory.’ Once Duchamp arrived, the city proved a cipher to him. ‘Buenos Aires does not exist,’ the artist wrote in a letter during his stay. ‘It is just a big provincial town full of rich people with absolutely no taste, and everything bought in Europe, right down to the stone they build their houses with.’

Duchamp did not produce much art during this period, using it instead to reflect and make preparatory works around his magnum opus, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-23). He occupied his time by becoming even more obsessed with chess than he was previously, going so far as to carve his own chess set and planning an ill-fated exhibition of Cubist art as a way of ‘importing’ Modernism. He may not have seen his influence reflected in Buenos Aires by the time he boarded a boat bound for Southampton, UK, in 1919 on his way back to France, but his claim for artists’ agency ultimately made an especially deep impression in Argentina, which became one of the centers of Conceptualism in the 1960s.

On the 100th anniversary of Duchamp’s trip, the American artist David Horvitz – an heir of both readymade strategies and the legacy of Argentinean conceptual art that followed – will present a work that honors the artist’s spirit as part of ‘Hopscotch (Rayuela)’, a citywide group exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani during Art Basel Cities Week.

Horvitz’s interest in Duchamp’s mischievous aesthetics goes back to his childhood, the artist told me during a brief break between travels at his home in Los Angeles. While in elementary school, he would dig a hole and fill it with grass. ‘I would get people to chase me, and then they would trip in the hole,’ he recalls. ‘Was that an early work – an audience unknowingly participating in some trickster artwork?’ Today, Horvitz’s practice is animated by the idea that any object or action can be reframed as art. He started out making photographs but studied a combination of history and cultural anthropology at the University of California, Riverside (as well as taking classes in the art department with the likes of photographer Uta Barth), before getting his MFA at Bard College in upstate New York.

In the early days of the Internet, Horvitz experimented with digital distribution: He posted instruction-based artworks on Tumblr, published fictional ‘missed connections’ on Craigslist, and uploaded a fake Bas Jan Ader video work to YouTube (‘Rarely Seen Bas Jan Ader Film’), building a dialog with art history. ‘I was using the Internet as a tool for dispersion, but it would also formulate back into real life,’ he says. More recent pieces take the form of sculptures, including Three Standard Breaths, or the Shapes of Hours (2014), consisting of blown-glass vases made with an hour’s worth of sand from an hourglass.

The artist toys with language; most of his pieces emerge from a process of drinking coffee and writing, using his phone or a computer. Yet words fail at the fleeting poetry that his objects evoke, as in a work titled Somewhere in Between the Jurisdiction of Time (2014), 32 unique glass vessels containing seawater collected in the Pacific Ocean at a longitude of 127.5° west and placed in a north-to-south line. Others crystallize as an evocative action, as in Eridanus (2017), for which the artist walked around Paris, surreptitiously switching off street lamps, then presented a resulting slideshow in a darkened gallery lit by candles.

Although Horvitz downplays much direct influence, there’s an unmistakably Duchampian playfulness to his practice – after all, the French inventor of readymades is unavoidable. Horvitz remembers a story: Duchamp and his wife would tell each other jokes when they went to bed so they fell asleep laughing. ‘He was a master at this art of daily life,’ Horvitz says.

It was Zanna Gilbert, a historian of South and Latin American art and Horvitz’s wife, who introduced him to the work of Argentinean artists like Edgardo Antonio Vigo, a pioneer of mail art, and David Lamelas, whose Signals demarcates an object like a chair or a tree within a painted circle, designating everyday objects as art. Vigo and Lamelas were among a group of artists, often educated in philosophy and literature rather than art, who emerged in Argentina in the 1960s. They were part of a wider conceptual tendency in contemporary art that took hold around the globe in that era, but they shared a particular engagement with what we often call ‘the street’: everyday people and politics on the ground.

‘The period of Argentinean conceptual art during the ’60s and ’70s was important,’ says Ana Bugnone, a professor at Argentina’s National University of La Plata in Buenos Aires. ‘They were always thinking and producing from the present and our reality.’ This ethos might be best summarized by the Argentinean artist Alberto Greco’s Vivo-Dito Manifesto, published in 1963. With a decidedly Duchampian approach, the artist advocated for ‘the direct and total contact with things, places, people, creating situations, creating the unexpected.’

In the 1970s Argentina faced a looming dictatorship, which extended into the ’80s, that amplified the importance of the movement because artists like Vigo could fly under the radar of state police. ‘An advantage of conceptual works is that no one could intuit them as an artwork,’ Quiles explains. ‘These are private acts, almost.’ Their art quietly restored politics to public spaces. Greco, for example, would draw chalk circles on the sidewalk around fellow artists and passersby, then sign his name.

Like Duchamp and the Argentinean artists, Horvitz makes the world his creative laboratory. It’s hard to say where life ends and art begins, so it is only appropriate that his work for ‘Hopscotch (Rayuela)’ will consist of a poetic, participatory intervention in a public space. ‘For me,’ Horvitz says, ‘going out in the city is where I’ll get my ideas – walking around, going into some garden or something.’ The resulting pieces become part of the urban fabric: ‘An object can exist as a story. It becomes like a tale, like a folktale.’

Top image: David Horvitz, Public Access (Border Field State Park), 2011-2014, C-print, Wikipedia article printout, 24.4cm x 37.1cm. Courtesy of the artist and ChertLüdde, Berlin.

Learn more about Horvitz and the artists participating in ‘Hopscotch (Rayuela)’, and book your trip now to experience the exhibition during  Art Basel Cities Week, September 6-12.