Absurd, Mischievous, and Hoaxy: Horvitz, Cadere, and Artist Estates

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André Cadere: a presentation of nine works 1974–1977 (installation view) (2023). Painted round bars of wood placed throughout the garden of David Horvitz (made in collaboration with Terremoto), February 2023. Image courtesy of David Horvitz. Photo: Rio Asch Phoenix.

On an overcast afternoon in June, I visited the garden of artist David Horvitz in the Arlington Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. While we talked, Horvitz took advantage of the cool weather by weeding, watering plants, feeding crows, and slinging mud at the garden walls to attract swallows. Steps away from Horvitz’s studio, the land was granted to him by the owner in a handshake deal after a house on the property burned down.¹ By the end of 2020, Horvitz and the landscape design firm Terremoto had begun collaborating on the repair and rejuvenation of the 5,000-square-foot lot. Endeavoring toward positive ecological change, Terremoto and Horvitz created a lush garden of native plants.² Horvitz views the space as an artwork, citing Derek Jarman’s (1942–94) garden at Prospect Cottage, from which he collected seeds to plant in his own garden, as a project he admires. His first artistic gesture was filling the lot with rubble he gathered from LACMA’s recent demolition of William Pereira’s “float[ing]” campus to make way for Peter Zumthor’s publicly loathed design.³ Built from both domestic and institutional ruin, Horvitz’s garden has been described as an “antithesis” to the “symbol of waste and excess” of LACMA’s demolition.⁴ Shells from oysters, mussels, scallops, and abalone are arranged in piles across the dirt floor, a motley crew of restaurant waste, beach finds, and leftovers from dinner parties with friends. In Horvitz’s garden, nearly everything has a provenance. The landscape is layered with rich histories.

Since its creation, the garden has served as a venue for Horvitz’s artist-organized shows. Horvitz’s impulse to organize in unlikely spaces has been present since his mid- to late-20s, when he started undertaking experimental exhibitions alongside friends and collaborators in what he calls “non-spaces”; over the years, he has held exhibitions in a post office mailbox, at a photo lab, and as an edition of 30 bound books. A busy father of two, Horvitz now launches his garden projects spontaneously, often giving the public a day’s notice. In February, he invited 33 artists to create text-based instructional works, scores, moments, and situations for a garden exhibition co-sponsored by the Swiss Institute and Triple Canopy. Visitors were handed a booklet featuring instructions for each work, allowing them to enact those of their choosing.

When I walked into the space, I noticed a popular text-based work from the 1960s painted on the garden’s north-facing wall, which I assumed was left over from the group exhibition. “I have to paint over that,” Horvitz noted. The artist’s studio had permitted him to reproduce the work in the booklet, but painting it on the wall, unbeknownst to Horvitz, was not permissible. Through our conversation, I learned that recreating the work of conceptualists is, for Horvitz, not an act of copying—rather, it is a recurring practice that serves as a conduit for exploring larger issues of authorship.

Running simultaneously with the group show was an exhibition of artist André Cadere (1934–78). On February 15, 2023, one day before the opening, Horvitz printed 100 flyers for the Cadere show, posting a photograph of one on Instagram. The invitations were bare, advertising that nine works made by the late conceptual artist between 1974 and 1977 would be presented in participation with Frieze Los Angeles.⁵ Cryptically, the back of the invitation, also posted to Instagram, stated: “INVITATION TO POINT OUT WHAT IS EXHIBITED WITHOUT INVITATION.” Horvitz admitted to me that the fair had not sanctioned the exhibition as an official satellite event and that, “in the spirit of Cadere,” this detail was fabricated. “He would impose himself always, and I was imposing the show onto Frieze like a parasite,” he said—an interesting choice of words given the fact that art critic Bruce Hainley once referred to Cadere’s practice as a “purposeful parasitism.”⁶ And like the Frieze detail, the artworks in the show were fabricated by Horvitz. Following the strict, rigorous system for color sequencing laid out in Cadere’s catalogue raisonné, Horvitz and his assistant built nine Barres de bois rond (“round bars of wood”). Cadere constructed two hundred such bars between 1970 and his premature death in 1978. Horvitz placed his replica bars throughout his garden, along with a binder filled with photocopies of pages from Cadere’s catalogue raisonné, including images of the original works and their building instructions.

At the exhibition’s opening, visitors expressed their delight on Instagram, tagging @andre_cadere, an account reportedly run by Hervé Bize, whose eponymous gallery represents Cadere’s estate. Upon seeing the unlicensed use of Cadere’s work, Bize struck back with an all-caps text post on Instagram—a rather unexpected forum for an estate to get involved in a potential legal dispute:

To answer definitely to anyone who would lend the slightest consideration to what has been announced as a so-called garden exhibition of André Cadere in Los Angeles (and for Frieze LA!): Any responsible and professional person should realize that all this is only a kind of trickery that has no interest and comes from an artist who thinks he can do anything to make himself a bit interesting.⁷

In subsequent posts, Bize included extensive corrections to an ArtNews article written by Alex Greenberger about Horvitz’s show. One post’s caption expressed outrage over Greenberger’s reference to the show as an “exhibition,” calling it “only a masquerade”—accompanied by the hashtag “fakeshow.”⁸ The title of Greenberger’s essay was later revised to appease Bize. Horvitz often responded by “liking” Bize’s posts, proving himself to be an institutional agitator, much like Cadere.

Cadere was a Romanian émigré who developed an anti-establishment reputation. He had a habit of antagonizing artists, such as Daniel Buren, whose opening he crashed in Paris in 1973. Cadere brought one of his seven-foot-long wooden bars to Buren’s exhibition, and after discovering that the gallery staff had hidden it away in a broom closet, he mailed out exhibition announcements, inviting people to view the work in the closet.⁹ According to art historian Lily Woodruff, members of the arts community were often displeased with Cadere’s “guerrilla tactics.”¹⁰ Cadere referred to himself as a “squatter” and often positioned his wooden bars outside of “legible art contexts,”¹¹ such as cafés, pubs, and trains. Friend of Cadere and art historian Sanda Agalides described him as “absurd, mischievous and hoaxy.”¹² Hainley wrote that Cadere aimed to “fuck” with authority through “minor forms of terrorism.”¹³ Even when galleries and museums legitimized him, Cadere found ways to disrupt the order and decorum demanded by these spaces. At Galerie MTL in Brussels, for example, seven of the artist’s wooden bars were protected by traditional gallery displays, while the eighth was available for visitors to handle.¹⁴

André Cadere walking with artwork, Barre de bois rond, in front of Blimpie restaurant, New York (1976). Image courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Photo: Shunk-Kender/© J. Paul Getty Trust.

Since Cadere’s death from cancer in 1978, Galerie Hervé Bize, along with Cadere’s estate (rumored to be overseen by Cadere’s widow), has taken responsibility for upholding the integrity of the artist by making decisions that preserve the moral and economic rights guaranteed to artists under French law. When I asked Bize whether Cadere prepared any estate planning documents prior to his death, he noted that Cadere died relatively young at 44 and thus “didn’t have much time to think about his estate or his posterity.”¹⁵ Without such documents in place, it can be difficult to determine whether an estate is operating in the artist’s best interest. An estate is also considered the authority on the artist’s history and the sole authenticator of the artist’s production. Cadere’s history of challenging institutional control appears incompatible with legality, canonization, and institutionalization. In our conversation, Horvitz criticized Bize for “attempting to commercialize” Cadere’s work, while Bize noted that Cadere regularly exhibited and sold his work during his short career.¹⁶ When I asked Horvitz if an artist like Cadere could be managed by an estate, to my surprise, he said, “Yes. If it’s done the right way.”

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From the start of his artistic practice, which reflects on legacy, ownership, intellectual property, and the creation of art history, Horvitz, like Cadere, has frequently ruffled the feathers of authority. The story begins in 2007 when Horvitz made a five-second, black-and-white video that was uploaded onto YouTube just two short years after the platform’s inception. Shot on film, the video shows a young man on the beach, facing away from the camera, riding his bike toward the shore. The clip cuts off right as he enters the Pacific Ocean.¹⁷ Next, Horvitz updated the Wikipedia page for the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader (1942–75), claiming that the video was made by Ader and recently discovered at the University of California, Irvine, where the artist taught in the 1970s. The YouTube description noted that Ader probably deemed the video unusable because the film ran out.¹⁸ Horvitz’s decision to create the work was a reaction to the art world’s romanticization of Ader’s death (the artist disappeared after embarking on what would have been the smallest sailboat to ever journey across the Atlantic).¹⁹ According to Horvitz, he was not trying to “make a fake work that people thought was real”; rather, he was experimenting with the creation of folklore and exploring public participation in the development of an artist’s story.

Before his untimely death, it is assumed that Ader, like Cadere, had not prepared legal documents outlining his wishes for the afterlife of his work and image. Ader’s widow, Mary Sue Andersen-Ader, became the executor of his estate by default. Andersen-Ader joined forces with several individuals close to and knowledgeable about Ader. Ger van Elk, a Dutch artist and friend of Ader; Erik Ader, the artist’s younger brother; Adriaan van Ravesteijn, then co-owner of the Amsterdam-based gallery Art & Project; and Martijn Sanders, a civic leader and well-known collector in Amsterdam, thus became representatives of Ader’s estate.²⁰ Andersen-Ader was enthusiastic about the care these men put into cataloging and preserving his legacy. The estate would remain at Art & Project, where Ader had shown since 1972, and would be represented by gallery owner and collector Paul Andriesse, then an art history student. Together, they all wrote authoritative texts on Ader’s life and work and agreed not to recreate works or publish posthumous editions.²¹ In 1993, after only five years, Andriesse was removed from his responsibilities by Andersen-Ader, who would entrust the representation of the artist’s work to gallerist Patrick Painter.²²

In 2007, on the heels of his Ader Wikipedia page, and at a nascent stage of his career, Horvitz received an email from Patrick Painter, Inc., an art gallery in Los Angeles founded in 1997, asking for a studio visit. Rather than arrange a time to visit Horvitz’s studio, Painter asked for a meeting at the gallery, which raised suspicion for Horvitz. He believes that the gallery tried to bait him with a career opportunity to confront him about the falsely attributed video, saying “my friends thought I was crazy for passing up on a blue-chip gallery.” After protesting the video, the gallery had it temporarily removed from YouTube.²³ Ironically enough, by this time, Painter’s gallery and publishing house had already been criticized for creating posthumous artworks by Ader—including projects Ader had abandoned during his lifetime—and thus violating the estate’s prior ethics and standards.²⁴ In 2004, Wade Saunders wrote about the debacle in Art in America, also revealing that he discovered Ader’s written instructions for the 1973 project Thoughts Unsaid, Then Forgotten at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, which had been inaccurately recreated by Patrick Painter Editions.²⁵

According to Horvitz, after Ader’s widow Andersen-Ader was shown his video by a documentarian, she remarked that she had “never seen this,” that Horvitz “had Ader’s hair,” and that Ader “would do this.” Perhaps Andersen-Ader’s more permissive response shows that with open-mindedness and a sense of humor, executors of a late artist’s estate can maintain the integrity and relevance of said artist while simultaneously embracing experimentations by other artists. In 2009, Horvitz exhibited the video at 2nd Cannons Publications in L.A.’s Chinatown. In a Los Angeles Times review of the show, Holly Myers wrote, “Horvitz’s indebtedness…to the Conceptualists of Ader’s generation is so great as to border, at times, on sheer imitation—and it may be that this young artist…has yet to find his own footing.… There’s heart to the work, however, and a kind of shrewd integrity that leaves little doubt that he will.”²⁶ It is most accurate, however, to view Horvitz’s practice not as homage, nor as imitation, but rather as an exercise in questioning authorship, authority, historicization, legacy, and myth-making.

Art historian Woodruff noted that Cadere’s intention for placing himself within the orbit of more prominent artists like Buren was to “call attention to his own work.”²⁷ Although his work was “formally and strategically very similar,” Cadere believed it was crucially different from Buren’s and other established conceptualists’ in that it was “more institutionally independent.”²⁸ It appears here that Cadere found the move away from the institution virtuous. However, he did not completely shun the gallery and museum circuit and willingly operated within it toward the end of his career. Like Cadere, Horvitz’s practice has been supported by prestigious institutions while also pushing the boundaries of acceptability. Both artists have been perceived by their peers and authoritative figures as inappropriate agitators.

In Horvitz’s case, he places himself within a lineage of conceptual practitioners, speaking to them through his artistic practice, or using their posthumous careers as cautionary tales against institutional control. “What is your response to someone like Bize, who says you align yourself with Cadere, or even Ader, because you want attention or more exposure?” I asked. “All of Bize’s criticism towards me could go towards Cadere. ‘Oh, this guy is just doing these things for attention so people can talk about him!’” Horvitz responded. “That’s what artists do. They make work so people can talk about it.”

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 33.

Photo: Olivia Fougeirol.

André Cadere: a presentation of nine works 1974–1977 (installation view) (2023). Painted round bars of wood placed throughout the garden of David Horvitz (made in collaboration with Terremoto), February 2023. Images courtesy of David Horvitz. Photos: Rio Asch Phoenix.

André Cadere: a presentation of nine works 1974–1977 (installation view) (2023). Painted round bars of wood placed throughout the garden of David Horvitz (made in collaboration with Terremoto), February 2023. Images courtesy of David Horvitz. Photos: Rio Asch Phoenix.

André Cadere: a presentation of nine works 1974–1977 (installation view) (2023). Painted round bars of wood placed throughout the garden of David Horvitz (made in collaboration with Terremoto), February 2023. Images courtesy of David Horvitz. Photos: Rio Asch Phoenix.

Tina Barouti, PhD is an art historian and curator from Los Angeles. She lectures in SAIC’s Art History, Theory, and Criticism department.

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