Rebecca Horn
Photography: Mechanical Body Fan, 1972-1974. Courtesy of Rebecca Horn / VG Bild Kunst / VISDA
The German conceptual artist Rebecca Horn has spent a half-century using fans, feathers and curious masks to extend the human body.
Photograph: Measure Box, 1970. Courtesy of Rebecca Horn / VG Bild Kunst / VISDA
“Einhorn” was a performance in which a woman walked through the countryside for 12 hours with a unicorn-like horn attached to her head.
In 1964, while living in Barcelona and staying in a hotel where the rooms were rented by the hour, Rebecca Horn began her artistic career. She was 20 and had just enrolled in the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts but had been forced to drop out: Over the next few years, she would become increasingly and inexplicably physically weak. After her parents both died, she started to feel isolated as well. By 1967, says Alexandra Müller, a curator at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, which recently mounted an exhibition of Horn’s work, Horn had certainly contracted lung poisoning from the toxic fumes she’d been breathing while sculpting polyester resins without a mask. She was committed to a year in a sanatorium to recover—an “unbearable” experience for her, Müller says.
The body—its limitations, its fallibility, its capacity for debilitating sickness and death—became the center of Horn’s burgeoning artistic practice. In the sanatorium, she began to create her first “body sculptures.” Growing up in post–World War II Bavaria, she had been taught to draw by her Romanian governess. She rarely spoke as a girl, and almost never spoke German if she did. “Germans were hated. We had to learn French and English. We were always traveling somewhere else, speaking something else,” Horn said in a rare 2005 interview with The Guardian. “I did not have to draw in German or French or English. I could just draw.”
At the sanatorium, she returned to the drawing of her childhood, conceiving of mythical, physically impossible humans, blessed and burdened with additional appendages. Perhaps her most famous artwork, “Einhorn” (1970), is both a work of performance and a physical work of art. A “sculptural garment,” “Einhorn,” meaning unicorn, is a single white horn strapped around the wearer’s head. It looks similar to the body straps depicted in Frida Kahlo’s “Broken Column” (1944), which Kahlo was forced to use to stabilize her spine after a near-fatal tram crash. “Einhorn” is violent, but it is also a reference to art history, and even funny—a play on words with the artist’s own name.
Violence began to appear everywhere in Horn’s work. In her 20s and 30s, it emerged in her reinventions of the physical body. Horn’s “Hahnenmaske” (1973), or Cockfeather Mask, is made of a fabric-covered strip of metal and black feathers that bends to the wearer’s face, stroking anyone who comes near. Like a number of her works, it looks like a sadomasochist device. “Federkleid” (1972), Feather Dress, is a set of feathers that covers a naked man and is held together by strings. Horn can pull and release to raise the feathers up or down, giving her the power to expose or protect the man’s nakedness. But perhaps there is no more disturbing work than her video installation “Buster’s Bedroom,” in which a hospital patient who’s pretending to be a doctor—played improbably by a young Donald Sutherland—puts a straightjacket onto a young woman. A real straightjacket, displayed in the gallery next to the screen, inflates and deflates itself as the girl in the video shouts “That hurts!”
“Einhorn” was a performance in which a woman walked through the countryside for 12 hours with a unicorn-like horn attached to her head.
Photograph: Chris Felver/Getty Images
Einhorn, 1970. Courtesy of Rebecca Horn / VG Bild Kunst / VISDA.
White Body Fan,1972. Courtesy of Rebecca Horn / VG Bild Kunst / VISDA.
“You have to believe in something, and you have to give that out to the world. Most people live in a little prison in their minds.”
“Buster’s Bedroom”—and much of Horn’s early oeuvre—implies that not only might we have power over our bodies taken away, but that our lack of power might become a source of entertainment for another. The effect of these works is a greater realization of one’s own body and ability but also its fickleness. With sufficient training, for instance, one might run a marathon, but also, with a well-placed slice to our Achilles tendon, never walk again. The line between good and evil, life and death, movement and incapacitation is outlandishly thin, to the degree that to believe one has control over anything, even one’s own flesh and bones, is a dangerously arrogant assumption. Horn’s art forces one to watch another’s pain and bodily incapacitation.
It’s not a coincidence that many of the 20th-century artists who grappled the most with the pain of others are German. In the mid-1970s, Horn moved to New York, where she lived for a decade before she returned to Germany and began to wrestle with her home country’s historical legacy, evolving her art from the individual body to the wider society. She created “Concert in Reverse” (1987), a sound work that she installed at the site of Nazi torture and executions, which recreated the sounds of struggling, dying prisoners. Horn also reopened a tower that Nazis had used to torture prisoners and added in steel hammers and flickering lights to create a site of memory that cannot be changed.
For Horn, the body is history and history is the body. “Horn’s work [is a testament to] her consciousness of the world where brutality and pain are inseparable from a dramatic tension,” says Müller. For most people, the response to our inability to change our past, and, in many ways, to even change anything about our future, is to pretend we have more agency than we do—to claim control even where we do not have it. But for others, as Horn’s art shows, the solution to having no existential control is to enact violence and pain as one can—to assert control at any cost.
It is often the great challenge of enterprising performance artists—from Horn to the late Ulay—to archive and maintain the relevance of their works. So contingent on their immediate context, Horn’s pieces are either impossible to recreate elsewhere or simply become irrelevant in other contexts. Even a physical piece like “Pencil Mask,” a body extension artwork with nine leather straps that looks like an S&M hood but actually allows the wearer to use her face to draw, requires a knowledgeable wearer. It is not like a painting; it cannot be easily, or at least passively, “read” in a gallery setting.
As early as her 20s, Horn anticipated this challenge and hired photographers to memorialize her performances, most frequently the photographer Achim Thode. Her intention to make her fleeting works permanent, Müller says, changed how she performed. Each performance was effectively being done twice: first the performance for the audience, then the performance for the photographer. “The artist becomes, like Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, or others before, the producer of his own myth,” says Müller. “Rebecca Horn has ensured, or rather directed, the visual immortality of her ephemeral works.”
Horn diversified the modes of consumption for a number of her artworks in order to give them historical longevity, says Sandra Beate Reimann, a curator at the Museum Tinguely, in Basel, which recently presented a Horn retrospective. Reimann cites “White Body Fan” (1972), which Horn has performed, and had filmed and photographed. She also lets museums and galleries borrow the object at the center of the piece—a contraption that encases the wearer in an enormous white fan made of metal and wood.
Though Horn has been working for the better part of 60 years, today, at 76 years old, she is still relatively unknown. A shame. Her art captures the beauty of physical movement as well as any of the thematically similar but more popular contemporary artists like Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci or Bruce Nauman. Yet Horn singularly prioritizes the investigation of psychological movement as well. “You have to believe in something, and you have to give that out to the world,” Horn says. “Most people live in a little prison in their minds.”
