Rebecca Horn is a performance artist who creates site-specific installations, a sculptor who makes films, an artist who draws and writes poetry. An interdisciplinary artist with high sensitivity and the subtle ability to navigate and connect all these forms of expression through a potent body of work, emotive and sometimes even disturbing, characterized as much by psychological fragility as it is by play and wittiness.
The following (X) observations examine Rebecca Horn’s artistic energy as well as the motifs and aesthetic strategies of her work.
(I) Rebecca Horn’s work has casted a broad arc between a deeply rooted reality and a all-embracing imagination, characterized by crossing references between emotions, oppressive memories and dreams, reflections of contemporary politics and history, unpredictable responses to locations and moods and the dialogue of a curious mind with science and technology. A very inclusive approach to making by conjuring highly suggestive images throughout a strong desire to manifest forms and motion.
(II) From the late 1960’s to the early 1970’s the artist produced a series of studies addressing the female anatomy. Rather than presenting harmonious visions of feminine beauty these are depictions of a vulnerable and occasionally mistreated body. The body is held together with bandages and corsets that make it look like a chained captive assuming a grotesque appearance through large prostheses and a disability connected to a traumatic past, resembling a subjective insecurity, testifying not only a physical deficit but also psychological, physically manifested by the creation of body sculptures (her drawings acquire objective character) that restrict physicality through enlarged body extremities together with the cutting of sensory perception, clearly conveying a lack of interpersonal communication. Hence the performer takes a passive role/ indirect contact with the audience, hardly allowing any autonomy for the individual expression or improvisation.
(III) Rebecca Horn’s work prompts associations with surrealism. The artist does not pay tribute to the 20th century avant-garde movement by directly taking over its forms, motifs or subjects, but instead by adopting specific artistic strategies (i.e. collage, montage, ready-mades) and by concerning herself with the general thematic explored by the surrealist (i.e. erotism, sexuality) making use as well of their linguistic metaphors in her visual works. Keeping hold of those unfaithful legs (title taken from Andre Breton’s and Paul Eluard’s book: L’Immacule conception) is about a dialogue with Otto Sander in which each participant is partially bandaged with white tape, joined together with strong magnets attached respectably to the outside of his left leg and of her right leg; such is the power of the connection that the two performers extremities together create a three legged/ double-bodied creature who is only able to advance with wobbling uncertainty and a lot of effort.
Another form of alluding to this surrealist context is made by the artist’s suggestions to legends and myths. In Unicorn, the actor is meant to be seen as a new embodiment of the Minotaur a cross between a man and a bull, an aspiration for forms of re-mythification seems to be very strong, imbued by the yearning for a quality that presupposes primordial knowledge.
Like the surrealists, Rebecca Horn is not stoping at only creating spectacular objects that stand up: the viewer’s interest must be caught by something in these objects that is of deeper human interest. These objects are highly charged with emotional connotations capable of shaking the viewer’s self confidence calling his/ her sense of identity into doubt, leaving open a space for self interpretation. Her work is constantly revolving around the evocation of things concealed behind their outer appearance, vital energy and sexuality, contrast and harmony, identity and division, drama and poetry always integrated in a multi-layered context, which also seems to be guided by a convulsive beauty.
(IV) In 1978, Rebecca Horn makes Der Eintanzer, a film that to some extent conceals all of the artist’s previous works, adding language and music to her visual imagery as crucial elements of expression, various objects now started to play a major role in her work. Despite the fact of being conceived for a filmic setting these artefacts continue to retain their original form and motory functions preserving their kinetic functiounality alongside their visual appearance, as the four-legged table that towards the end of the movie starts moving, attempting to stimulate a tango, the table simbolises the grace and innocence of these everyday objects brought to life marking a transformation in Rebecca’s work in which she no longer performs and human element is susplanted by the machines.
In contraposition to Joseph Beuys and other artists associated with the Fluxus and Arte povera movements, Rebecca Horn does not turn to found objects, “impoverished” or worn out/ humble machines; instead she builds particular machines of her own that are designed with precision and technical skill imbued with poetic grace and enchanting fragility.
(v) Kinetic objects, mechanical devices and machines play a special role in Rebecca Horn’s work that is almost unparalelled elsewhere in contemporary art. These machines do not operate according to a rational criteria, are not result-oriented. Driven by small electrical motors, these constructs: scratch and caress, beat and drill, hit and stab, hammer and slit. As Rebecca Horn has said: “My machines are not washing machines or cars. They have a human quality and they must change. They get nervous and must stop sometimes. If a machine stops, it doesn’t mean it’s broken. It’s just tired. The tragic and melancholic aspect of machine sis very important to me. I don’t want them to run forever. It’s part of their life that they stop and faint”.
Furthermore these high-quality precision machines are associated with the sphere of memory, calling past or pass events back into our minds and evoking a horizon of playfull experience charged with intimations and feelings.
(VI) The future of art seems no longer to lie with the creation of enduring masterpieces, but instead with defending alternative strategies, individual artists continuing to demonstrate new attitudes towards art and life. This is an attitude that can be traced in Rebecca Horn’s work, asserting and exemplary mode of action. Her works intrinsically act as prototypes, possessing an open structure, the instance of the process that is always open to change: to further development and exploration. Her aesthetically autonomous machines are not seeing as a sacrosanct fully-completed masterpieces but instead as artifacts that can point beyond the narrow confines or art. Building a bridge between everyday life and art. Everyday life objects having a life of their own and placed in unfamiliar contexts.
(VII) The quality of her motory installations are attributed to a femenine methaporic language. Although her work do not illustrates this directly it can be sensed, somehow felt in a subtle manner. What stands out is their repeteadly and constant motion mechanisms creating rythms suggests a responsive relationship between man and machine and even man/nature-machine. Operating in large constellations assuming specific roles, this artifacts are real performing machines and can be compared to the human body as they flirt, dress up and pose, tremble, quiver and sigh, they lay bare the hidden. Translating the human phyche in parodistic manner. It is the articulation of uncertainty that hightens the qualities of these impressive installations.
(VIII) Rebecca Horn is anthing but formalist in her approach to art. Whatever choices of medium, her works are driven by a mission to reflect the mistery of human existence, to articulate the enigmatic nature of being with all it ups and downs, in all its ramifications and limitations, and towards this end uncessingly seeking new images, signs, symbols and metaphores.
(IX) Rebecca Horn’s work revolves around repetition, the kinetic dimension is infused with potentially unlimited duration opening to a landscape of vast imagination. Compared to Jane Tinguely’s work her mechanical paintings are not dependent on the machine itself and the inserted sheet of paper but also are determined by people, objects, duration and specific spaces/ situations becoming a subject to change. They seem to be live mechanisms appearing in tandem with her poems, emphasising the close relationship between writing and drawing, meaning and form, concept and perspective, the poem develop a perspective from which the work can be viewed.
(X) The artist’s symbolic forms deeply rooted in subjective experience are constantly forging images that transcends the personal into a more broader picture. A symbolic language common to the whole humanity.
In her work the mirror motif is much more than a means to make the room appear larger, their refractions and multiplication of appearences adress the issue of identity. Where role and persona become interchangeable, the self appear as the other: resembling one another but not identical. The mirror opens up an alter world where reality and ilusion appear indistinguisable. She also appeals to a range of other things, materials and substances implying magic and alchemy shown in her preferences for substances like mercury, sulphur, black or red liquids, silver and gold to point to an objective mythopoetic laguage borrowed from Carl J. Jung, the artist does not view the purpose of alchemy worshiping some hermetic mysticism but in the possibility of steering the development of the individual along an artistic path (path of individuation) towards a condition of wholeness incidentally leading us to the cosmos. However, pursuing this goal she sets her sights not on society as a whole but solely in the individual. Ultimatly she is conerned with bonding the fundamental opposites of male and female aling the process of self-discovery, unifying incompatible forces abd bridging contradictions, like in the chemical wedding manifesting the union of male sulphur with female mercury in the shape of a human figure.
The deeper artistic meaning of her creativity extends beyond this perspective and it could be seen in the light that her work addresses fundamental questions of the human existence without the promise of conclusive answers or practical remedies. As she defines it in the documentary (Rebecca Horn is Traveling) created by the Tate Modern for her retrospective show in 1994, after all: “It is a magic act” in which the artist is fully committed to the process not even interested in analyzing the purpose or further meaning of the work, then is when the audience takes over.