Rebecca Horn

Rebecca Horn 

Possibly best known for her performance pieces and drawing machines, Rebecca Horn finds unusual ways to engage her body to create drawings from physical limitations. What started out as a problem solving exercise, when Horn spent some time in a sanatorium, unable to operate as normal, without masses of antibiotics and plenty of bed rest. Horn created ‘pencil mask’ to escape the limitations her body set upon her. By engaging in artist practice, she started to fight her loneliness and regain functional behavioural patterns. Themes within the artist’s work include mortality, memory, human vulnerability, sexuality and emotional fragility, which the artist communicates through body and kinetic sculptures, film, poetry and institutional works.

The way the artist plays with space has also captured my interest, as the scale of the majority of Horns’ works are generally quite large, this creates the impression that the artist has allowed room for accidental and chance outcome, I applied this way of working to my “drawing machine” project. Like Rebecca Horn I put soul back into a machine. By choosing to adapt a music box mechanism, I was able to use the musical voice like quality of the machine to propel the pastel/charcoal fragments. This in itself casts visually theatrical and poetical readings onto the subject, and offers an attempt to “let the pieces fall where they may”.

Personally I admire the artist’s work, for its honesty and curious nature. The way the Artist respects the objects she uses in her sculptures, installations etc, is part of what makes seeing her work an immersive and significant experience. The poetical and metaphorical content allow for the viewer to add their interpretation, which is key to her practice.

The piece below is entitled 'concert for anarchy' and was my first encounter with the work of Rebecca Horn, that I experienced at the Tate gallery during my gcse year. I was captivated by the all round immersive capability of her kinetic sculptures, and reactions and behaviours of those who came into contact with them.

I have taken a great amount of inspiration form the audio recordings, the sober tones of the whale sounds, are evocative of the environment surrounding them, as well as being poetic in terms of sensing, feeling evoked from speaking regardless of understanding the language. The forms of speaking act as a performance piece.

"Seeing the automata interposed with the drawings, poems and assembled still-lifes, the experience is that of the artist-inventor, the alchemist. There is more than a little bit of magic about Horn, with her feathers and wings, mirrors and stones, pools of still water, vials of liquid and books made out of ashes. In some of the works she has collaborated with New Zealand composer Hayden Chisholm, whose music, like something from Prospero's island, shimmers over the installations, as though they were breathing it out."  -  Guardian article 


The materials Horn uses are intricately poetic and respectful of the materials themselves. Horn acts as a surgeon taking pieces of old machines and fashioning them into something new, giving them a new twist that resembles there previous selves. 







http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/rebecca-horn-2269


https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/may/23/art

http://artdaily.com/news/14513/Rebecca-Horn---Bodylandscapes--Drawings#.WCSCRvmLTIU

http://www.marthagarzon.com/contemporary_art/2012/07/rebecca-horn-body-art-performance-installations/

http://bitesofdsign.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/rebecca-horn-1944-germanyalemania.html