Essay/Text: Without Rhyme or Reason

Below is a critical response to Vlatka Horvat’s work This Here and That There, which has been commissioned for a critical journal based in Croatia called zarez (www.zarez.hr). The text follows a recent performance of the work by Horvat in the Los Angeles River, presented by Outpost for Contemporary Art. In This Here and That There, Horvat continuously rearranges 50 chairs over a period of eight hours. Each successive chair arrangement implies a set of possible relations between their imagined occupants, evoking a range of possibilities related to human interaction - dialogue, encounter, communication, and conflict. The text is used as a space to extend ideas initially developed in relation to this work within an previous essay Over and Over, Again and Again, where notions of restlessness and Sisyphian labour are explored through the prism of Horvat’s practice.

Without Rhyme or Reason