Reading Diary: REBECCA HORN’S BODYLANDSCAPES: (X) observations about the race of feeling and drawing in the post mechanical times. by ARMIN ZWEITE.

Rebecca Horn is a performance artist who creates site-specific installations, a sculptor who makes films, an artist who draws and writes poetry. An interdisciplinary artist with high sensitivity and the subtle ability to navigate and connect all these forms of expression through a potent body of work, emotive and sometimes even disturbing, characterized as much by psychological fragility as it is by play and wittiness.

The following (X) observations examine Rebecca Horn’s artistic energy as well as the motifs and aesthetic strategies of her work.

(I)  Rebecca Horn’s work has casted a broad arc between a deeply rooted reality and a all-embracing imagination, characterized by crossing references between emotions, oppressive memories and dreams, reflections of contemporary politics and history, unpredictable responses to locations and moods and the dialogue of a curious mind with science and technology. A very inclusive approach to making by conjuring highly suggestive images throughout a strong desire to manifest forms and motion.

(II) From the late 1960’s to the early 1970’s the artist produced a series of studies addressing the female anatomy. Rather than presenting harmonious visions of feminine beauty these are depictions of a vulnerable and occasionally mistreated body. The body is held together with bandages and corsets that make it look like a chained captive assuming a grotesque appearance through large prostheses and a disability connected to a traumatic past, resembling a subjective insecurity, testifying not only a physical deficit but also psychological, physically manifested by the creation of body sculptures (her drawings acquire objective character) that restrict physicality through enlarged body extremities together with the cutting of sensory perception, clearly conveying a lack of interpersonal communication. Hence the performer takes a passive role/ indirect contact with the audience, hardly allowing any autonomy for the individual expression or improvisation.

(III) Rebecca Horn’s work prompts associations with surrealism. The artist does not pay tribute to the 20th century avant-garde movement by directly taking over its forms, motifs or subjects, but instead by adopting specific artistic strategies (i.e. collage, montage, ready-mades) and by concerning herself with the general thematic explored by the surrealist (i.e. erotism, sexuality) making use as well of their linguistic metaphors in her visual works. Keeping hold of those unfaithful legs (title taken from Andre Breton’s and Paul Eluard’s book: L’Immacule conception)  is about a dialogue with Otto Sander in which each participant is partially bandaged with white tape, joined together with strong magnets attached respectably to the outside of his left leg and of her right leg; such is the power of the connection that the two performers extremities together create a three legged/ double-bodied creature who is only able to advance with wobbling uncertainty and a lot of effort.  

Another form of alluding to this surrealist context is made by the artist’s suggestions to legends and myths. In Unicorn, the actor is meant to be seen as a new embodiment of the Minotaur a cross between a man and a bull, an aspiration for forms of re-mythification seems to be very strong, imbued by the yearning for a quality that presupposes primordial knowledge.

Like the surrealists, Rebecca Horn is not stoping at only creating spectacular objects that stand up: the viewer’s interest must be caught by something in these objects that is of deeper human interest. These objects are highly charged with emotional connotations capable of shaking the viewer’s self confidence  calling his/ her sense of identity into doubt, leaving open a space for self interpretation. Her work is constantly revolving around the evocation of things concealed behind their outer appearance, vital energy and sexuality, contrast and harmony, identity and division, drama and poetry always integrated in a multi-layered context, which also seems to be guided by a convulsive beauty.

(IV) In 1978, Rebecca Horn makes Der Eintanzer, a film that to some extent conceals all of the artist’s previous works, adding language and music to her visual imagery as crucial elements of expression, various objects now started to play a major role in her work. Despite the fact of being conceived for a filmic setting these artefacts continue to retain their original form and motory functions preserving their kinetic functiounality alongside their visual appearance, as the four-legged table  that towards the end of the movie starts moving, attempting to stimulate a tango, the table simbolises the grace and innocence of these everyday objects brought to life marking a transformation in Rebecca’s work in which she no longer performs and human element is susplanted by the machines.

In contraposition to Joseph Beuys and other artists associated with the Fluxus and Arte povera movements, Rebecca Horn does not turn to found objects, “impoverished” or worn out/ humble machines; instead she builds particular machines of her own that are designed with precision and technical skill imbued with poetic grace and enchanting fragility.

(v) Kinetic objects, mechanical devices and machines play a special role in Rebecca Horn’s work that is almost unparalelled elsewhere in contemporary art. These machines do not operate according to a rational criteria, are not result-oriented. Driven by small electrical motors, these constructs:  scratch and caress, beat and drill, hit and stab, hammer and slit. As Rebecca Horn has said: “My machines are not washing machines or cars. They have a human quality and they must change. They get nervous and must stop sometimes. If a machine stops, it doesn’t mean it’s broken. It’s just tired. The tragic and melancholic aspect of machine sis very important to me. I don’t want them to run forever. It’s part of their life that they stop and faint”.

Furthermore these high-quality precision machines are associated with the sphere of memory, calling past or pass events back into our minds and evoking a horizon of playfull experience charged with intimations and feelings.

(VI) The future of art seems no longer to lie with the creation of enduring masterpieces, but instead with defending alternative strategies, individual artists continuing to demonstrate new attitudes towards art and life. This is an attitude that can be traced in Rebecca Horn’s work, asserting and exemplary mode of action. Her works intrinsically act as prototypes, possessing an open structure, the instance of the process that is always open to change: to further development and exploration. Her  aesthetically autonomous machines  are  not seeing as a sacrosanct fully-completed masterpieces but instead as artifacts that can point beyond the narrow confines or art. Building a bridge between everyday life and art. Everyday life objects having a life of their own and placed in unfamiliar contexts.

(VII)  The quality of her motory installations are attributed to a femenine methaporic language. Although her work do not illustrates this directly it can be sensed, somehow felt in a subtle manner. What stands out is their repeteadly and constant motion mechanisms creating rythms  suggests a responsive relationship between man and machine and even man/nature-machine. Operating in large constellations assuming specific roles, this artifacts are real performing machines and can  be compared to the human body as they flirt, dress up and pose, tremble, quiver and sigh, they lay bare the hidden. Translating the human phyche in parodistic manner.  It is the articulation of uncertainty that hightens the qualities of these impressive installations.

(VIII)  Rebecca Horn is anthing but formalist in her approach to art. Whatever choices of medium, her works are driven by a mission to reflect the mistery of human existence, to articulate the enigmatic nature of being with all it ups and downs, in all its ramifications and limitations, and towards this end uncessingly seeking new images, signs, symbols and metaphores.

(IX)  Rebecca Horn’s work revolves around repetition, the kinetic dimension is infused with potentially unlimited duration opening to a landscape of vast imagination. Compared to Jane Tinguely’s work her mechanical paintings are not dependent on the machine itself and the inserted sheet of paper but also are determined by people, objects, duration and specific spaces/ situations becoming a subject to change. They seem to be live mechanisms appearing in tandem with her poems, emphasising the close relationship between writing and drawing, meaning and form, concept and perspective, the poem develop a perspective from which the work can be viewed.

(X)  The artist’s symbolic forms deeply rooted in subjective experience are constantly forging images that transcends the personal into a more broader picture. A symbolic language common to the whole humanity.

In her work the mirror motif is much more than a means to make the room appear larger, their refractions and multiplication of appearences adress the issue of identity. Where role and persona become interchangeable, the self appear as the other: resembling one another but not identical. The mirror opens up an alter world where reality and ilusion appear indistinguisable. She also appeals to a range of other things, materials and substances implying magic and alchemy shown in her preferences for substances like mercury, sulphur, black or red liquids, silver and gold to point to an objective mythopoetic laguage borrowed from Carl J. Jung, the artist does not view the purpose of alchemy worshiping some hermetic mysticism but in the possibility of steering the development of the individual along an artistic path (path of individuation) towards a condition of wholeness incidentally leading us to the cosmos. However, pursuing this goal she sets her sights not on society as a whole but solely in the individual. Ultimatly she is conerned with bonding the fundamental opposites of male and female aling the process of self-discovery, unifying incompatible forces abd bridging contradictions, like in the chemical wedding manifesting the union of male sulphur with female mercury in the shape of a human figure.

The deeper artistic meaning of her creativity extends beyond this perspective and it could be seen in the light that her work addresses fundamental questions of the human existence without the promise of conclusive answers or practical remedies. As she defines it  in the documentary (Rebecca Horn is Traveling) created by the Tate Modern for her retrospective show in 1994, after all: “It is a magic act” in which the artist is fully committed to the process not even interested in analyzing the purpose or further meaning of the work, then is when the audience takes over.

Reading Diary: SEDUCER or SEDUCED: with Andrew Cook

The concept of beauty for humans seems (to me) to be among the most relative subjects, changing according time, space and cultural settings. What is “beautiful” now a days within a globalized western culture differs a lot from what it used to be for the pre- Columbian cultures, per say the Mayan culture. They certainly had a sense of beauty that was quite different from ours: slanted foreheads, slightly crossed-eyes, nose that appears broken, elongated neck, pierced ears, lips and nose, tattooed bodies so on… whereas for now those notions seem to be different what I find in common is the human aspiration for beauty, something really to strive for.

I was born in a country in which people have developed a cult around sculpted and delineated bodies and faces leading to a superficial understanding of the subject matter, as if beauty was only skin deep.

What is beauty then? Personally, seems to expand beyond physicality, an inner state rather, something gestated within that inevitable translates without.

What triggers that perception of being or seeing something very alluring?

Certain works of art do! and have the capacity of making us respond, return to an original state by feeling mysteriously attracted, a dynamic connected also with qualities such as: surprise, elation, exaltation, enabling a self-transcendent experience.

Reading Diary: WALKING PRACTICE: cycling journey / entering the woods with Herman Bashiron Mendoliccio

Re-envisioning a way that could bring human beings closer to nature, leaving behind our human attempt and tendency to control and dominate nature replacing it with a more equanimous relation with our planet is very much needed. Eradicating this idea of nature as something wild that needs to be conquered  (perhaps inherited from the colonizing eras).

Seems to me that this model for change not only needs to be thought and spoken about but more than anything needs to be acted upon. The state of emergency is here, there, everywhere.

The Nordic countries and their way of outdoor living called “Friluftsliv” as a slow and peak experiences in the transmodern society proposes  a very clear and pragmatic model for this change, offering the perspective of co-operating with nature instead of controlling it. I agree with the author when stating: “free nature was our true home”. Then reconnecting with that essence could be a way to restore that lost forgotten connection. I also believe that by reestablishing contact with the natural environment something else happens within our bodies, systems, psyche. Effects very well recorded and explained in the article “effect of forest bathing”.

At a personal level of experience, I do feel positive shifts within my body and mind after spending time in nature, so I can see this model proposed by the Nordic countries as a viable and realistic approach to this problem. Healthy body, mind and soul creates a healthy society that translates into the world. This care certainly involves self-knowledge, responsibility and the willingness to share and learn from others, implies an inside-out journey that not only embraces the self but also our relation with others and the environment.

Society and culture are in constant exchange supported by economy and technology. How this economies are as well re-envisoned based on this new model? How the support system for this new way of living and acting is embodied? How we as artists living during this moment in history immersed in a culture that is always asking for more to consume at (every level) could contribute to that shift? What is the role of the artist within this new model?

Leaving behind the industrial era heading for a more fluid and perhaps even less tangible (virtual) reality together with the rapid generational change started in the second half of the 20th century and what we have experienced so far from the 21st  century has created not only change but also a sequence of gaps. How do bridge them? Could somehow this model be a way for finding unison?

Reading Diary: SILENCE/ SILENCED: with Elena Marcheveska

Personally, I find a lot of meaning in SILENCE: wisdom, space, aggression, neglection, inability to express, repression, acceptance, patience. Contradictory in nature, silence has the power to change what’s arising. I find this idea fascinating. What makes an act of silence to go one way or the other, to remain in stillness or to become an omission?  One implicates absence while the other implicates exclusion. This can perhaps relate to the idea that the power of silence has two forms: one joyful and the other disturbing. In both cases silence is the privation of speech. Of being unable to say what one wishes to say or even choosing not to say what one has to say. I find a lot wisdom in knowing when to speak up. One can also convey a big deal by the simple  act of being silent and present.

Looking back at Ancient Civilizations and Traditions, I can see how silence was something sacred and even required to undergo any initiation, the text refers to the Greeks with the Eleusinian mysteries, to the Roman pantheon where the goddess Angerona commands silence with the expression of her mouth bound and sealed. I think of the Buddhist traditions and their approach to silence as something noble, as a technique used to refrains from speaking as a way to help quiet the mind and condition the body in the discipline of right speech.

The unsayable not because of omission but rather as something to be realized individually from within. Words can sometimes fall short in the effort of trying to describe emotions, feelings, events, etc. There! is when new ways of expression are so helpful, like painting, defined by Simonides (Greek poet) as “silent poetry”, the making mute of poetry, the silencing of the word. After that a lot can arise and silence becomes this act of allowing for other expressions to be expressed. Then painting silences language by interrupting the relationship of significance created between name and thing or the labeling of a thing, leaving a gap open for namelessness.

Art nowadays has become something noisy with appeals for “silence”. Hence there seems to be a tendency for the artist to transgress that by embracing silence as much as he/she remains an artists and keeps his/her conversation with the public, preserving this reclusive, silent, empty space in which this deeper experience of immediacy with art is translated into something more experimental. Art as a technique for focusing the attention, where the artist task is to open up new areas and objects of attention. The art-work there remains as a tool for perception and realization. Ultimately, silence never ceases to imply its opposite and to demand on its presence. As John Cage puts it: “there is no such thing as silence, something is always happening that makes a sound” similarly there is no such thing as “empty” space as long as there is human awareness within a cosmos in which there is always more to be seen.

Reading Diary: METASSEMBLAGE: collaging theory & practice with Michael Bowdidge

In this paper: -From aesthetics to abstract machine: Deluze, Guattari and the contemporary art practice, the author (Simon O’Sullivan) ponders upon contemporary art practice referring to the philosophical framework of Deluze & Guattari. Beginning with his experience encountering a particular work of art, that of Cathy Wilkes among other artists from the Glasgow art scene and how he re-thinks (upon this encounter) what contemporary art “is” and what it “does”. Followed by a second section in which the author crosspollinates abstract concepts from Deluze & Guattari opus aimed to contemporary art practice in general. Lastly, elaborating a conclusion about: The future orientation of art, linked to the abstract machine and its diagrammatic function, a function that does not represent but rather construct a new type of reality. Treating our life’s as a work of art.

Addressing the following issues;

Art as sign, object, quality, event whose presence indicates the presence of something else. New assemblages taking place from the recombination of already existing elements, executed by new art practitioners willing to inscribe the work of art within a network of signs and significations, recasting and manipulating existing material from elsewhere. Offering an Interdisciplinary kind of art practice.

Aesthetics as an impulse towards innovation. Away from any particular Jandra, closer instead to a more spontaneous expression of the multiplicity of form and meaning nowadays. The artist as the one (re-assembling, re-signifying) bringing about something “new”. As we evolve as human beings so does art and our new ways of expressing it. Life and art (inseparable- to me) as two sides of the same coin.

Art as an experience that takes place beyond the boundaries of time and how we conventionally experience it, deploying different temporalities. I link this to my experience with Wilke’s work, in her recent show at MOMA ps1 (NYC-March-2018) in which I could sense this slowing down- entering into stillness kind of sensation when going through her installations, objects, pieces and images.

Dialectical opposition within the aesthetics of art, one of dissent and criticism versus the other of affirmation and creativity (the birth of something new). It’s one’s style of thought: “Whether one is drawn to negation and critique or to affirmation or creativity “- Deluze. Both are necessary stages that build onto each other along  the process of bringing about something new. It is important to me to give space and allow critique in order to clarify the direction of the new that is to be manifested.

Artist as visionaire, rendering new compositions of affect, it is through the artist’s abilities and skills that a new visions are brought into this world as compositions. Art as a vital force from the dark-unknown caught by the imagination of the artist and translated by his/ her abilities and skills. Art practice can then be described as the realization of this potential that surround us all.

Uncertainty as that that holds potential opening up new pathways. It is  very important to my creative process to allow error, absurdity and the stop of making sense. Experimentation has been and continues to be the key to further incorporate  these points of indeterminacy and to freeing my work from being useful.

World as fiction, being able to grasp the world of convention as fiction is what enables us to gain some perspective, seeing not only its limits but also going beyond that into a world of pure potential, giving birth to new possibilities for life. Our interaction with the world and with art then becomes an event, an event that bears the potential for new patterns.

Reading Diary: INFINITE PLAY: with Kim Schoen

For the selected reading I have identified two categories: (1) falling under a more theoretical frame of work related to language, death, infinity and its origins, linked to the foundations of what seems to be the western world view-Theology emerging from Greek philosophy, specifically Platonic philosophy in the setting up of this idea of truth- theoretical truth and Greek mathematics in the setting up of an ideal representation of space-time very much grounded in the idealization of empirical units of measurements making possible this idea of a systematical coherent theory that begins with self-evident principles constructing the all possible spatial forms. Deductive format of a science that contains the knowledge of all possible figures and its relationships by accumulation of observations (western science); (2) Giving shape to a more pragmatic definition of infinity linked to play, games, the theatrical, the dramatic presented in a more dialectical manner showing the oppositions between this two interactive elements: finite/ infinite.

(1)   “The origin of Infinity” addressing the following issues: 

The idea of infinity as an idealized form, it can’t be given, it can only be aimed at- it is by becaming through aim and intention that can be pursued. Infinity as extension whose forms and properties are studied by mathematics and no longer by empirical measurements.

Infinity as a theoretical attitude formed by disengagement, disinvolvement, disinterestedness, it is the distance from the object, yet motivation is the link that connects together the phases of life into one stream, this link breaks when theory arises. The one who converts to the theoretical attitude isolates himself, detaching from the common needs of human nature never serving the society or nation, whereas for an ideal of truth one utterly implicates the other- ethical intersubjectivity -giving as a result a humanity totally responsible for all the moves it takes.

The infinity of time as form in the present, this theoretical subjectivity according to Hussserl (above mentioned) produces out of itself the infinity that reveals into this world. Hence the living present of an actual consciousness has infinite horizons before and behind it. How does consciousness has that intuitive capacity? Reflection makes consciousness itself the object of intuition. Reflection can see consciousness as having the form of phases, one succeeding the next as an impression, a moment of actual awareness crystallizing in the present.

What is formed in the present also gives form to the past and future, past is implicated in the present as well as motivated by the moments passed, that is how every-time we tell a story about ourselves from the past to another person we are re-creating that memory or story at that given moment. The present then becomes the anchorage in which life expands spontaneously producing the form of the now. Consciousness consists on the actualization of that living in the now

(1)    “Language to Infinity” addressing the following issues: 

Boundless misfortune, as Homer said: the resounding gift of the gods sending disasters to human beings so we can speak of them, marks the point where language begins and the limit of death (the realization of it) opens infinite spaces within language. In this possibility speech finds its infinite inventiveness. Language as a door, an opening to an ever expansive landscape of infinite possibilities, finding possibilities in its own divisions, repetitions, analogies, self-images, system of mirrors, a language that postpone death by ceaselessly opening a space analog to itself. As referred in the “Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges, everything that can possibly be said or has been said, pronounced, meant- it all exist within this sovereign language that recovers them and is even responsible for their birth, a language that hovers against death, because it is at the moment of falling into the shaft of an infinite hexagon that the most lucid of the librarians reveals that even “the infinity of language multiplies itself into infinity, repeating itself without end in the divided figures of the same”. This makes me think about speech and sound as forms of vibration that can endlessly multiply aiming towards infinity.

(2)   “Finite and Infinite games” addressing the following issues:

 Finite games versus Infinite games

Finite games: played for the purpose of wining, agreement that involves a beginning an end and a set of rules under which the game is played, defined as temporal boundaries, it needs an opponent and most times teammates, rules are set as to bring the game with the opponent to and end, finite players play within boundaries, finite players assume roles and put up with masks, self-veiling as a free suspension of our freedom, how far can we go with that self -veiling? Finite games are theatrical, the script is used not as rules but rather as the actual exchange between actors/ players, surprise is crucial and can cause the end of the game, to be prepared against surprise is to be trained, Training towards a final self-definition. Death for finite players is abstract, finite players play for the tittles-for immortality, finite play is serious, looking at what could be impossible for others. Contradictory, both true and false. Power is a concept that only belongs to finite games, measured in units of comparison, one can best powerful only when completing something in a close field, one does not win by being powerful but to be so.

Infinite games: played for the sake of continuing playing, freedom of play if one must play one can’t play, internally defined, finite games can be played within infinite games but not the other way around, it has no boundaries or limit of play, it can expand into any number of worlds, rules can be defined as a way of continuing communication with each other, infinite players play with boundaries, infinite games are dramatic, surprise is the cause for the infinite play to continue, infinite players play in complete openness-vulnerability, as a way of exposing their constant growth, infinite player not only expect to be surprised but also to be transform by it. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated, Education leads to a continuing self-discovery. Death for infinite players is a fact that can happen during the course of the play, its dramatic, and even given as an offering for the continuation of the game, infinite players play as mortals, infinite play is joyous. Laughing at what can be possible with others. Paradoxical yet true. Infinite players play with strength, something that can’t be measured, strength is not matter of force but rather allowing others to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.

To be playful is not to be trivial or superficial but rather to interact with others at a level of choice, having at every turn the freedom to choose continuing playing and if so how to continue with that play.

The degree to which one is open to expose the self at that level has to do with an openness and understanding of what an infinite play really means.