Rebecca Horn has a longstanding interest in the creation of magical objects, which she infuses with both tenderness and pain. DACS register. The proximity and steadiness of the camera leads to lengthy observation of the scissors’ movements. However, Maxim despises his spouse for refusing to be the perfect housewife he desired. Also bed ridden, Horn started making soft sculptures with materials she could work with whilst recovering. Though she began by utilizing polyester in her works, Horn started building bodily extensions from textiles and feathers after being confined to a sanatorium (an excruciating experience necessitated by a lung disease). Jul 2016. Irresponsibly conflating liberation with satisfaction, the "have it all" formulation sets an impossible bar for female success and . Cutting One's Hair with Two Scissors at Once is the eighth part of Berlin Exercises: Dreaming under Water (1974-75), a series of recorded performances. The essence of their imagery comes out of the tremendous precision of the physical and technical functionality she uses to stage her works each . The instant physical contact is established, they begin to entwine. Her expression conveys a conscious defiance in the deployment of a violent transformative power over her own image and appearance. "Rebecca Horn Artist Overview and Analysis". Pinterest. We suffer from fragmentation and isolation. The ending of the film memorably involves one of the twins becoming tempted by a mechanical swing, then jumping to an image shot of a dead girl in the street outside Horn's studio. 8. Such unstable attachments mark the female body as mutable, denying the signification of her body into a fetish object under the phallocentric gaze. I did not have to draw in German or French or English. These attachments are carefully extended to reach the perimeter of the studio, a motion that registers Horn’s desire to make contact with the world outside her body. These are not cars or washing machines. This is her disability that she has struggled with forever. Rebecca Horn is always open to new methods for generating art. What? It's dedicated to her. I have never discarded my yearning for change. The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. List Of Artists Great Artists Preformance Art Amazing Street Art Artistic Installation Fantasy Places A Level Art Performance Artist Feminist Art More information . “As a result of inhaling the toxic fibreglass, Horn spent a year in the sanatorium, followed by two more years in isolation as a precautionary measure to prevent her from contracting further illnesses due to a weakened respiratory system.” Sarah Kent, Joy Sleeman, Peg Rawes and Anna Dezeuze, ‘Drawing the Line: a Round Table on Rebecca Horn’, Papers of Surrealism, 2007, Issue 5, pp. Inside, a section of train track stretched from one end of the room to the other. When locked in constant dialogue with the mind, Horn reveals that working with the body (and indeed the process of art making) brings balance. From running a huge household to. Overall, as an abstract, surreal, and fantastic narrative, Horn's film helps to bring her body sculptures to life using a highly impressive melange of different media and styles. Therefore, as another key reason for her constant travel, always challenging prevailing cultural thoughts or norms, Horn understands that many people experience her as a disruptive and, potentially, an unwelcome force. Talking about her body sculptures, that the Tate had recently acquired, he called them a "singular body of work in European art of the early 1970s." By Doris van Drathen, Rebecca Horn, Katharina Schmidt and Armin Zweite / MACBA Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art. Black cockfeathers Rebecca Horn 1971, printed 2000 11.2003 On display - 20th-century galleries (lower level 1) For while Horn dreams of an expansive haptic erotics which may take her from her body into those of others, this does not mean that the specifics of her (sick, female) body are lost. When the auto-complete results are available, use the up and down arrows to review and Enter to select. New York: Harper Collins. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said during a TEDx talk "I decided I would now be a Happy African FEMINIST Who Does Not Hate Men And Who… Isabel Burdallo, PhD en LinkedIn: #feminism #tedxtalk #horizoneurope #horizon2020 #women #genderbias Watch. The experience for the viewer, with the heavy thing precariously hanging, is always one of impending threat and risk. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’, 7. 12. I'm interested in the soul of a thing, not the machine itself. 1.5k Followers. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Rebecca Horn, New York, 1993, 58 (illus.). This admiration and interest in shared themes, led to Horn's most ambitious feature film, Buster's Bedroom made in 1991. 1. Instead we are overwhelmed by a double sense that the image and its contents are right up close to us, pushing against our skin. Site-specific installation in a baroque stairwell - Naschmarkt, Vienna, Austria. Nowadays little of this remains, and this is tragic. As the camera follows the scissors’ movement upwards, it takes in Horn’s face and her direct stare into the lens. As such, these sculptures serve to help viewers understand difficult emotions and have a therapeutic impact. The human body, specifically the body of woman, became the central tool in her work. Site-specific Installation - Weimar, Germany. 6 September, 1994, By Kurt McVey / Critically Acclaimed. A cone-like structure, akin to the mythical creature's horn, is attached to the performer's head as an extension of her body using a series of horizontal and vertical fabric straps that run from the head, to the neck, and down the naked body. Their harsh force is interrupted by moments of gentle pressure as, standing stationary, Horn and Sander begin to slowly move their legs towards each other, causing the magnets to softly tap against their opposite. Courtesy of Rebecca Horn / VG Bild Kunst / VISDA. stated in. In 1947, her . However, to a greater degree than for her minimalist colleagues, she introduced psychology and the expression of the individuality of the artist into her works. Horn's friend, Conceptual artist John Baldessari talked of how Horn identified with Keaton and stated that, "a way to understand Horn is to look at his films." Erotic action is introduced in the first performance in Berlin–Exercises, titled ‘Two hands scratching both walls’.4 Framed by the doorway, a female performer (Horn) slowly outstretches her arms to reveal long thin white cones attached to each finger, elongated versions of the prosthetics used in her 1972 performance film ‘Finger Gloves’. It's the story between the machine and its audience that interests me. Horn, Rebecca. CV. She has also spoken of her grandmother who died just after she was born. Frida Kahlo cut her long locks when she divorced from Diego Rivera, and such is a recurring theme for women as they suffer loss in love. These horizontal facings are carried over into the film’s epilogue, in which white captions spell out lines from Paul Éluard and André Breton’s poem The Immaculate Conception: “When a woman and her lover lying down – face to face / and she coils (wraps) her legs around the legs of the man – / with the window opened wide – that is the O A S I S.”10 Horn’s use of this quote, from a section of the poem regarding “reciprocal love, the only kind that should concern us here”11 marks her attempt to dream a feminist erotics reorientated away from phallocentrism. Horn’s website refers to it as ‘Touching the walls with both hands simultaneously,’ while Media Kunst Netz gives the title as ‘Scratching Both Walls at Once.’ 5. In another part of the installation a collection of large sculptural beehives were hung from the ceiling and illuminated by searchlights, which were then in turn reflected in rotating mirrors. Supposedly straightforward functions, such as drawing or touching, become difficult and compromised, but are also given new meaning." Horn sets up an opposition between the genders, for instance in the creation of an argument, and by showing the capacity of the female twins to attract the attention of the male characters, Max and blind Frazer. Collectible monograph on Rebecca Horn, By Rebecca Horn, 2014 / However, conspicuously, this coiling embrace is not pictured in Berlin–Exercises. After the war, Horn and her fellow Germans could hardly speak their own language because, blamed for the atrocities of the older generation, they had become a hated people. Although likely an early source of inspiration for the artist, she has also said herself that her father's stories often triggered deep anxiety. This emotive and poetic set of texts are not dated and do not name Horn's friends, but the fact of its publication does demonstrate her intention to communicate all of her feelings whilst simultaneously retaining private intimacy. Hauchkörper, Cologne, Germany: Wienand Verlag, 2019. Again, this title is the one which appears in, Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), View anothergazejournal’s profile on Facebook, View anothergazejournal’s profile on Instagram, View UCs-azQEURwL-z34md7zrCDA’s profile on YouTube, Sense-Making From The Ground Up: The Films of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Cao Fei’s ‘Blueprints’ finds freedom in fantasy, Against Inheritance: Stanya Kahn’s ‘No Go Backs’. For although Horn wanted to expand beyond her own body, she also wanted to be contained, or to ‘seek refuge’, within the body of another. Rebecca Horn - Galerie Thomas Schulte you consent to our use of cookies. The work thus introduces an important and recurring material and theme for the artist, that of the feather. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis. In Concert for Anarchy a grand piano is hung upside down from the ceiling, high above viewers' heads. Snipping scissors are especially dangerous in the vicinity of erect appendages. This footage of cutting is made doubly uneconomical through the irreproducibility of the act once the hair is removed. ‘Two hands scratching both walls’ is the title which appears in Berlin–Exercises, however the exercise has also been subsequently labelled under various names. Jon Graham), The Immaculate Conception, London: Atlas, 1990, p. 103. Appropriately for this work, Horn has said, "I like my machines to tire...They are more than objects. As Breton and Éluard say, “the thing is to form a single block from the two [lovers]”.12 In their text, this ‘block’ is achieved through the woman’s ‘coiling’ embrace, which welds man to woman in Edenic passion. It was at art school that Horn began to make large-scale sculptures using mainly polyester and fibreglass. 2-3. 23 May, 2005, An interview with Rebecca Horn / She has three hallmarks of a good wife - "breeding, brains and beauty," as told to Maxim - in spades. Horn too has said that she related to Keaton's tragic stories about his own experience that he then transformed in a Surrealist way. She has expressed a deep love for the Romanian governess who looked after her as a young child recalling that it was the governess who spent much time drawing with her at around three or four years old. Both artists visualise trauma that they have experienced and transform this into meaning. Indeed, Horn became a key figure in a moment for art that challenged and changed formal ideas. With the 'wings' looking like a cocoon but also being referred to as a 'prison', there is a simultaneous message that this way of being (highly thoughtful and imaginative) can be at once protective and restrictive. Emerging onto the art scene in the late 1960s, the German artist Rebecca Horn was part of a generation of artists whose work challenged the institutions, forces and structures that governed not only the art world but society at large. She refused to let marriage crush her right to an identity, her omnipresent first name standing in contrast to our nameless protagonist. Indeed, prior associations with pianos are disrupted and their intended effect, to produce sweet music, is literally turned on its head as proposed 'anarchy' serves to challenge the symbolism we typically recall upon seeing this object. To this day, she lives within the rich and private, whilst paradoxically, transparent and revealing, real fantasy world that she has created for herself. Wearable sculpture - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom. Rebecca West on Feminism "People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute." - Rebecca West (born on this date in 1892). Horn’s fingers are carefully fitted into individual prosthetic extensions designed to encase each digit. Both books are understood to have nurtured Horn's interest in alchemy, Surrealism, machinic invention, and absurdity. In the first part of the color film, German actor Otto Sander is seen reading out the following text to camera: "Tongues flickering, their heads move back and forth until the scaly skin beneath the throat is touching. 7. As such, these sculptures serve to help viewers understand difficult emotions and have a therapeutic impact. As sound waves flow from their source on-screen to the listening receiver, the affective capacity of the auditory is made material, as in the listener’s body the sound quite literally ‘moves’ through the vibration of the inner ear. An amplified scratching noise, rough and painful, accompanies the image and registers the unseen contact between the tips on the fingers and the studio walls. The affect of sound is linked to its permeating capacities, its ability to enter into the body of the listener through the ear. These artworks explore the relationship between the human body and its surroundings, political and historical memory, and human vulnerability. Art and architecture historian Carl Haenlein, has described how, "the form this work relates to the ancient Babylonian dream of the artist touching the heavens by erecting a columned house whose roof reaches high above the clouds." Now removing herself physically from the work, she introduced proxies instead, including her partner, and thus continued to refer back to her own life in surreal and self-referential ways. The text appears over a shot of the empty studio, although the poem resonates clearly through the film image, with the right-hand window, which is left ajar, and the reflection of the open door in the large mirror. Rebecca Horn (born 24 March 1944, Michelstadt, Hesse) is a German visual artist, who is best known for her installation art, film directing, and her body modifications such as Einhorn (Unicorn), a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece. As truly multi-talented, Horn has also been described by the Tate Modern curator, Valentina Ravaglia, as "arguably the first artist-turned-feature-filmmaker of the post-war generation". The aggressive fighting dance of the two partners is characterized by a gradual, mutual loss of momentum and the beating against each other of their forebodies. Here, it moves across the walls of the studio to the screen of the film, confusing the discreteness of bodies as we, the spectators, also feel the spines as if they were scraping across our skin. All Rights Reserved, Rebecca Horn: Bodylandscapes Drawings, Sculptures, Installations 1964-2004, The Backbone of Rebecca Horn (an interview with Rebecca Horn), Discussion of Rebecca Horn - Body Extensions and Isolation, Documentation of Berlin Exercises in Nine Pieces: Exercise 8: Cutting One's Hair with Two Scissors at Once, Tied to a Bed - The Thing About...Art & Artists - Rebecca Horn. Watch Joey from Tate Collec. As is typical of the work of Horn, a simultaneously elusive and powerful subjectivity remains at the heart of all that she does. Restricted access. Rebecca Horn At the same time, the machines challenge the empathy induced by physical observation. Rebecca Walker (born November 17, 1969, as Rebecca Leventhal) is an American writer, feminist, and activist.Walker has been regarded as one of the prominent voices of Third Wave Feminism, and the coiner of the term "third wave", since publishing a 1992 article on feminism in Ms. magazine called "Becoming the Third Wave", in which she proclaimed: "I am the Third Wave." Horn constantly addresses the balance between psychological states of heaviness and lightness in her artwork. Although it is unlikely that Horn was familiar with Frida Kahlo's work at this time, the resemblance between this sculpture and Kahlo's 1942, Broken Column painting is uncanny. Through the haptic image, sites of erotic arousal are spread across the flesh to demarcate new expansive zones of sexual pleasure which promise to realise, if only in film, Horn’s desire to move beyond the imprisoning boundaries of her sick, subjugated body. Hill Collins, P. (1990) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. In 1978 Horn made The Gigolo (Der Eintänzer) and The Feathered Prison Fan. Rebecca Horn lives in Berlin and Paris, but has lived in many international cities, often moving to a city if she is offered an exhibition there. When the film returns to Horn, the snakes’ aggression is paralleled in the violent snipping of the scissor blades. ", "For me, all of these machines have a soul because they act, shake, tremble, faint, almost fall apart, and then come back to life again. Other times women are forced to make choices whether they want to or not. Bio. She introduces sound to her pieces to suggest to the viewer that they approach art more like music, that they do not agonise and try to understand, but instead that they 'listen' and experience an intuitive response. Rebecca herself was an alluring and attractive woman, yet, she is condemned for using her feminine wiles to live beyond her wifely role. “As a result of inhaling the toxic fibreglass, Horn spent a year in the sanatorium, followed by two more years in isolation as a precautionary measure to prevent her from contracting further illnesses due to a weakened respiratory system.” Sarah Kent, Joy Sleeman, Peg Rawes and Anna Dezeuze, ‘Drawing the Line: a Round Table on Rebecca Horn’, 3. German Sculptor, Filmmaker and Performance Artist. Rebecca Horn was born in the midst of war, in 1944 in Michelstadt, Hesse, Germany. We were always travelling somewhere else, speaking something else. The bluntness of the cuts deliberately reject notions of an ideal feminine appearance, and her stare suggests an attitude of defiance in the face of constraints placed on the body and mind. Such difference also disrupts the sameness of the phallocentric sexual act, which through its penetrative logic defines pleasure around erection and ejaculation. Indicative of her wider work as a politically passionate artist, Horn has spoken of being influenced by major world events including the Gulf War, and of course, the Holocaust. ", "Obviously, I experience things personally, but that's not the basis of my method of working. Reciprocal, heterosexual love is framed by Breton and Éluard as the resolution of opposites. Sound confuses the separateness of bodies and things. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol XXI, London: Vintage, 2001, p. 147-57. This represents a form of total rejection of the surrounding society, enabling anarchy to be lived out in the imagination." She is thus well situated amongst other highly influential and visionary female artists. As the camera slides up the edge of the magnetic straps, wavering strands of long auburn hair descend into shot, and the image bristles with tactility. "Rebecca Horn: The Inferno-Paradiso Switch", was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1993. Since Albrecht Dürer's famous engraving of a large 'melancholy' angel, many artists have since re-visited this subject. At once personal and universal, Rebecca Horn's oeuvre distills the beauty, absurdity, and anxieties of the human condition into performances, films, sculptures, and installations centered on the body and how it moves through space. As result, Horn always makes art that "extends" outwards to best communicate with others. Rebecca Horn (born 24 March 1944, in Michelstadt, Hesse) is a German visual artist, who is best known for her installation art, film directing, and her body modifications such as Einhorn (Unicorn), a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece. ", "You have to believe in something, and you have to give that out to the world. As the two scissors repeatedly open and close, moving rapidly across Horn’s hair towards the centre of the frame, their sharp points glint against the pale flesh of her neck. The slicing of hair from head also seems discordant in relation to Horn’s lung fever-driven desires to “grow out of [her] own body and merge with the other person’s”. "WACK! These sensuous relationships are visually emphasised through the interplay between the horizontal and vertical axes in Berlin–Exercises. Rebecca Horn (24 March 1944, Michelstadt, Hesse) is a German visual artist, who is best known for her installation art, film directing, and her body modifications such as Einhorn (Unicorn), a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from the headpiece. They are also at once sculptures in their own right as well as being part of a performance; this was an unusual artistic development during the 1960s and 70s, and shows effective combination of very different media, one tangible and one ephemeral. Rebecca Horn - "Feathered Prison Fan" (1978) . Feminism and Gender Roles ThemeTracker The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Feminism and Gender Roles appears in each chapter of Rebecca.