Rebecca Horn was my first art obsession. I spent much of my first winter in art school alone in my apartment, sheltering from the brutal Rhode Island snowstorms and away from home and those close to me. It was during this time that I stumbled across Horn’s work and I was immediately drawn to her life and artistic practice.
There was nothing in my living room but a large mirror leaning against the wall and a window overlooking the town square. it resembles the room in which horne performed Scrape two walls at the same time (1974-75) as part of her series Berlin Nine Paragraph Exercise. During the performance, her fingers stretched across the width of the room, allowing her hands to touch two walls and make a scraping sound.
After a long period of isolation, Horn began making and wearing equipment for her acting work. At the age of 20, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, but had to leave due to severe lung inflammation caused by inhaling fiberglass. “I spent a year in a nursing home,” she told an interviewer in 2005, “and my parents died. I was completely isolated. That’s when I started making my first sculptures of the human body. I was lying in bed Just sew.” Naturally, her chosen materials became those more readily available in domestic spaces: fabric, pencil, wood, feathers, cardboard, and wire.
She uses prosthetic bandages to clinicalize the connection between the device and the body, creating constraining intersections on the torso, head and limbs. Horn’s body changed as she was strapped in: leaving marks on her body pencil mask (1972), as utterly restrained as a mummy arm extension (1968), or using her movements to create two ever-changing semicircles White body fan (1972), Horn’s ballet background is also evident. She orchestrates objects and brutally directs physical performances. It was almost natural that she would create this film dancer (dancer), 1978, depicts the surreal scene of two young ballet dancers bound to each other, arms tied to their legs, doomed to fall.
Soon after her early experiments with body extensions, Horne’s metamorphosis transcended the human body and began to revel in the joys of precision engineering. her debut Peacock machine (1982) demonstrated her ability to summon spirits at Documenta 7. Her machines perform endlessly repetitive dances that feature moments of intimacy, violence, and loss, as Rhino Kiss (1989) and Love and Hate, “Knuggle Dome” by James Joyce (2004), and the empty back-and-forth movement dancersuggesting something about the nanny who jumped out of the window. As Horn puts it, her automata are “more than objects. These are not cars or washing machines. They rest, reflect, wait.”
Every time I see Horn’s machines in action, I am mesmerized by their graceful movements, as if time slows down. Her intricate interlocking gears and actuators reminded me of the extraordinary mechanics of life in author Ted Chiang’s short story “Exhale” (2019), in which every strand of gold foil is a piece of consciousness. Long before the advent of intelligent machines, Horne was breathing life into her creations.
To this day, female artists are not widely recognized as leaders in the field of kinetic sculpture or for their mastery of the technique. Although Horn has worked extensively in both areas, she is primarily known for her early performances that highlighted the body and its seamed extensions in domestic spaces.
Horn largely retired from public life after suffering a stroke in 2015. The latest video I found online is of her visiting the Harvard Art Museums while she was creating Hei Yufei calligraphy and painting (2014). In the video, she talks about her collaboration with the university and her choice of the three books that appear in the work, each chosen for its possible message to young people: Fernando Pessoa’s Book of DisquietFranz Kafka Americanand James Joyce’s Ulysses. The “black rain” in the work is ink, not paint, splattered on the white wall in a manner that is both precise and spontaneous. She describes the programmed movements as the dance of a snake spitting ink.
I trained in ballet and gymnastics and later studied mechanics before creating art. I am grateful for my early exposure to Horn’s work. She showed me what kind of artist one could be: a storyteller, an inventor, an alchemist, and a theater director.
