PUBLIC ACCESS

Between December 2010 and January 2011, photographer David Horvitz toured the coast of California, from the Mexican border to Oregon, stopping at more than forty beaches. At each of them, he took a photo of himself looking at the horizon, carefully standing with his back to the camera. He wanted to convey the feeling of being an anonymous person pictured in a romantic landscape.

Horvitz then uploaded the images to the Wikipedia pages of each beach, creating –in some cases– new articles for these places, and generating his first visual representations on the Internet. At some point, the editors of Wikipedia discovered the project and started a discussion. The legitimacy of the photographs, their quality and their status as works of art were some of the issues that were debated. One of the editors, hoping to pour oil on troubled waters, even deleted Horvitz from his own photos and uploaded them again. Another stated that he was not breaking the rules as he did not show his face. Some of the landscapes were downloaded, reframed and uploaded again without including the artist. Finally, after a vote they concluded that David Horvitz had broken the rules, so he was banned from contributing to Wikipedia and most of his images were removed.

Public Access explores the way in which information is generated and circulated on the Internet, focusing on the conditions in which images are published. The project brings to light the values ​​and considerations that condition public opinion, as well as the autonomy that images have in relation to it.

David Horvitz is ocean romantic, based in Los Angeles, California. Playful and poetic, his works meddle with the systems of language, time and networks, hyper-paced Zoom calls, emails and images transmitted through screens. Eschewing categorization, his extensive nomadic body of work – which traverses the forms of photographs, word of mouth and physical movement or distribution, artist books, performances, memes, mail art, sound, rubber stamps, gastronomy, weather, travel, walks, and watercolor – is presented through examining questions of distance between places, people and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining or even erasing this distance. 

OUTDOOR INSTALLATION

11 PUBLIC ACCESS

Venue: Ereaga beach