Imagine a man who is as obsessive as he is silly, as genius as naïve, as whimsical as scrutinizing. Stanley Kubrick? No, I'm referring to Kristan Horton. Quickly on his way to becoming a career artist, Horton has contributed some of the quirkiest, innovative art to the Toronto scene. He has worked in just about every medium you can imagine, including some you might not have, like robotic sculpture and 'iconic grammar'.
In his latest project, Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove, Horton undertook the massive task of photographing every still (approximately 350) from the 1964 Kubrick classic. He then set about arranging in sculpture, miniature recreations of every scene using mundane household objects like peanut butter jars, cigarette butts, cutlery and duct tape. The resulting photographs are then displayed beside the original stills, not unlike the game "Guess What's Different in Picture B" except, of course, everything has been replaced.
The results are remarkable and sometimes hilarious, like in the aerial view of the Pentagon, in which Horton uses a wicker placemat for his interpretation, or instead of a radar, he simply uses a stove element, shot from above. Like other viewers, I couldn't help myself from laughing out loud several times, recognizing the unlikely stand-ins, like Bell bills and to-do lists instead of Top Secret documents. But the photographs are also awestriking. For their obsessive quality, for the patience Horton puts into lighting, complex angles and subtle grades of tone and scale.
Horton confesses to having viewed Kubrick’s film some 730 times over a two-year period. He describes his artistic fixation with "the use of “transplantation” in film, the replacement of the “real” with convincing substitutes".
Only in rare cases are the actors represented in Horton's recreations, mostly the human component is conspicuously missing, not unlike several of his past projects. In his 2000 -2004 installation, Oracle, Horton programmed software to transcribe Homer's The Odyssey from a 'book-on-tape', turning it back into a book without the help of any author. Or in his 1997 project, Flower & Son Co., where he constructed robotic patio furniture that would unfold itself on a timer synchronized to the sun's rise.
Horton has a strong affinity with the inanimate world, perhaps it could even be said, more so than with that of humans. For him, objects have a reliability that the frailty of the body can never equal. When Horton was twelve years old, he developed a debilitating case of Chron's disease. Over the next 25 years, he had an unimaginable number of surgeries performed on him and, as a result, suffered forced reclusion during a time when most young people are fiercely meeting the outside world. With Chron's, not unlike Dr. Strangelove, an otherwise mundane object, such as a colostomy pouch, becomes a reasonable transplant for the failing original.
As in the historical cases of Khalo, Beethoven, Sontag and Goethe, creativity and illness are inextricably linked. The afflictions the artist suffers become a vehicle or tenor of metaphor in their work. For Horton, the disease is less a theme than a context from which his art seems to be issued. In all his work, there is unmistakable reverence for the kindness of objects.
As Kubrick succeeded with the original film, treating complex and dark subject matter with amusement is one of Horton's great talents. On first viewing, one might only observe the whimsical element of this project, but with a careful eye, the density of his undertaking is irrefutable. It is intricately crafted spoof upon spoof, but laying quietly underneath it all remains the injustice of war, the fallible human factor.
Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove is showing at the Wynick/Tuck Gallery in Toronto, until January 26th, 2005. For more information on Kristan Horton, visit his website at http://kristanhorton.com.
This article was originally published in NY Arts Magazine, August 2005
