February 2008 Archives

Last week during the total lunar eclipse I decided to take a walk around New York for the entirety of the eclipse.  I left my house at 8:43pm and somewhere in the middle of when it had become red (I was in Chinatown in Manhattan), I started walking home.  I wanted my wandering to be on moon time.  I wanted the concept of duration to lose association with standardized time.  I wanted to let the Earth's shadow tell me what to do.  I took some photos.  I will mail them to some people.

In the Strand bookstore in New York City I revealed the truth about conceptual art.

This is an idea for one-hundred shirts:

One hundred Bob Dylan quote shirts hand written with a black sharpee on a white shirt.  All of them will have "- Bob Dylan" written below the quote.  All will be hand-written.  I need to sit down and find 100 quotes.   Then I need to buy 100 shirts and make tests.  Then I need to find a model to model them all.  Maybe I will sell them as a set of 100 only.  You have to buy all of them.  Or, maybe I won't.

I will go to New York public libraries and wait by my favorite books hoping to find someone there.

After wandering around Times Square with a friend I found myself carrying a bath mat that I had taken from a hotel that we had snuck into.  I thought that I must put the bath mat next to fountain in case someone wanted to take a swim and needed some place to stand when they got out.  I thought that I would take a photograph of this.  On my way to do this I saw a homeless person sleeping on a bench and thought that maybe if I just left the bath mat near them they would roll it up and use it as a pillow or something.  I did that instead.  There is no photograph.

The next day I saw a man with no money wanting to ride the train.  Right before the train arrived I pushed the emergency gate open to let him in, then I quickly got on the train.  If I got arrested, I would try to sell my mug shot as art.  I didn't get caught..

At around 11:00pm on a Thursday night I walked an avocado seed across the Williamsburg Bridge until I was in the middle of the East River.  I then threw the seed into the water.

Over the course of three days I would wake up and get on the train when everyone was going to work.  I would stay on the train all day and get off the same place I had gotten on, as if I was returning home from work.  After three days I had ridden every route in New York City (except for Staten Island, which you have to get out of the train-system to get on a ferry to get back on the train).

Every night I look up random fax numbers on the internet and fax this to them using free online faxing.

New book/digital project now up/out.  A project by Mylinh and I.  Features a handful of your favorite artists.  See now read now.

During a Friday's evening rush-hour in the Main Concourse of Grand Terminal Station I aimlessly walked amongst the mad rush of people for one-hour.



On the following Sunday in the middle of the night I returned to the Main Concourse and waited there for one-hour amongst other people waiting.

I stood in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street holding a cardboard sign that read:  BORED.

I want to give this photograph away for the cheapest way possible.  If you want one, please send me a SASE with $1 to:  David Horvitz/ 99 Vernon Ave #1, Brooklyn, NY 11206.  If you live outside the US paypal me $2: hikarusaru (at) gmail (dot) com

After I got pushed on stage during No Age in Brooklyn on February 11, 2008 I decided to pull the Lawrence Weiner brochure for his retrospective at the Whitney out of my bag and attempt to give it to someone else to read by throwing it into the audience.  I already read it, and it was time to pass it on. 

By the way, do you know what samizdat is?  What about potlach?  Oh, and did you know in an open letter to John Berger from Subcomandante Marcos he offers him a flower  from  Chiapas, the southern state of Mexico.  Or, he offers it to everyone:

We would like to offer you a flower, I say a flower because we don't have enough for all of you, but one is enough if you share it and if each one of you keeps a tiny fragment...

I once bought a purple flower from a  lady  in a market in Oaxaca.  I carried it with me in a plastic water bottle.  All my photographs from that trip, from the Panama Canal to Los Angeles by land, had been stolen.  Except for maybe a few polaroids of the sky or the sea or of a cow in Nicaragua.  It doesn't matter.  The point is this:  a purple flower in a water bottle.  You don't need documentation of a previous existing action.  You just go and get a flower and put it in a bottle.

A purple flower inside a water bottle.

Walking away to the sea in three photographs.  I want to mail you these photographs - each in their own separate envelope and mailed a few days apart.

I took a photograph of myself looking at the sky on February 9, 2008.  If you are on the mailing list you got the email.  This is where I was when I took the photograph.  I was standing right here on a desolate beach in the Rockaways.

After I paid $1 to get into the Whitney on the pay-what-you-want Friday nights, I found a mop that was being thrown out on Maddison near 66th.  I decided to walk home to Brooklyn (about 8 miles according to Google's driving directions) dragging it behind me.  I wanted to clean the route to my house and give the mop one last ceremonial mopping.  After I mopped the 8 miles I left it near my trashcan (I thought it would be funny to transfer it from one trash can to another, like it was a circulating currency).   The map above is the route I took (now a clean path from near-the-Whitney to my house).  I also wandered around the block of Saint Patrick's Cathedral.  I also took note of two places to try:  a Mexican restaurant and a juice bar that had horchata.  Oh, and I also walked behind Thurston Moore peering into a bar window on Clinton. 

This mop is for sale as an art-work.  If you wish to purchase it please contact me immediately.   Someone else might take it out to play with, or the trash-man will get it in a few days.

One evening in Central Park in near freezing temperature I sat on a bench and tried to make myself cry to see if my tears would freeze my eye-lids shut.  I wanted to be temporarily blind.  It didn't work.