David Horvitz | Other People [Special Edition]

David Horvitz

Other People [Special Edition]

Paris, France: RVB Books, 2025

448 pp., 8.8 x 12.5 cm., softcover

Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies

The special edition of David Horvitz’ Other People [see previous post] comes with a signed and numbered Lambda print of four photographs of people that Artificial Intelligence Facial Recognition software mistook for the artist. 

The work is available from the publisher, here, for 80€.

David Horvitz | Other People

David Horvitz

Other People 

Paris, France: RVB Books, 2025

448 pp., 8.8 x 12.5 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

"Other People is a collection of digital photographs found using facial recognition software. David Horvitz sent photographs of his own face to conduct these searches. The photographs presented here are misidentifications, errors that AI technology deemed to be the artists face but are not. These photographs are "other people," individuals unknown to Horvitz, with a slight familiarity and similarity, living parallel lives. The ethics of these image databases are ambiguous. They are formed from digital photographs dredged from the internet. In most cases, the authors (and the people depicted) of these images have no idea their photographs have been copied and monetized. Law enforcement agencies are among the customers of these databases, using them to enhance techniques of surveillance and control. This work was inspired by research on training materials for East German border guards at Checkpoint Charlie, found in the Wende Museum collection.”

- publisher’s blurb

Robin Metcalfe on Kelly Mark

Kelly Mark | Glow House

To mark the first anniversary of her death, several of Kelly Mark's friends and contemporaries are mounting new iterations of her classic work Glow House. Beginning tomorrow, Glow House will be presented across the country, from coast to coast. 

The project was initiated by Kegan McFadden and Anthony Cooper, with help from Stefan Hancherow, Sanaa Humaayun, Ivan Jurakic, Eleanor King, Dean Baldwin Lew,  jake moore, Su Ying Strang, Adam Whitford, Collin Zipp, as well as Roula and myself. 

It will be presented at the following venues: 

Deluge Contemporary Art (Victoria, BC)

https://deluge.squarespace.com/next

Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin (Lethbridge, AB) | Offsite

https://www.saag.ca/upcoming/glow-house-tribute-to-kelly-mark

University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, SK) | Offsite

https://kagcag.usask.ca/

One Night Stand (Winnipeg, MB)

Hamilton Artists Inc. (Hamilton, ON)

https://www.theinc.ca/

Good Water Gallery (Toronto, ON)

https://goodwatergallery.com/

King Residency (Halifax, NS)

Struts Gallery (Sackville, NB) | Offsite

https://www.strutsgallery.ca/

Robin Metcalfe has contributed a new text about the work (see next post) but here’s one Kelly commissioned me to write 21 years ago, for a glow in the dark poster produced by YYZ, when they mounted an early version of Glow House: 

"I love to watch things on TV. When I first bought a video camera I pointed it out the window and sat on the sofa watching the passersby on my set for hours on end, in a way I would never just sit and look out the window. It’s this addictive quality that draws the ire of its detractors, even as they indulge in their own opiates of choice.

It’s television the appliance that appeals to me, not the programming, 90% of which is crap (a ratio on par with the visual arts, theatre, literature, music, film and most other things). I like that it’s a nightlight for the insomniac, company for pets, a warm glow left on low in the backroom when one is cleaning or working. A common comfort, like a porch light left on.

When art turns its attention to television it tends to be as a critique of the content, or at best an examination of the possibilities, but seldom a celebration of the qualities intrinsic to the ubiquitous box. Sound artists recognize the strong cultural resonance that a record player needle or speaker holds for its audience. Rarely are the properties inherent to television(s) mined for the same visceral memory effect.

Artists’ writings sometimes come closest. Laurie Anderson likens television to Heaven as a perfect little world that doesn't really need you. As a stand-alone, the metaphor holds up, but she nails it with the line that follows, and everything there is made of light. Tom Sherman, in his 1980 text "How To Watch Television" proposes leaning in close, with your face pressed up against the glass. It's beautiful up close. It’s rare that we think of televised images as made of light. We’re somewhat aware of the illusion and the frames per second but the glow often goes unnoticed, perhaps because it is inconspicuously projected onto us.

Kelly Mark sees the light, harnesses and amplifies it in a brilliant outdoor installation titled “Glowhouse” - a vacant home flickering with the blue light of thirty-five televisions, conspiratorially set to the same channel. The cartoon plutonium-like glow pulsing through the house, like the heartbeat of the home. Like a jack-o-lantern.

The building appears gutted, cast with light in a manner reminiscent of Rachel Whiteread’s concrete cast of an East London house. Mark’s work betters Whiteread as a public sculpture by being less intrusive, less monumental. It’s a late-night intervention situated on a residential street near the downtown core, waiting to be stumbled upon by drunks and dog walkers, for a discreet but sublime evening encounter.

A companion work, “Horror, Suspense, Romance, Porn, Kung-Fu”, records the glow of genre cinema reflected onto a wall. In exhibition a different genre is represented weekly for the duration of the show. Just as different types of music have rhythms and timbres specific to their styles, cinema genres have their own particular rhythms and hues. Westerns are browner, film-noir blacker. Thrillers flicker faster. Glowhouse also highlights these rhythms – during an action film, or commercial break or music video, the fast edits make it appear as though fireworks are going off inside the house.

Mark is often called a “working-class conceptualist” and, for all its physical beauty, “Glowhouse” is not incongruous with this assessment. A common working-class pastime is to come home from a hard day’s work and unwind in front of the television by watching others perform their job. We watch shows about cops, teachers, doctors, coroners. Newscasters and talk show hosts sit perched behind desks.

The upper classes once distinguished themselves by the culture they consumed and now resent sharing one with the great unwashed, perhaps explaining the condescending epithets boob tube and idiot box. Television is often blamed for our short attention spans, laziness and the learning difficulties of our children. For violence and deviant behaviour - nothing short of the breakdown of society. Mark sidesteps the pissing match and democratizes the medium by reducing it to its core element. By accentuating the light, Mark reminds us that television has merely replaced fire as center of the home - the glow around which we tell our stories.

Dave Dyment, 2005"

David Bellingham | Box Full of Air

David Bellingham

Box Full of Air

Toronto, Canada: Paul+Wendy Projects, 2026

3-3/4 x 1-3/4 x 2-1/2"

Edition of 200 signed copies

I discovered David Bellingham’s work in Scotland, almost twenty years ago. I first found his great book Ideas Leave Objects Standing and then a few days later saw the same phrase on a mug while visiting David Shrigley’s home (they’re old friends). 

Recently I added his watch-hands earrings to my collection of artists wristwatches.*

Earlier this week, Paul+Wendy Projects announced a new edition, their second with Bellingham. It consists of a letterpress printed die-cut cardboard box that ships flat. 

The work functions as a "cardboard vessel for the collection and storage of local air”. It comes accompanied by a signed certificate of assurance, and warranty ("this product will be repaired or replaced if it ceases to function as advertised”). 

Box Full of Air work is the 86th title produced by Paul+Wendy Projects, whose other editions include books, multiples and prints by Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Maggie Groat, Kay Rosen, Micah Lexier, Van Maltese, Richard McGuire, Jonathan Monk, Roula Partheniou, David Shrigley, Derek Sullivan, and many others. 

It is available from the publishers, here, for $20.00. 

*An informal collection of watches and clocks by artists that includes: Tauba Auerbach, GuyGuyGuy, Nam June Paik, Jon Sasaki, Jeff Kulak, Marie Ange-Guilleminot, Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis, Yoko Ono, Sara Mackillop, Eunice Luk, Lawrence Weiner, etc. 

Phaidon Press Protest

Five years ago this month, the Guerrilla Girls severed ties with Phaidon Press in protest of owner Leon Black’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, writing “In 2018, the Guerrilla Girls contracted with Phaidon Press to publish our dream book of all our work from 1985 to today: conceptualized, designed and written by us. In 2019, the world learned about Black’s extensive and shady dealings with shady pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, before and after Epstein’s conviction for sex trafficking young girls. We decided we could not work with Phaidon” [see earlier post here].

The group also called for Black to step down as chairman of the board of the Museum of Modern Art, including phone booth ads across the street from the museum. When his term ended on July 1st, 2021, Black did not seek re-election.

Phaidon is a multi-national publisher of books on art, architecture, design, fashion, photography, and popular culture, based out of London and New York City, with additional offices in Paris and Berlin. 

Phaidon has over 1500 titles in print and has sold almost fifty million books worldwide. Founded in Vienna in 1923, the company was sold to Black in 2012. 

It was recently revealed that Black had contributed a page to the infamous Epstein 50th birthday greeting album (compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 and featuring the now-notorious Trump signature as pubic hair drawing). Black’s contribution was a handwritten poem that contained the lines "Blonde, Red or Brunette, spread out geographically/With this net of fish, Jeff’s now The Old Man and The Sea". The poem is signed"Love and kisses, Leon".

He reportedly paid $158 million to Epstein between 2012 and 2017 for advice on taxes and estate planning. Epstein also helped him amass an enormous art collection, including The Scream by Edvard Munch, for which he paid $119.9 million.

In March 2021, Guzel Ganieva claimed in a series of tweets that "I was sexually harassed and abused by [Black] for years and forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement under duress”. Black maintained that the relationship was consensual but paid out nine million dollars for the agreement. Ganieva further alleged that he had introduced her to Epstein and tried to force her to have sex with him. 

In 2023, a lawsuit was filed against Black alleging that he violently raped a 16-year-old girl with autism and Down syndrome in Epstein's Manhattan townhouse the year prior, while asking her "what made her 'Jeffrey special girl.” 

Yesterday, British artist and Turner Prize winner* Tai Shani [above, centre] announced that she too has withdrawn a forthcoming monograph with Phaidon. The 49 year old artist posted to her twenty-five thousand Instagram followers: 

“I have decided to withdraw my monograph from publication with Phaidon. The recently unsealed Epstein files contain numerous horrific allegations against Leon Black, the owner of Phaidon since 2012. 

Behind these allegations, whose specifics many of us have read with horror, behind the geopolitical implications, the many unsurprising ties to the art world, behind the gossip, behind the observations about global networks of power, behind the spectacle of violence are human beings, victims: young women, children, often from precarious backgrounds, real lives exploited and destroyed. Even in this 

age of increasing impunity and breathtaking ruthlessness, their suffering, their lives matter and must be acknowledged." 

And then added in the comments: "I’m trying to meet this moment with some kind of moral consistency."

*The 2019 shortlisted artists (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Shani)  were jointly awarded the prize as a collective, following their request to be considered as a single group "in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity”.

Yoko Ono signed recordings

Happy Birthday to Yoko Ono, who turns 93 today.