Moments. Talk with Channa Horwitz

Channa Horwitz’s conceptual series Sonakinatography comprises drawings, performances and musical compositions. She includes sound and movement, in other words temporal structures, in her minimalist notational system. By means of a mathematical order based on the sequence 1‒8, Horwitz extends the rigid structures of seriality to infinite variation possibilities. The linear logic, the monosyllabic rhythm of which can be modulated and multiplied in an infinite variety of ways, Horwitz has also repeatedly staged in concrete performative musical acts. Moments shows two of these earlier realizations and a new interpretation, as well as a selection of minimalist drawings on which these are based. Horwitz’s work in the performance field, originating in a strictly spatial system, has an aesthetic concept.

In her works, the North American performance and conceptual artist Channa Horwitz (*1932 in Los Angeles, USA) has been experimenting since the beginning of the 1960s with numbers, rhythms, movements as well as spatial and temporal structures: she records diagrams temporally, which may be read as musical scores; movements are translated into colored schemes. The compositions thus created are, to some extent, designed as choreography or augmented in multimedia interpretations. As performance artist, Horwitz works together, among others, with Allan Kaprow. Horwitz’s minimalist-structural work, which could be viewed at the beginning of 2010 at Solway-Jones Gallery (Los Angeles), is currently experiencing international rediscovery and re-evaluation as the work of one of the most important North American artists of her generation.