David Horvitz
20th Century Alienation, 2020

20th Century Alienation is a minimalist ABC poem, with each of the 27 pages devoted to one letter of the alphabet and one page to numbers. The words are mostly tags and key words that the artist has taken from photo databases that contain photographs with supposedly depressive or sad content. 20th Century Alienation is an examination of the symptoms of alienation in the present time, in which the number of depression has particularly increased due to the global Corona pandemic. The work creates a peculiar tension between the status of the individual words as database tags and their supposedly emotional content. At the same time, the artist’s text work is repeatedly interspersed with words that are assigned to the terms “depression” and “sadness” by the photo database, but which can certainly generate a grin.

Excerpt from the press release of Horvitz’s exhibition “lessons” at the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, 2020.