2024-05-03 09:49:23
Actually, you would be happy with the two butterfly wings and the fine wires on which they float and the tiny gears. But then they start to flutter. And then they stay still again. What can you do about the fact that you now remember the cuckoo clock in front of which you waited as a child until the door was snapped open?
That’s how it is with Rebecca Horn. In her large exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, something keeps turning on and off. She lets the violin bow scrape over strings, chases lightning through fluorescent tubes, squirts black paint onto the wall with a painting arm, uses motor sensitivity to make a rope vibrate, or causes the wooden innards to fall with a clamor from a piano that is hung upside down.
And everything takes a long, very long time before it decides to take a sedate action. You learn again what “Andante” means when you stay with Rebecca Horn in the middle of your busy life.
Rebecca Horn’s art has something of the craft of watchmaking
In no other work of contemporary art is time so finely rhythmized, so carefully divided into manageable portions. Nothing passes, flows, degenerates, everything repeats itself.
The fact that the monster time is just another word for the experience of transience, of constant change, seems forgotten in front of those butterfly wings. Someone has to pull the plug for them to lose interest in flapping. And even then you wouldn’t be sure whether they would be satisfied with it.
Rebecca Horn, recorded at an early performance
Source: Rebecca Horn / VG Bildkunst Bonn 2024
It is also said that AI’s most sophisticated intelligence lies in obtaining its own energy. The AI here comes entirely from the pre-digital era. Horn’s devices all have a touch of watchmaking craftsmanship. Their “life center” is thanks to aesthetic precision engineering and is still a long way from the incorruptible precision with which surgical robots attack the sensitive interior of the body.
This also creates a cozy atmosphere in the exhibition – even in front of the house-high pieces made of stacked bed frames or gigantic ladders screwed together. With them you are never in any doubt that after waiting for a while, something will start to light up or make a sound. This is elegant mechanics.
Clean solutions, not muscular
The era of chips and invisible ionic currents has almost made us forget that circling, pushing, striping, pivoting, springing, tensioning and releasing also belong to the group of aesthetic movements. Shiny brass gears, meshing smoothly without bite; Transmissions that turn slow rotations into fast ones and fast ones into slow ones; hidden, barely audible drives; Lever arms, delicate, without much muscle; sophisticated distribution of forces.
Installation by Rebecca Horn in the Haus der Kunst, Munich
Source: Rebecca Horn / VG Bildkunst Bonn 2024
Rebecca Horn does not make fun of the poor prepotence of machines, as the Swiss kineticist Jean Tinguely did. Technically there are only clean solutions in their work, in terms of cultural progress it seems to be at the height of the developed possibilities.
In any case, all of these mechanical actors need the sensually gifted body that stands in front of them, that waits for them. Even more than the image, which remains in the image depot, these pieces depend on the witness of their programmed activity. Someone has to measure their measured balance, have patience, have to close the gap between event and uneventfulness.
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Basically, it’s like performances, with which Horn’s work began. At that time, the now eighty-year-old artist tried to keep the tightrope walkers’ balance pole balanced on her head. As a “unicorn,” she strapped on a meter-high set of antlers with which she and her fellow students roamed through the fields. Grotesque hats, unwearable like the hoods of the Inquisition, only much pointier, much more graceful, much more flared. And on his hands the claws grew like bayonets.
The preferred impression was sharp, cutting, hurtful, athletic like tap dancing, which is repeatedly discussed in the early work. What remains in memory are bizarre masquerades full of never-quite-fathomable secrets and hidden magic. Ambiguous, evasive, cautious in its message, never reliably usable for political discourse. Even back then, people were puzzled about the strange appeal of a somewhat stiff video that tells the story of how a nude figure gets a whole body of pubic hair painted on, piece by piece.
Relaxes infinite repetition
How this work doesn’t seem to have become any more urgent. There is also something touching, benignly domesticated about the way the works are assembled in the intimidating Munich halls. It is the most peaceful manifestation of technology imaginable, wonderfully relaxed in its endless repetition, basically as frugal as the water wheel that the children set up by the stream.
Retrospective for Rebecca Horn’s 80th birthday
Source: Rebecca Horn / VG Bildkunst Bonn 2024
And even where a dangerous motif could clearly be intended – as in the pair of knives that clash in the wall piece “Love and Hate” dedicated to James Joyce – the gears and rods are set up so that they immediately move away again. That’s not aggressive. Just a little aggressive.
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Certainly not unfathomable. Perhaps the knives have become a little worn from frequent use. Perhaps we can see this more clearly today than before, how the components are animated into empty bravura with choreographic precision. And if you’ve watched for a while how the painting machine’s swaying brush performs the same gestures over and over again, then you’ll find yourself wishing for a little break in its program.
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It is completely grotesque when the curators state that Horn exposes the painting tools as historical instruments of male power. Thanks to her painting machine, the myth of the creative genius is being overcome. Apart from the fact that there is hardly another work that cultivates the myth of creative genius so carefully, the painting machine also wants to be nothing less than an ingenious construction.
“Pencil Mask” by Rebecca Horn (1972)
Source: Archive Rebecca Horn / © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024 Rebecca Horn/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
And there are also brilliant drawings in this exhibition: made by hand, not by machines. They are structures made up of delicate, fragile movements, fleeting touches, a brushing past here, a breath over there. You almost think your hand has barely touched the paper, the line appears so ephemeral.
Like quickly disappearing contrails in the sky, pencil and ink pen leave traces of graphite and color behind them. Absolutely silent. And no one knows whether the butterfly wings aren’t a little jealous of that.
Rebecca Horn, bis 13. October, House of ArtMünchen
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