Word: horning
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...Rebecca Horn's Eccentric Machines...
...Rebecca Horn's Eccentric Machines...
Some things go slowly, like the piece titled Paradiso, 1993, hung from the Guggenheim dome: two enormous breastlike funnels drip a white liquid into the ornamental pool far below, drawing an imaginary line and suggesting grace | coming, rather parsimoniously, from heaven. Others go fast, like Untitled (Amerika), 1990, Horn's image of nomadic life and rootlessness: a beat-up suitcase with a thermometer inside flaps agitatedly along a line slung across the open well of the building...
Happily, most of Horn's eccentric machines aren't so overblown as this. The image of sex-as-mechanism is one of the oldest tropes in modern art. A century has passed since Joris-Karl Huysmans, the "decadent" novelist, invited the reader to see the workings of an engine as "steel Romeos inside cast-iron Juliets"; the idea of a "desiring machine" has been explored by a lot of art since then, from early Picabia and Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), through the Surrealists in the '30s, and so down...
...Horn's sculptures can't be written off as a mere footnote to this train of imagery; the best of them have a comic grace and a needling mysteriousness that are entirely their own. Yet it is hard to shake the feeling that, like all kinetic art, they are limited by their programs, so that once you have seen them shake their stuff they cannot renew themselves, as painting and static sculpture can, the second time around...