The Movement of the Body, the Substance of the Self
On Rebecca Horn's Body Landscapes
Her puzzle and
painting machines have made her famous, yet Rebecca Horn's ephemeral
drawings have remained comparatively unknown. Now, the art collection of
North Rhine/Westphalia, K20, is showing a successful combination of
installations and 80 paper works by the artist. Magdalena Kröner
on the key role of drawing, feminist body art, poetry, and surrealism in the
work of the New York-based artist.
Rotation of the Silver Crane, 1984, Deutsche Bank Collection
The artist Rebecca Horn, born in 1944, moved to New York in 1972. The idea she
had in mind was simple, yet insistent: to search out the body's landscapes
and describe them; to stage its movements, observe and distort them, and
to investigate its poetic attributes. While
Rebecca Horn has used a variety of media over the course of her forty-year
career, she has always remained true to a fundamental interest in the body
and the corporeal.
Paradieswitwe, 1975, Deutsche Bank Collection
Rebecca Horn has shot
films, put on performances, and built a large number of wonderfully
fragile, surreal puzzle and painting machines - it was primarily through
the latter that she became well-known. Speaking about her devices, the
artist has said: "My machines aren't Laundromats. They're nervous, and
sometimes they have to pause. If a machine no longer runs, it doesn't mean
that it's broken; it's merely exhausted. The machines' tragic and
melancholic aspect is important to me. I don't want them to go on
functioning forever."
Until now, Rebecca Horn's ephemeral
drawings have remained less known; they've accompanied an oeuvre that has
developed in a variety of areas and genres engaged in a continuous process
of self-reference.
Blüten der Mandel, 2004
©Rebecca Horn / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
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Drawing has always been a favored medium in Rebecca Horn's
work, as the current
exhibition at the Art
Collection North Rhine / Westphalia, K20, testifies to in its
successful combination of 20 installations and sculptures with 80 works on
paper; like an ongoing notebook, it has accompanied all her experiments
and excursions into new territory.
Unicorn, 1970
©Rebecca Horn / VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
Photo:
Achim Thode
Whether it's a matter of
performance, machine, or film - Horn's movements through space and her
interactions with space always remain concrete in their clear connection
to the body. This treatment of the body as a departure point and scale of
reference can best be experienced in Horn's early body sculptures, such as
her famous "Unicorn" from 1970, in which the artist, inspired by the
prostheses and bandages of the clinics and sanatoriums from the turn of
the century, has an actress walk through a cornfield. While her movements
remain limited, her posture is nonetheless upright and proud, expressing
an almost paradoxical dignity; despite her barely concealed nudity, the
woman looks like the dignitary of a secret society or a member of a
strange species, such as the fabulous creature of the work's title. In her
body sculptures, Rebecca Horn also refers back to art historical models -
one only need think of
Max Ernst's collages or the artistic body manipulations of the
Surrealists.
Pencil Mask, 1972, (Filmstill)
©Rebecca Horn / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
At the same time, Rebecca Horn also visualizes an immediate experience in
her body sculptures that has its roots in the feminist
Body Art of the time, within which Rebecca Horn occupies a unique
position. Horn localizes the body in a semantic interstice - it is neither
'free' nor 'natural,' as its occasional placement in nature might suggest.
In Horn's work, the body is always a medium of direct civilizational and
social inscription - conversely, shifting from object to subject, it also
becomes the inscriber. Rebecca Horn has expressed this in a particularly
intense way in works such as Pencil Mask, which she used for a 1972
performance: here, she wears a restrictive, dangerous-looking mask on her
head and uses it to make marks on the wall. "There are three vertical
straps and six horizontal straps tied around my head. A pencil is affixed
to each intersection of straps. Each pencil is 5 cm long; together, they
create a spacial likeness of my profile. When I move my head rhythmically
back and forth before a white wall, the pencils draw the course of the
movement on the wall in lines that grow denser and denser," as the artist
described this impressive performance.
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