PARIS.- Trees for museums, flowers to be imagined, sprayed watercolours or Mexican palm trees on Donald Trump's golf course. With Avenues All Lined With Trees, David Horvitz (born in 1981 in Los Angeles) presents poetic, conceptual and evolving works, mail art and a video - everything here evokes or even emanates from 7th Avenue Garden, the artist's personal garden in Los Angeles, next door to his studio. Since its creation in 2021 with the Californian landscape architecture agency Terremoto, it has been conceived as a place for sharing, welcoming, experimenting and resisting in the heart of the city and its ecological disaster.
At JKG Vaugirard, David Horvitz presents the new project Fleur de corbeau [Crow's Flower] (2024) which documents the spontaneous donation of plumeria cuttings to fourteen French public collections, a set of mailed watercolours created in the garden using hose water, and descriptions of flowers in photographs that no longer exist (Nostalgia, 2018 - ongoing).
A recurring motif in his work, the crow has in recent years become something of an alter ego for David Horvitz. 'Have you ever received a gift from a raven?' is how he concludes each of the letters accompanying the plumeria cuttings he donated to fourteen French public museums and institutions as a preamble to the exhibition*. Crows are known for giving gifts to their fellow creatures, and sometimes to humans. The cuttings originate from the plumeria trees growing in the artist's garden, themselves cuttings from the trees that grew in front of the artist's grandmother's house in Los Angeles. Horvitz adds that each cutting - like a photograph, [contains] records of sunlight. It is also a vessel carrying memories. And it is a future. 'Fleur de Corbeau / Crow's Flower' is the translation of 'plumeria' in Nahuatl, as if for the Mexicans this tree was destined to be given away. Fleur de corbeau is a conceptual work that asks whether life can enter the museum. In the gallery, the documents accompanying the donations are displayed in archival boxes, and pinned to the wall are the responses, positive or negative or perhaps even absent, from the recipient institutions. These documents will feed into the project throughout the exhibition and probably beyond, as museums have their own administrative rhythms - but what happens to the cuttings in the meantime. Fleur de corbeau lies in the very process of making a living gift to the museum. It questions the nature of art and the structures dedicated to its conservation and preservation. And the fourteen institutions scattered across France draw a map, because the plumerias map networks of friendships through gift economies.
Throughout the exhibition, David Horvitz will be mailing the gallery a series of watercolours in various formats. These colourful, abstract compositions on paper were created in the garden using the water for plants, sometimes even with the hose, as well as plants and stones. While it is impossible to displace a garden into a gallery, these mailed artworks received over time remind us that the artist's garden lives on, 9,000 km away, during the exhibition. Once again, it is a cartography that shows what separates us and what unites us, another recurring motif in David Horvitz's work.
Since 2018, David Horvitz has begun to erase his own photographic archives, noting that our culture is inundated with images and that attention has eroded. This erasure became a work of art entitled Nostalgia and takes the form of textual works, poetic descriptions of the erased photographs that often require the viewer to stimulate their imagination. For Avenues All Lined With Trees was chosen a selection of flowers that David Horvitz has photographed - purple lilacs or morning glories - and that we must now imagine.
At JKG Odéon, David Horvitz presents the video A Walk At Dusk (Washingtonia Robusta/Mexican Fan Palm) (2018) and another text from Nostalgia.
'A tree growing in a cage', again a description of an erased photograph, is a metaphor for what the artist questions in this exhibition: to what extent should nature be constrained?
A Walk At Dusk, a video featuring the artist, opens with his palms filled with washingtonia robusta or Mexican palm seeds, the foreign species of tree that has shaped the Californian imagery. California is the birthplace of David Horvitz, whose family, originally from Japan, was imprisoned in Japanese internment camps during the war. Once again, a hollow cartography. Then the viewer follows the artist at dusk as he strolls along the Trump National Golf Course in Los Angeles. As he walks, Horvitz scatters large quantities of Mexican palm seeds. Some of the seeds are even hidden in thickets, as if he were making sure that their growth would escape the vigilance of gardeners. In the background, one hears the city and nature, helicopters and the wind, crickets, birds and the ocean. Until the early morning hours when the automatic sprinklers water the lawn and the seeds. A Walk At Dusk is the title of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich from 1830-35, depicting a man alone surrounded by dying nature. The work is in Los Angeles, at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
'Avenues all line with trees' is a quote from the song Ceremony by New Order.
