Black Dot Project

The Black Dot Project is an ongoing participatory work by the American artist Jonathan Horowitz (born 1966), known for art that mixes pop culture, politics and conceptual games. Each participant is given a small white surface, black paint and a brush and asked to paint one black dot freehand, with no ruler, compass or stencil. The dots are then installed side by side in a grid. Exact dates, venues and the number of panels in this installation have not been confirmed.

What you are looking at

Rows of square white panels are hung edge to edge, each carrying a single black circle. At first glance the grid looks mechanical, like a sheet of printer's halftone or a pattern of polka dots. Look closer and every dot is different. Some are big and confident, nearly touching the edges of their square; others are small and cautious. Some are perfectly round, others lumpy or slightly oval. A few have sharp edges, while others show the drag of the brush or a thin rim where the paint pooled.

The variation is the subject. The same instruction, given to many hands, produces a crowd of individual signatures, and the eye starts to read character into them: bold, timid, careful, careless.

Ideas behind it

Horowitz has linked the dot to the printed image, where in comic books and newspapers pictures are built from patterns of dots. Roy Lichtenstein famously enlarged those Ben-Day dots in Pop Art. Horowitz reverses the process: instead of a machine imitating the hand, many hands imitate a machine, and fail beautifully, each in its own way.

The project also plays with authorship. The work is Horowitz's idea, but the dots are painted by others, often members of the public, in a kind of collective abstraction. It belongs to a line of conceptual art, from Sol LeWitt's instruction-based wall drawings to participatory projects since the 1990s, that asks who really makes a work of art.

Related works

Other works by Horowitz in the catalogue include Left Over Paint Abstraction, Donation Cubes and Talking Without Thinking. More on the artist at Jonathan Horowitz.