If the US Postal Service ever runs out of stuff to do, it won’t be David Horvitz’s fault. The New York-based artist/photographer, currently working on his MFA at Bard College, makes constant, imaginative use of PO boxes, public mail drop boxes, postcards, and envelopes. Sure, sometimes they’re simply a way of getting his art out into the world, but other times they play a significant role in his conceptual art pieces, and occasionally they are the art.

Among the things Horvitz mails to strangers: photographs of the sky, the sea, himself kissing a moon tree; a rock from the Hudson River; old memories, dredged up and written down; a cassette tape of a psychic reading; secrets; Coney Island sand; photos of mailboxes mailed from the boxes they depict. Many of these items are part of a recent project called Things For Sale That I Will Mail You, which highlights (among other things) the distance between people and places, but more so the potential closeness.

The concept is relatively simple: On his website, Horvitz offers a variety of things he will do—places he’ll go, photos he’ll take, books he’ll read, etc.—for various prices. For $1,626, he will go to the small Okinawan island of Taketomi and send you an envelope filled with star sand. For $800, he will ride in a hot air balloon, take Polaroids of the experience, put the photos in an envelope addressed to you, and drop the envelope from the sky. For $250, he’ll read The Little Prince in front of the New York Stock Exchange. For $1, he will sit in silence and think about you for one minute.

This conceptual art ranges in price and complicatedness and place/amount of time involved. For most of the tasks, Horvitz sends the purchaser photographic proof of what happened—where he went, what the sky looked like from there. For others, he mails a specific object (rock, sand) as confirmation.

The response to this project—with its romanticism, skyscapes, and intriguing mixture of structure and surprise—has been overwhelming. Things For Sale That I Will Mail You has spread across the worldwide web, attracting the attention of art bloggers, curio collectors, and NPR. I spoke with the ever-scheming Horvitz about his work: interacting with strangers, empty envelopes, and the art of the everyday.

LAURA PEARSON: So this magazine is called Proximity, and I think it’s a pretty great word to describe your work. The art you’ve been selling on your website establishes a special proximity between you (the artist) and the art buyer. By simply clicking on a PayPal link, the art buyer is interacting with you, sort of setting you in motion. How would you describe this interaction?

How to Exit a Photograph by David Horvitz

DAVID HORVITZ: An exchange occurs here: The purchaser initiates an action. But I’d also like to see it as an action towards them—a gesture, a gift. We can’t really talk about the art as a gift for this specific project, because they are purchasing it, but there’s the idea of giving: I will go somewhere and send you something from there. I will send you this email when I start thinking about you, and when I finish. It’s a connection.

LP: Have you gotten feedback from people who are purchasing this stuff, and if so, what have they said?

DH: A lot of the time I just do it and that’s that. Sometimes people will send me a photograph back of what I send them. Sometimes they will ask me how I felt. But that’s usually it. On rare occasions people will try to use this to instigate meeting with me. I feel weird meeting people off the Internet, so I try not to. I am not opposed to meeting people—I’d like to meet these people—but when I develop some kind of dialogue with someone online that I don’t know, and then they try to take it a step further, I feel reluctant. However, if a meeting with someone happened randomly that would be completely different. I think I’m saying I am into chance.

LP: That makes sense. I mean, in many ways the person who’s buying the art is closely involved with the piece, in the sense that they’re the one receiving the “gift” or sponsoring the experience. But there’s also a bit of distance there. In some cases, you’re going to remote places and reading a book or looking for rocks or doing something solitarily . . . which leads me to the question: How do you come up with ideas for things you will sell?

DH: I’m not really sure. They just emerge from somewhere. I could get an idea in the shower or while I’m falling asleep. I go on walks every day, and that usually generates ideas. Or I just put myself in situations where I react to unexpected or new things. Like, I will talk to people or go down a street I’ve never been or go to the library and open up a book at random, and I’ll see if anything comes out of that—out of a synergy or something.

LP: I imagine selling one of your posters or photographs is a totally different thing than selling a conceptual piece like taking a train to a desolate area and reading Anna Karenina in its entirety. But maybe not. What’s going through your head when someone buys this kind of art piece?

DH: Ha ha. This is what goes on in my head: Oh no, I guess I gotta go read 800 pages at the end of Roosevelt Island! I guess when we look at what I am doing, we could depart into a discussion about a way of living or a way of navigating everyday life and being active within that space—opening up possibilities and whatnot. I’m setting up a kind of conceptual parameter for an action I must carry out. But this prescribed idea happens in the world. I use the world as a set to make play. I like to play!

LP: And there are exciting, unpredictable elements to play. Have any of these pieces—like train rides or psychic readings—turned out very differently than you expected?

DH: For the psychic reading [a task in which Horvitz talked to a psychic, recorded it, and sent the cassette tape to the buyer], it was really hard to find someone who would let me record the session. So it was really interesting. I ended up going on these exhausting ventures through the city looking for psychics. I got really into the idea of navigating through a city by paying attention to certain things, looking for certain signs. The city completely changes then; it’s a whole new system. The same goes for feeding the homeless [another project] or searching for a mailbox. I like leaving things open-ended and seeing where I end up.

LP: I want to ask you about mailboxes. What draws you to using PO boxes, sending things through the mail—y’know, besides just generally keeping employees of the USPS on their toes?

DH: There are a couple things at play here. One is this romantic (or maybe just comforting) idea of knowing that there exists this tiny little space where these things reside and just sit. There are also subversive aspects of it—the possibility of reappropriating this space.

For mail, it is the intimacy that interests me. When you mail something to someone, you are sending it on a path. It is going right to them—to its target, its destination. I like how it also bridges the distance between two people. Yet it also goes on its own unknown journey: I am somewhere. You are somewhere. The letter goes in between us through the real world. But we don’t know where it goes; we don’t know what it sees; we don’t know whom it encounters along the way. I once played with this idea by mailing someone two envelopes from Japan on the same day from the same post office. They were both addressed to the same place, so the letters had the same starting and ending point, but I sent one airmail and the other via sea. So they both had completely different travel experiences.

LP: Didn’t you also mail people empty envelopes?

DH: Yeah, with the empty envelopes there are two things happening: One is this romantic gesture of sending nothing, so it is just about this act of going from one person to another. The other thing is that since it is nothing and just this act of sending, it becomes about the distance. Wait; maybe those are both the same thing. I always thought of it as two things, I guess I was fooling myself. Ha ha!

LP: Speaking of romanticism, let’s talk about your sky project. You’ve been emailing or mailing people photos of the sky every day. And you’re going to take a photo of the sky every day for the rest of your life.

DH: The sky email is similar in that it is about sending someone something [that is] almost pointless and meaningless but also full of a kind of romanticism, awareness, and attention. I’m interested in giving small moments attention.

LP: Are there artists or forces of inspiration who help you turn your attention to the small things?

DH: There is a lot of talk about the everyday: Michel De Certeu, Henri Lefebvre, the Situationist ideas of constructing situations—opening up spaces for play and possibility, wandering around…. Olafur Eliasson creates these amazing pieces that have to do with experience and perception, but a lot of the times they are within a gallery or museum, and the active viewer experiences what Eliasson has created. I am trying to figure out a way to not make something, to just redirect attention to what is already there. This can be very easy and very difficult. I can say, Look at the sky. But there needs to be more of a trick going on—a trick!

by Laura Pearson