“Everything starts from a dot.”—Wassily Kandisky
There is nothing more perfunctory than a single dot. The dot is the beginning of everything observable and beyond, from the infinitesimal to the unthinkably massive. Subatomic particles and stars are both circular “dots” that make up something larger: the base of our existence and the larger universe, respectively. In art history, the dot has proven to be an everlasting, indispensable building block to translating visual culture; it is the beginning of a mark, a single momentous drip, a way to obscure things, a way to create patterns, and even the basis for whole movements.
No one is thinking more about dots right now than New York-based artist Jonathan Horowitz, whose current show at 356 Mission, an alternative art space in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, is called 590 Dots. The show revolves around Horowitz’s invitation to community participants to come in and paint black dots in exchange for handmade $20 checks. The resultant dots of varying sizes and exactness, hang on the walls, making for a dizzying optical experience. Shaded by allegiances to the works of Roy Lichtenstein (and the Pointillists before him) and Yayoi Kusama, it’s as if Horowitz is reminding viewers that dots are as much a part of art history as they are the current state of art.
In an email, Horowitz describes the recurrence of dots as an unintended motif throughout his career. A 1992 video called Dot, . illumines the use of the center point of the screen in film and television to demonstrate that these mediums can be viewed as portraiture; a 1993 video called Middle and End edits together the television footage all the golf balls in flight during a tournament; and another body of work, Stairmaster Suite from 1996, was comprised of drawings that transcribed the dot diagrams that make up the fitness gauge on the Stairmaster he was using at the time. More recently, for Self Portraits in Mirror #1, a 2012 show at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Horowitz asked 18 other painters to recreate Roy Lichtenstein’s dotted Mirror #1 painting by hand.
For 590 Dots, Horowitz continues to look to Lichtenstein for influence. Lichtenstein used techniques similar to the printing process of pulp comic books in his paintings, placing uniformly sized Ben-Day dots—named for 19th-century illustrator and printer Benjamin Day—as a way to save money on colored ink. Day had invented the technique, which uses dots as a way of shading, relies on separately colored dots to trick the mind into filling in the spaces and blending colors. “In the Lichtenstein self-portraits, the dots create a sort of automatic transference of the painter’s subjectivity to the viewer,” says Horowitz. “There’s a similar loss of self in 590 Dots, as the viewer falls into the strobing field.”
Prior to Lichtenstein (and around the same time Day was developing his dots), Pointillism marked the beginning of an artistic self-consciousness of dots as a mark-making tool. In the late 19th century, French artists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac became frustrated with Impressionism, in which the blending of colors in the palette
There is nothing more perfunctory than a single dot. The dot is the beginning of everything observable and beyond, from the infinitesimal to the unthinkably massive. Subatomic particles and stars are both circular “dots” that make up something larger: the base of our existence and the larger universe, respectively. In art history, the dot has proven to be an everlasting, indispensable building block to translating visual culture; it is the beginning of a mark, a single momentous drip, a way to obscure things, a way to create patterns, and even the basis for whole movements.
No one is thinking more about dots right now than New York-based artist Jonathan Horowitz, whose current show at 356 Mission, an alternative art space in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, is called 590 Dots. The show revolves around Horowitz’s invitation to community participants to come in and paint black dots in exchange for handmade $20 checks. The resultant dots of varying sizes and exactness, hang on the walls, making for a dizzying optical experience. Shaded by allegiances to the works of Roy Lichtenstein (and the Pointillists before him) and Yayoi Kusama, it’s as if Horowitz is reminding viewers that dots are as much a part of art history as they are the current state of art.
In an email, Horowitz describes the recurrence of dots as an unintended motif throughout his career. A 1992 video called Dot, . illumines the use of the center point of the screen in film and television to demonstrate that these mediums can be viewed as portraiture; a 1993 video called Middle and End edits together the television footage all the golf balls in flight during a tournament; and another body of work, Stairmaster Suite from 1996, was comprised of drawings that transcribed the dot diagrams that make up the fitness gauge on the Stairmaster he was using at the time. More recently, for Self Portraits in Mirror #1, a 2012 show at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Horowitz asked 18 other painters to recreate Roy Lichtenstein’s dotted Mirror #1 painting by hand.
For 590 Dots, Horowitz continues to look to Lichtenstein for influence. Lichtenstein used techniques similar to the printing process of pulp comic books in his paintings, placing uniformly sized Ben-Day dots—named for 19th-century illustrator and printer Benjamin Day—as a way to save money on colored ink. Day had invented the technique, which uses dots as a way of shading, relies on separately colored dots to trick the mind into filling in the spaces and blending colors. “In the Lichtenstein self-portraits, the dots create a sort of automatic transference of the painter’s subjectivity to the viewer,” says Horowitz. “There’s a similar loss of self in 590 Dots, as the viewer falls into the strobing field.”
Prior to Lichtenstein (and around the same time Day was developing his dots), Pointillism marked the beginning of an artistic self-consciousness of dots as a mark-making tool. In the late 19th century, French artists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac became frustrated with Impressionism, in which the blending of colors in the palette