Untitled

This project, presented directly by the artist via email, consists of a single idea: to pull one of Los Angeles’s old trolley cars out of the ocean, where they were dumped after the closure of the city’s streetcar system. Reflecting on his native city—now completely devoted to cars—its past, and its processes of forgetting, Horvitz seeks to bring back to light an episode—the dumping of the trolleys into the ocean—that clearly serves as a metaphor.
The Los Angeles Railway was a streetcar system that operated in central Los Angeles and the surrounding neighborhoods between 1901 and 1963. Several articles and photographs confirm that, during the 1950s, a few of the discarded streetcars from the Los Angeles Transit Lines (created in 1945) were thrown into the ocean. In particular, the July 1959 issue of Mass Transportation magazine[1] featured an informative article about six “old” Los Angeles Transit Lines streetcars being placed off the coast at Redondo Beach to create an artificial reef.
This work by David Horvitz can also be seen as part of a broader reflection by the artist on the concepts of water and time—one that draws upon conceptual practices and applies “the fluid and impermanent dimension of the Fluxus movement and of Oriental culture”[2]. The search for and recovery of a discarded trolley car thus become a poetic and surreal performative gesture—an ephemeral action meant to leave several different traces, much like David Horvitz’s postal artworks, his stamps, or his attempts to mimic the sound of the ocean using the human voice.
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[1] Metro Digital Resources Librarian, Before “Subway To The Sea,” There Was “Streetcar In The Sea”: Creating Artificial Reefs Off The Los Angeles Coast In 1959,  Metro's Primary Resources, Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, May 18, 2011, Available at: https://metroprimaryresources.info/before-subway-to-the-sea-there-was-streetcar-in-the-sea-creating-artificial-reefs-off-the-los-angeles-coast-in-1959/1324/

[2] M. Vecellio, The Water in you, in David Horvitz, nuvola, nuvola, oceano, nuvola, foschia, tu, Loom Gallery, Milano, 2018, s.p.