“David Horvitz: Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film” Book Launch Dinner
Book launch for David Horvitz: Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film and dinner by Leif Hedendal. Performative reading by David Horvitz, Park C. Myers, and Amanda Martin Katz. Oysters courtesy of Morro Bay Oyster Company.
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David Horvitz’s Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film (2007) encapsulates romanticism, melancholy, and mischief in the search for artistic authenticity. When Horvitz uploaded a found film of the late conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader to YouTube, he unveiled problematic systems of contemporary art circulation and record. In this book, Ed Steck poetically unravels the networks of associations that flow from Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film. Steck’s spontaneous, sporadic, and open-ended points of reference momentarily elucidate that which underpins both Horvitz’s practice and the institutions he seeks to exploit—a flux of elusiveness and evasion, appearing and disappearing. David Horvitz works in a wide range of media that are informed by conceptualism and rooted in art history. Steck focuses on Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film in order to explore the ways in which Horvitz’s trickster antics are anything but superficial interventions; rather, they are a commentary and critique of contemporary art at the systemic level. This title is part of the One Work book series, which focuses on the artworks that have significantly shaped the way we understand art and its history.
…check it out on Amazon.com
David Horvitz is an American artist who uses art books, photography, performance art, and mail art as media for his work. He is known for his work in the virtual sphere. Horvitz is a graduate of Bard College.
Park C. Myers is the Royall Family Curator at 1708 in Richmond, VA. He has organized exhibitions and facilitated projects at Knockdown Center, NY; Actual Size, LA; Komplot, Brussels; the Judd Foundation; the Hessel Museum of Art; and the Copenhagen Art Festival. Publications include On-Curating, The Cure, (Komplot) and Dear Helen (CCSBard). He is a co-founder of the online journal aCCeSsions. Myers with Xavi Acarín established XP, a dialogical exhibitions platform. His research aims to develop new curatorial and institutional strategies informed by the study of complex adaptive systems and attendant shifts in sociocultural infrastructure and architecture. Myers holds a B.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art and an M.A. from CCS Bard.
Leif Hedendal is a chef based in San Francisco, CA. Through cooking and bringing people together, Leif strives to address issues of community and communality, food politics and sustainable agriculture, the influence of subculture, health and nutrition, and, ultimately, our relationships to our food and each other. Primarily self-taught, his cooking focuses on micro-seasonality, humanely raised meat, under-utilized vegetables, urban agriculture, and wild foraging. His iconoclastic work has broadened through the events he has hosted and collaborated on over the years—though he is first and foremost a chef, and his projects are often deeply engaged in artistic practice. His ongoing Dinner Discussion series brings together artists, curators, and writers with chefs, farmers, and food activists to sit around a table, enjoy a simple meal, discuss their projects, and form connections. Started in 2008, Dinner Discussion has traveled to New York, Chicago, Copenhagen, and Berlin, and has been co-hosted by such notables as Alice Waters, Harvard University, Art in General, e-flux, and Slow Food USA. Remarkable guests such as Francis Lam, Rebecca Solnit, Les Blank, Daniel Patterson, Agnes Denes, Peter Coyote, Ted Purves, Amy Franceschini, Larry Rinder, Novella Carpenter, Jill Magid, and Doug Ashford have attended, among hundreds of others. Leif has cooked at Noma, Chez Panisse, Greens, and Citron, as well as numerous underground restaurants. He has done food-based work with SFMOMA, YBCA (SF), Berkeley Art Museum, Soex, Triple Base Gallery, Studio for Urban Projects, Kinfolk Magazine, Art In General (NYC), Space All Over (NYC), Ballroom Marfa, NADA at Art Basel Miami, Open Engagement (Portland), and InCUBATE (Chicago). He has been a guest lecturer at Harvard, CCA, SFAI, Mills College, and the Danish Royal Academy of Art. Leif co-curated the food for Doug Aiken’s nomadic public art project Station to Station with Alice Waters, has served as culinary advisor to the Kadist Art Foundation, and, with the artist Ben Kinmont, he produced “An Exhibition in Your Mouth,” a multi-course meal based on recipes inspired by artists throughout history. His experience is wide and varied, marked by a commitment to curiosity, engagement, community, exploration, and beauty. Leif’s cooking work is currently focused on catering for creative events in San Francisco and New York, while in his artistic practice he continues his Dinner Discussion series as well as artist collaborations around the world.
photos by Olivia Fougeirol