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THE GLOBAL RESPONSE to the death of Rebecca Horn in September reflects her importance as a pioneer of transmedia artistic practice since the 1970s, as well as her continuing influence on younger artists in the twenty-first century. Early on, Horn created visionary symbols for the interconnection of bodies and technology. She explored existential questions at the blurred boundaries between nature and culture, human and nonhuman. Variously described as an inventor, a director, an author, a composer, or a poet, she considered herself first and foremost a choreographer, describing her practice as precisely calculated relationships between space, light, physicality, sound, and rhythm that come together to form an orchestration. Her works in performance, sculpture, and film aim at the visible, tangible, and audible stimuli that can be experienced through bodily understanding. Already in her early works she used the kinetic to make tangible the relationship be-tween inside and outside, as she would continue to do in her later oeuvre. She resisted the male-dominated relationship between “man” and technology and opened up new, nongendered perspectives on human perception. Inspired as her work might have been by Surrealism, Fluxus, Arte Povera, body art, and feminism, it belonged to no particular movement, creating its own path.
In 1972, at the age of twenty-eight, she was the youngest artist to be included by Harald Szeemann in Documenta 5; she would also participate in the following three editions of the Kassel mega-exhibition, and continued to exhibit in biennials and art festivals around the world. The first work of hers that caught my attention was Hydra Piano, 1993, in which hidden motors make a puddle of mercury move like a snake across the bottom of a steel basin. I’d come across it in a collection presentation at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in the mid-2000s, where it was shown alongside the work of Joseph Beuys, whose anthroposophical worldview she greatly appreciated, as well as pieces by her frequent collaborator Jannis Kounellis. Alchemical, physical, and spatial hybrids have always appeared as allegories in Horn’s work. While she had already received attention in countless international solo exhibitions at the time, it was not until more than a decade later, with a selection of early video works in the Tanks at London’s Tate Modern in 2019, that I realized the extent to which all her moving objects were conceived with the body as their starting point.
Andrea Lissoni, who with Valentina Ravaglia was responsible for the Tate’s presentation, had also drawn on the museum’s impressive holdings of Horn’s work—thanks to Nick Serota’s decades-long commitment to her practice—for a collection presentation for the opening of the institution’s Herzog & de Meuron–designed extension in 2016. Here I learned how Horn began to celebrate the power of transformation. Her compilations of assembled individual works like Performances I, 1972; Performances II, 1973; and Berlin. Exercises in Nine Pieces, 1974–75, were presented prominently again after a long time. Each of these compilations features body extensions, wearable sculptural constructions of cotton and other materials through which she augmented and controlled the body, resulting in movements of fantastic grace and menacing pain. Actions with masks, bandages, and feathers opened up a variety of associations. The tense relationship between intimacy and public display made for moments of maximum sensory experience, transferring codes and systems of seeing, hearing, and touching into new experiential spaces. Influencing the wearer’s movements and stretching their physical boundaries, these works connected the human body to a larger historical context by demonstrating how the energy of our bodies is connected to the surrounding space.
At Documenta 5 in 1972, Horn became friends with American artists such as John Baldessari and Vito Acconci. That same year, she set up a studio apartment in New York; she would commute between the United States and Berlin for almost a decade. New York inspired her: Horn became friends with Andy Warhol, met Man Ray, and appreciated Marcel Duchamp. Experimental film became important to her at this time. Her work was seen widely in New York from the very beginning, for example with the screening of Berlin (10.11.1974–28.1.1975): Dreaming under water of things afar at the Anthology Film Archive in 1975 and her solo exhibitions with René Block in the 1970s and in the ’80s and ’90s at the Marian Goodman Gallery. In 1979, her first feature-length film, Der Eintänzer, 1978, was shown alongside works by Lawrence Weiner as part of the New American Filmmakers Series at the Whitney Museum of American Art, while hundreds of thousands of people in Germany watched it on public television. Her studio in New York, converted into a ballet studio, served as the set for that work. Ballet is omnipresent in the film’s fantastical scenes, but especially when the young dancers, connected to each other by strings, submit to the mechanistic control of their movements. Here, humans are no longer at one with their bodies: The desire for absolute synchronicity suggests an equivalence between human and machine. Horn used the symbolic nature of dance movements as a medium and catalyst for her choreographic fictions. For her, stillness and movement are mutually dependent; she is fascinated by contrasts and contradictions. The dancers in the film thus represent a preliminary to her later movement machines.
In one of her earliest sculptures, Überströmer (Over-flowing Blood Machine), 1970, she demonstrated the fusion of spatial and body art. By externalizing an implied blood circulation in the form of a wearable vein costume in which a motorized pump circulated red fluid, she drew parallels between biological and technical systems. Notably, this clinical contextualization of the body came about after Horn had spent more than a year recovering from a life-threatening lung disease caused by working with toxic materials during her studies at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg and before she transferred to Saint Martin’s School of Art in London in 1971.
From her earliest drawings, such as Lippenmaschine (Lips Machine), 1964, she explored the idea of “incorporation,” and from the early 1980s, with her mechanical sculptures, she created symbols of technical physical interconnectedness. Her works seem to metaphorically intertwine modes of perception and action with contemporary technologies. They offer a daunting technoid embodiment of sexuality and affectivity: The monumental Pfauenmaschine (Peacock Machine), 1982, for example, first shown at Documenta 7, imitates the courtship ritual of male peacocks. Horn generated new human-animal relationships with machines that perform human gestures in abstracted animal forms, such as Kuss des Rhinozeros (Kiss of the Rhinoceros), 1989, prominently presented by Cecilia Alemani at the 2022 Venice Biennale in the context of post-humanist theories. Here and elsewhere, Horn renders networks of human and nonhuman actors visible.
Interwoven references from literature and the history of art and film run through Horn’s oeuvre, as Emma Lavigne and Alexandra Müller showed in the exhibition “Rebecca Horn: Théâtre des metamorphoses” at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2019, which ran parallel to the exhibition curated by Sandra Beate Reimann at the Museum Tinguely in Basel. Horn celebrated the horror of machines as a continuation of the body and referred to monsters, in both poetry and science, as figures of the unrepresentable and giving a face to the abysmal. For example, she created several site-specific works as memorials to the victims of the Holocaust. Similarly, she dedicated Turm der Namenlosen (Tower of the Nameless), 1994, to the victims of the Yugoslav Wars, demanding physical and mental empathy through the sound and discord of motorized violins in a towerlike construction of ladders.
In 1989, she became the first woman to be appointed to the new multimedia professorship at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), from which she retired in 2009. She set up her Moontower Foundation on her father’s reacquired estate, a former textile factory, that same year, dedicating it to the preservation and research of her life’s work. In 1993, Horn was honored with a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, curated by Germano Celant and Nancy Spector, which then traveled to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna. In retrospect, the New York show seems to have stimulated Horn to work on an ever-increasing scale from then on. In an interview I conducted with her for the catalogue of the six-decade retrospective of Horn’s work that I recently curated for the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Spector remembered Horn’s special way of occupying the museum in its architecture and vision, calculating an address to the public that could have a hypnotic, spiritual, or psychological character.
In her poignant late works, Horn transformed her artistic grammar into an abstract choreography full of poetry and grace. Her oeuvre is a lifelong and explosive echo of the progressive decentering of humanity. She explored the interaction of the senses and placed the sensuality of the body in relation to the environment through performance. I was deeply moved that Horn, already seriously ill, traveled to the opening of the retrospective in Munich in April, four months before her death. I will never forget feeling her joy and gratitude.
Jana Baumann is senior curator at Haus der Kunst, Munich.
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