Word: horned
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...work of the German artist Rebecca Horn, on view at New York City's Guggenheim Museum through Oct. 1, has something in common with recent American feminist art, but not much. You could call hers a European sensibility, meaning that it is open to nuance and, whatever its references to the politics of the suffering body, to humor. It is oblique, magical and ironic, and has none of the in-your-face tone of complaint (men are colonizing thugs, women are victims, and a display of wounds is all you need to make a piece of art) that renders...
...point of similarity with feminist art is that it is grounded in trauma. When Horn was a sculpture student in Hamburg in the late '60s, she worked with fiber glass and, unaware that the stuff is poisonous, neglected to use a mask. She ended up confined to a sanatorium for a year, isolated, with severely damaged lungs. When eventually she got back to work, Horn found herself thinking in terms of images of confinement -- cocoons, swaddling, bondage, prostheses. "When you are very isolated or alone," she remarks to the show's curator, Germano Celant, in a catalog interview, "you have...
...Surrealist vision of women as sorceresses or passive, quasi-mechanical objects of desire. It is no surprise to learn of her enthusiasm for the films of Luis Bunuel -- or, given the yearning and farcical behavior of some of her later sculptures, for those of Buster Keaton. Keaton, Horn points out, "has to invent the apparatus to achieve what he wants, and becomes completely obsessed by his mad world of imaginary things...
...Some of Horn's films, and videos of her performances, can be watched at the Guggenheim, but the main body of the show is sculpture: mechanized objects that pump liquids around, or reduce lumps of carbon to black dust with tiny pecking hammers, or swivel suspended binoculars in an anxious parody of disembodied inspection, or flap small wings. Some devices, slender granddaughters of Jean Tinguely's painting machines of the '50s, splatter paint around on the walls or (with more fetishistic suggestion) on women's shoes. No doubt to spare the clothes of the museum audience, these stay switched...
...doubtful whether Horn designed her mechanized sculpture to withstand the wear and tear of continuous running in a museum. At any given time, quite a few of the pieces are not working, and since even the ones that are have lengthy delays between cycles, the viewer spends a lot of time wondering when, if at all, something is going to happen. Then a cam turns, and neat little linkages make a crescent of feathers coquettishly unfurl or propel a row of knives, with sinister sexual intent, into a corresponding row of shaving brushes...