Rebecca Horn

The most recent work in the retrospective devoted to Rebecca Horn (b.1944) at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, is a grove of twelve bronze spears balanced on tapered ends FIG.1. Arranged across a slab of polished marble, they sway slowly, like saplings teetering in the wind. They work on the nervous system like music, capturing the viewer’s attention and bringing the body into their rhythm; watching them can invoke a new awareness of one’s own feet on the floor, of being upright. Tethered to the ground in this way, the human body is free to lurch, fall or otherwise give itself over to the forces around it, testing gravity against muscular sensation – external against internal energies. The work’s title, Hauchkörper, relates to exhaling and inhaling bodies, calling to mind warm breath against a window, the breath of life or the spirit world. The installation captures this breathy magic in an ineffable way: it is energetic but mechanical, sharp yet soft, dangerous yet tender. Like many of the works in the exhibition, it is an exercise in precision.

Covering almost sixty years, the works on view – from the artist’s early films to her well-known kinetic works and more recent sculptural installations – have a distinct affective power that is honed through experiment and repetition. Whereas in Hauchkörper the result is hypnotic, in Concert for Anarchy FIG.2 – an upside-down grand piano that periodically explodes its innards from an open lid – it is disarming. Horn has discussed her desire to provoke sensation in viewers in relation to her experience of illness and confinement as a young woman. ‘With lung fever’, she explained in a 2004 interview, ‘you dream differently, dreams filled with erotically charged images. You crave to grow out of your own body and merge with the other person’s body, to seek refuge in it’.¹ Here, Rosalind Krauss identified a connection to the work of other women artists, such as Frida Kahlo, noting that Horn engages ‘in producing myth out of her own self-projection and its oscillations between pain and eros’.² Krauss was sceptical of Horn’s autobiographical interpretation, asking ‘how interesting it is to recycle an already invented iconography of pain?’.³ Nonetheless, the story acts as a bridge: it gives her audience permission to engage with the work physically and to see it as a relational experience. It also draws out the key questions of this exhibition: how can you communicate fully with another? And how can you flow between genders, species, faiths and matter?

In the central gallery space, four projectors play Horn’s early films on a loop FIG.3. Newly digitised from reels found in the artist’s archives, the films are blown up to larger than life-sized. As well as bringing a sense of drama to the short DIY-style films, this immersive viewing experience encourages recognition and interaction. In these films Horn identifies a feeling and investigates it, distilling it into an image, object or movement. Touching the walls with both hands simultaneously (1974­–75), for example, shows the young artist in a white room with a mirror at the far end, wearing what appear to be long paper tubes on the end of her fingers. With her back to the camera, she stretches out her arms to their full span. Her extended fingers scrape along the walls either side, as she walks slowly across the room; it is one of the few films with sound. The image is one of confidence; she takes up space and makes herself bigger, radiating pleasure as the sensation travels through the tubes, up her arms and across her shoulders. Indeed, Horn has described these objects as ‘body extenders’, physical appendages that extend the possibilities of perception: ‘The lever action of the lengthened fingers intensifies the sense of touch in the hand. I feel myself touching, see myself grasping, and control the distance between myself and the objects’.⁴

Several of these early body extenders are on view nearby FIG.4. Shown among them are Unicorn (1970–72) and Head Extension (1972), both of which were exhibited at documenta 5, curated by Harald Szeemann in 1972. The first is a white conical ‘horn’ and bodice designed to be strapped onto a topless woman. The latter, also a cone but much taller, could be used as a makeshift maypole for the wearer’s companions. Films of these objects in use show parading bare-chested performers, and others walking solemnly across fields, their inscrutable expressions at odds with the ridiculous headpieces FIG.5. They model sexual and bodily liberation in a light-hearted, experimental manner that draws on Dada traditions, as well as later performances associated with Fluxus and the Viennese Actionists. In contrast to the explorations of the female body as object in the work of such artists as VALIE EXPORT (b.1940), however, Horn tends to explore her body as a desiring force. In the films, she plunges her fingers into feathers and crawls her camera up other people’s naked bodies – a morbid kind of eroticism that combines young skin and limber movement with the debris of dead animals.  

These early works convey the seeds of what would become overt in Horn’s later kinetic works, namely her interest in energy transfer, mysticism and the continuity between the living and non-living. Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas of vitalism, in particular, seem relevant here – both his conception of artistic creation as an overflow of life force, and his assertion that ‘the living is only a species of dead being, and a very rare species’.⁵ These ideas saturated her immediate context in Hamburg, London and Berlin in the early 1970s. Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Klossowski published influential texts on Nietzsche in the preceding decade, along with the former’s study of Henri Bergson in 1966, which contributed to the revival, especially in artistic circles, of nineteenth-century debates around vitalism and theories of emergence.⁶ Also in 1972, the reprinting of works by Wilhelm Reich drove a mass resurgence of interest in the psychiatrist, whose idea of ‘orgone energy’ or esoteric life force shares much with Horn’s interest in erotic charges. In Kiss of the Rhinoceros FIG.6, for example, two steel horns move slowly together; when they meet, a visible electrical charge buzzes between them.

It is difficult to know the extent to which Horn engaged with these philosophical ideas because she tends towards self-referential interpretations of her work, citing her past experiences and her own writing as influences: ‘drawings stimulate texts, the texts evolve into film scenes. Then the charged emotions of the actors are later transformed into solitary sculptures’.⁷ It is a cycle of reflection, reuse and transformation, rather than the modernist or post-modernist understanding of artistic influence as a teleology of successive responses to innovation. Horn does make some exceptions in naming her forebears. She credits the Sufi poet Rumi as ‘the source of everything’, and has dedicated several works, including the film Buster’s Bedroom (1990), to the American film-maker Buster Keaton.⁸ But these are disparate citations, removed from art-historical referents, and therefore perhaps more easily enveloped into the artist’s inner world, always communicated through the sphere of her own particular vision.

Horn’s display at documenta in 1972 brought her to international attention and earned her a degree of financial success, enabling her relocation to New York the following year, where she began working on her first feature film. Released in 1978, Der Eintänzer (The Dancer) was shot in the atelier where she lived, which she transformed into a ballet studio. Der Eintänzer is screened in full in the gallery and is described by the curator, Jana Baumann, as the starting point for the exhibition. The film follows an idiosyncratic cast of characters: the twins who set up a makeshift home together in the ballet school; the young dancers who are tied together with string to aid their synchronicity; and the blind man who shows one of the sisters how to access the pleasure of a peach but cannot see when she swings clean out of the New York tenement window. Although the situations are surreal, there is a relatability in the characters’ desire to connect with one another, and the fragility of the bonds that emerge.

Given its ability to transfer sensation and emotion through standardised movements, ballet seems a natural subject for Horn. The pathos in her kinetic sculptures may also appear in some sense natural, but it is the result of careful testing and training. Like the ballet dancer’s heart-stopping backbend, it conveys intense feeling through a difficult, repetitive and standardised process. This is, as she explains, by design:

Machines get nervous and must stop sometimes. If a machine stops, it doesn’t mean it’s broken. It’s just tired. The tragic or melancholic aspect of machines is very important to me. I don’t want them to run forever. It’s part of their life that they stop and faint.⁹

For Horn, the android or machine is not oppositional to humans or nature, but continuous with it in various ways: the butterflies that appear in several works – their wings dissected and attached to tiny mechanisms – are reanimated FIG.7; electricity creates ‘lightning’ in steel structures; and it courses through liquid mercury to make the substance dance like a snake. In one installation, violins are jimmied up to play screeching songs on ladders FIG.8; in another, hospital bedframes FIG.9 are suspended, not as a memorial to the dead they once supported, but more energetically ‘as a little sign showing their existence’.¹⁰ The line between living and non-living is muddy and malleable. In the kinetic works especially, bits of human, animal, spirit and machine bound freely about, in service of capturing a truth or emotion that none can manage alone.

The careful balance between restriction and release in many of Horn’s works is reflected in the hang of the exhibition. Drawings are chosen carefully and limited to a couple of walls FIG.10. Only one feature film is shown, and mechanical works play in their own time. As the visitor walks through seemingly still galleries, occasional crashing, buzzing, spluttering music and chimes hint at things coming to life elsewhere. The display thoughtfully reflects Horn’s approach to making, both in the way it echoes earlier works throughout and in its openness to chance, and even mystery. It is impossible to follow a linear route: one must allow themselves to be suspended by unexpected movements of bronze, rope and mercury. Horn’s longing for connection depends on this sense of agency or interaction; it is an invitation to sharpen the memories one feels in their body and use them to reach others.