Review: Rebecca Horn.

New York, Guggenheim Museum

Author(s): Lynne Cooke
Source: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 135, No. 1086 (Sep., 1993), pp. 658-659
Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/885903
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 EXHIBITION REVIEWS

'The exhibitionwas previouslyat the High Museum

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
Itt
57. War,byJackson
Pollock. 1947. Pen
and ink and coloured
pencils on paper,
52.4 by 66 cm.
(Metropolitan
Museum of Art,
New York).
'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.4Without
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
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).
of Art, Atlanta (26thJanuary to 4th April).
2AbstractExpressionism:WorksonPaper.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 ExtremesofAbstract Expressionism'
in C.M. JOACHIMIDESand N. ROSENTHAL, eds.: American
PaintingandSculpture
Art in the20thCentury: 1913-1993,
exh.cat., Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, [1993],
pp.88-90.
4MESSINGER, op.cit. above, p.30, note 3, cites Sally
Yard's assertionthat Judgement day'portraysthe four
angels of the Gatesof 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.
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,seancefor 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 Overflowingbloodmachine(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 Featheredprisonfan (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

658

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,
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
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-
59. Concertfor anarchy,
by
Rebecca Horn. 1990. shaped funnels suspended against the glass
Grandpianowith roof of the dome dripped slowly downwards
extendedkeyboardsand to meet the frail jet of water spouting from
motors,165.1by 137.2by Wright's fountain far below; and bundles
177.9cm. (Private of cables from The river of the moon (El rio
collection; exh. de la luna) (1992), snaked along the upper
Guggenheim Museum, reaches of the spiralling concourse binding
New York). the alcoves together. Unfortunately this
and other forms of obsessional and de- was not, in the end, sufficient to secure the
structive behaviour - abounds. space convincingly as Horn's own, to unify
It is perhaps not surprising, given the it as a single charged context. Nor could
theatrical cast in which Horn typically the inclusion of the two side galleries of
embodies these compelling and compulsive the new extension (in one of which the
preoccupations, that her three most recent early body pieces were impressively dis-
films, plus a number of site-specific instal- played) off-set the piecemeal character of
lations, have provided the highpoints in the installation as a whole.
her career over the past decade. Notable With these restrictions it is difficult to
among these were works made in the see how the Director, Thomas Krens, could
Theater am Steinhof (a psychiatric hospital) have expected Horn effectively to realise a
in Vienna; in an abandoned medieval tower project which he describes as being as much
in Miinster; a Roman bath in Bath and, an operatic event or Gesamtkunstwerk as an
most recently, an hotel for indigents in exhibition. Although some fifty works were
Barcelona. Such occasions offer the pos- on view, many of the finest monumental
sibility of a heightened ambience that the pieces from the eighties were absent. And
self-contained works often attain only when there was only token presentation of the
seen in the space of an entire room. Certain films, works which are singular achieve-
exceptions to this, such as the small Butterfly ments in their own right as well as being
swing (La balanfoire des papillons) (1991), central to the artist's Instead of being
demonstrate that Horn is nonetheless also aeuvre.
projected they were shown on a video
capable of intimate, poignant, private and 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 theArts
'RebeccaHornincludes two interviews with Horn, by
60. Featheredprison Germano Celant and Stuart Morgan, plus writings
fan, by Rebecca by the artist, and essays by Germano Celant, Nancy
Horn. 1978. Metal, Spector, Katharina Schmidt and Giuliana Bruno.
motor, wood and 344 pp. with 250 pis. in col. and 100 ills. in b. & w.
white peacock (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,
feathers, 110 by 83 1993), $42 HB. ISBN 0-89207-110-9; $36 PB. ISBN
by 32 cm. (Marian 0-89207-111-7.
Goodman Gallery, 2See D. HARAWAY: 'A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,
New York; exh. Technology, and socialist-Feminism in the late
Guggenheim Twentieth Century', in Simians,Cyborgs,and Women:
Museum, TheReinvention of Nature,New York [1991], pp. 149-
New York). 82.
659