Review: Rebecca Horn. New York, Guggenheim MuseumAuthor(s): Lynne CookeSource: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 135, No. 1086 (Sep., 1993), pp. 658-659Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/885903Accessed: 19/09/2010 19:40

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EXHIBITION REVIEWS

57. War, byJackson Pollock. 1947. Pen and ink and coloured pencils on paper, 52.4 by 66 cm. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

On the evidence here, de Kooning brought more ambition and complexity to his graphic output than perhaps anyone else. His oils on paper such as Judgement day (1946), Black untitled (1948) and Zot (1949) prove that he had collapsed drawing and painting into a single multi-layered process. In Woman (Fig.58) the mouth cut out from a magazine advertisement signals a kitsch level of bodily gratification. Yet the rest of this clamorous presence is splayed and dissolved into an armature both archi- tectonic and tumultuous. Thus the com- position as a whole blends feral and urban connotations, just as it disfigures arrestingly immediate passages (the mouth) with ob- scure ones (the lower torso). In fact, all seven of the de Koonings mimic Freud's

'oral-aggressive' psychological stage in their allusions to tearing, destruction, engulf- ment, phantasmagorical caricature or tac- tile fluency. This supports my sense that de Kooning's sources in several crucial cases - Pink angels, The marshes and Excavation among them - are morticed to such themes.3 Indeed, the placement of a tiny, lone orange-red streak in the ashen Zot cor- responds to where the prostrate body of Orpheus lies in the 1930 Picasso etching that probably sparked Excavation.4 Without even broaching these or other matters pertinent to contemporary scholarship, the show stood devoid of serious exegesis and rationale, impressively adrift on the walls of the Metropolitan.

DAVID ANFAM

' The exhibition was previously at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (26thJanuary to 4th April). 2Abstract Expressionism: Works on Paper. By Lisa Mintz Messinger. 163 pp. + 60 col. ills. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 1993), $45. ISBN 0-87099-656-8. 3For possible points of departure for these three paintings in Titian and in two works by Picasso respectively, see D. ANFAM: Abstract Expressionism, London [1990], pp.112-13, 121; D. ANFAM: 'Beginning at the End: The Extremes ofAbstract Expressionism' in C.M. JOACHIMIDES and N. ROSENTHAL, eds.: American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1913-1993, exh.cat., Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, [1993], pp.88-90. 4MESSINGER, op.cit. above, p.30, note 3, cites Sally Yard's assertion that Judgement day 'portrays the four angels of the Gates of Paradise'. Certainly, this work again has a specific source but Yard's choice is ques- tionable: I suspect another model far more attuned to de Kooning's focus on torment, aggression and the human anatomy.

Itt

58. Woman, by Willem de Kooning. 1950. Oil, cut and pasted paper on paper, 37.5 by 29.5 cm. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

New York, Guggenheim Museum Rebecca Horn

'You can love someone so much that you paralyse yourself. That's what I'm interested in, the extremes you can go to', Rebecca Horn recently confessed. Simul- taneously film maker, sculptor, performance and installation artist, Horn has made one of the most impressive and charged bodies of work devoted to the anatomy of love this century. Notwithstanding the variety of means she employs, hers is a persistent and consistent quest.

In the late sixties, Horn began a series of objects which extended the body physi- cally and, it could be argued, also psychi- cally into space. Such extensions to fingers, arms and torso not only permitted the wearer during a ritualistic performance to expand his or her grasp of the surrounding milieu but they provided the opportunity for the making of short films documenting these sensual, seductive activities. The most prophetic of these early pieces for Horn's subsequent career were two in which anatomy literally fed back into itself. Cornucopia, seance for two breasts (1970), a soft dark funnel-like device that encases each breast and culminates in the mouth, is a haunting image of erotic self-sustenance. In Overflowing blood machine (1970), another potent emblem of self-absorption and self- regeneration, the tubes through which this vital fluid circulates become a protective shield-cum-cage for the naked body within.

The feature-length fiction films which followed the documentaries again utilised props and mechanical protagonists which, in the aftermath of the tale, were released as autonomous sculptures. Like the won- drous Feathered prison fan (Fig.60; 1978), a delicate shield made from long sumptuous fronds taken from a peacock, and the epit- ome of the strutting lover, these construc- tions are revealed (once divested of the agents they had temporarily sheltered) as kinetic beings whose ceaseless mechanistic activity betokens a seduction with neither end nor climax - the very hallmark of frustration.

Such melancholy protagonists have their predecessors in the bachelor machines of Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Roussel and

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EXHIBITION REVIEWS

59. Concertfor anarchy, by Rebecca Horn. 1990. Grand piano with extended keyboards and motors, 165.1 by 137.2 by 177.9 cm. (Private collection; exh. Guggenheim Museum, New York).

other early twentieth-century devotees of Eros and Thanatos, as Nancy Spector acutely demonstrates in her perceptive essay in the handsome catalogue accompanying this exhibition.' Horn eschews both mere replays of these misogynistic fantasies, and simplistic inversions of this topos, for the latter would make her fragile robotic crea- tures the abstract counterparts to Donna Haraway's much discussed female cyborgs.2 Rather, for Horn, the pairing, partnering and sparring that typify the behaviour of male and female when together are paradig- matic of the erotic impulse. That such desire can never be dissociated from danger, torment, pain and passion remains fun- damental to her vision: passion's journeys, its symptoms, behaviour, and travails, form the very stuff of her work. Thus, alongside an extensive erotic iconography, imagery associated with Thanatos - with illness and debilitation, with manic, hysterical,

and other forms of obsessional and de- structive behaviour - abounds.

It is perhaps not surprising, given the theatrical cast in which Horn typically embodies these compelling and compulsive preoccupations, that her three most recent films, plus a number of site-specific instal- lations, have provided the highpoints in her career over the past decade. Notable among these were works made in the Theater am Steinhof (a psychiatric hospital) in Vienna; in an abandoned medieval tower in Miinster; a Roman bath in Bath and, most recently, an hotel for indigents in Barcelona. Such occasions offer the pos- sibility of a heightened ambience that the self-contained works often attain only when seen in the space of an entire room. Certain exceptions to this, such as the small Butterfly swing (La balanfoire des papillons) (1991), demonstrate that Horn is nonetheless also capable of intimate, poignant, private and

even playful gestures others, such as Concert for anarchy (1990; Fig.59) become indelible images of wayward, wilful transgression.

The prospect of a large exhibition by this mid-career German artist in the Solomon R. Guggenheim's Frank Lloyd Wright building (to 1st October) raised high ex- pectations. Recently, the institution has offered the rotunda to a number of artists for one-person shows, among them Dan Flavin, Mario Merz and Lothar Baum- garten. In Rececca Horn's case, however, as in that of Jenny Holzer, the museum unfortunately seems to have hedged its bets, reserving the lower three tiers for the display of its renowned Kandinskys from the Thannhauser collection, a decision which suggests that a double standard operates in its treatment of female art- ists. Faced with the dilemma of drawing together the ground-floor space and the vaulting rotunda, while bypassing the early twentieth-century painting, Horn had re- course to two monumental works. In Paradiso (1993), liquid from two breast- shaped funnels suspended against the glass roof of the dome dripped slowly downwards to meet the frail jet of water spouting from Wright's fountain far below; and bundles of cables from The river of the moon (El rio de la luna) (1992), snaked along the upper reaches of the spiralling concourse binding the alcoves together. Unfortunately this was not, in the end, sufficient to secure the space convincingly as Horn's own, to unify it as a single charged context. Nor could the inclusion of the two side galleries of the new extension (in one of which the early body pieces were impressively dis- played) off-set the piecemeal character of the installation as a whole.

With these restrictions it is difficult to see how the Director, Thomas Krens, could have expected Horn effectively to realise a project which he describes as being as much an operatic event or Gesamtkunstwerk as an exhibition. Although some fifty works were on view, many of the finest monumental pieces from the eighties were absent. And there was only token presentation of the films, works which are singular achieve- ments in their own right as well as being central to the artist's

aeuvre. Instead of being

projected they were shown on a video monitor, further vitiating a full under- standing of this artist's remarkable achieve- ment. One can only hope that in recon- stituting the show for its three European venues - Eindhoven, Berlin and Vienna - most of the slights and misrepresentations undermining this presentation will be re- dressed.

LYNNE COOKE

Dia Center for the Arts

'Rebecca Horn includes two interviews with Horn, by Germano Celant and Stuart Morgan, plus writings by the artist, and essays by Germano Celant, Nancy Spector, Katharina Schmidt and Giuliana Bruno. 344 pp. with 250 pis. in col. and 100 ills. in b. & w. (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1993), $42 HB. ISBN 0-89207-110-9; $36 PB. ISBN 0-89207-111-7. 2See D. HARAWAY: 'A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and socialist-Feminism in the late Twentieth Century', in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York [1991], pp. 149- 82.

60. Feathered prison fan, by Rebecca Horn. 1978. Metal, motor, wood and white peacock feathers, 110 by 83 by 32 cm. (Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; exh. Guggenheim Museum, New York).

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