Talking Without Thinking

What you are looking at

A red sign hangs inside an ornate nineteenth-century bandstand, framed by cast-iron columns, scrolling railings and a ring of globe lamps. In yellow and white lettering it sets out the rules of the piece: each weekday for the duration of the "Over the Edges" exhibition, the artist will record himself talking for as long as he can; after each session he will email the unedited recording to Ghent, where it will play continuously in this kiosk the following day; at weekends the whole week's recordings will play in sequence. It is signed "Jonathan Horowitz, new york city."

The sign is the only visible part of the work. The rest was sound.

The project

Jonathan Horowitz, an American artist born in New York in 1966, made Talking Without Thinking for Over the Edges, an exhibition organized in 2000 by S.M.A.K., the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent. Instead of using the museum's galleries, the exhibition placed works by dozens of international artists at street corners and in public spaces around the city. Horowitz chose a bandstand, a structure built for public performance, and filled it with the least performed sound imaginable: one man's unrehearsed, unedited monologue, piped in from across the Atlantic a day late.

What does it mean?

The title is a joke and a method. Horowitz set himself to talk without preparing, so the recordings would capture whatever came out: opinions, digressions, silences. Played in a civic space meant for brass bands and speeches, the stream of private chatter becomes a kind of public broadcast. The project also depended on email, still new for most people in 2000, and its one-day delay made the distance between New York and Ghent audible.

Much of Horowitz's work deals with mass media, celebrity and politics, often with deadpan humor, from his political posters such as We Fight to Build a Free World to Hillary Clinton is a Person Too. Talking Without Thinking turns that attention on himself: the artist as an endless talk-radio host with an audience of passers-by.

Where to see it

The installation was temporary and ran only for the duration of Over the Edges. Some descriptions of the work, including earlier versions of this page, have confused it with other Horowitz projects; the sign itself is the best record of what it was. See more on the Jonathan Horowitz page.