Phillips Contemporary Art New York Evening Sale 4 May 2015
$500.00
Published by NERO Editions, 2015
Softcover, 338 pages, English
ISBN 9788897503668
Dimensions: 12h x 9.50w in (30.48h x 24.13w cm)
Artist Marc Horowitz has photographed each page of an art catalogue by Phillips, the famous auction house in New York, having placed on the pages the residues of junk food: an irreverent work staging the encounter between art and consumption (artist's book).
This artist's book maintains the title, number of pages and orientation of the Phillips catalogue, and its cover, back and coast also coincide with the original. The yellow background on which the catalogue is posed creates a distance, even in time, between the action of the artist (put food on the catalogue and shoot a photograph) and the reader's perception of the differing levels in the artwork.
The gap between representation and the real object is made even more evident in the photographic reproduction of the artist's book (created for the NERO online catalogue) where the embossed cheeseburger on the cover leads the reader to wonder on which level of representation the real sandwich is actually placed. With a prescient instinct for the untapped cultural potential of populist mediums, notably Internet culture, commercial advertising and the entertainment industry, Horowitz looks to establish a social connection and reciprocity between viewer and artist. As in the book, the artist's sculptures and paintings on view at Depart Foundation are playfully corrupted with the inclusion of junky everyday objects and images.