Rebecca Horn

Working in the media of film, sculpture, installation, performance, drawing,

poetry and photography

Short Bio

• Born March 24, 1944 in Michelstadt, Germany

• Studied at the Hamburg Academy for Fine Arts from 1964 - 1970

• Tragedy in 1967 changed her approach to art-making

• Work has been shown at prestigious venues including the MOCA L.A., the Guggenheim, Nationalgalerie Berlin, and the Tate Gallery

• Over 80 solo and over 160 group exhibitions

Chorus of the Locusts, 1991

35 Typewriters hang from the ceiling of the

room,

Typing to alternate rhythms.

A cane for the blind conducts the chorus

Chorus of the Locusts• “Near the top of the building there was another staircase, as if

to an attic. Worth the effort? I went up anyway and emerged in an odd room. I'd never seen anything quite like it. The ceiling was lined with rows of typewriters, neatly arranged. Monumental, out-of-date office machines hung upside down. Here and there and now and then one or two typed away for a time and then stopped. The beat was kept (was that the point?) by a blind man's stick, white and hanging loosely down. The ribbon spewed out from one machine (had something gone wrong? could it be fixed?) onto the bare gallery floor. There was no real reason to bother with something like this, but I was intrigued and stayed on, attending to the erratic noise and trying to connect it to the movements that were going on. It took time. I never succeeded in getting it quite right.” - Artforum

• “…when I use machines, people start to dance. They start to move with a new rhythm that they can’t control… People came into the gallery and reacted to this sound with their bodies and their own interior rhythms.” -R. Horn

“A conductor’s baton begins to conduct, hovering alone in space… The space beneath the baton is void, and the observer is free to evolve into an actor and take up the rhythm of the violins, whose long and sad tone appears to be coaxed out by the magic wand… The violins hang from old, high fruit-tree ladders which are slotted fragilely into each other to form a dancing tower… A funnel is suspended high up under the ceiling and drips black water into an equally large, black basin eight metres down below. A drop falls every second; it is as though its downard motion could create a counterweight and fasten down the entire tower, which in some imaginary way threatens to fly away… Like a tearful metronome, the black water beats out a rhythm to the protracted, lamenting violin tones.”

Tower of the Nameless, 1994

“The escalation of events in Yugoslavia had already passed through the tragedy of a second winter in Sarajevo. Any hope for the survival of the besieged seemed almost illusory. Vienna’s underground was populated by the refugees of the war. These abandoned people were hiding in doorways and subway tunnels. The energy of a special kind of music was present everywhere one went. These people somehow still needed to articulate themselves - no longer with a cry nor in their language, all they had left was their music. This was their only way of expressing pain; they couldn’t speak German, they had no passports, no identity, they were on the run. In the Third Reich, before Hitler occupied Vienna, the city virtually became a transit station, and suddenly this desperate exodus was happening all over again. As a counterbalance to this momentum of flight I tried to establish a sense of stability within a space where these nameless people might rediscover their identity.

“Near the flea market, I constructed a ‘Tower of Violins’ inside a building. A Yugoslavian gypsy came by every day and with his own violin playing transformed the music performed by the mechanical violins, thus creating a new harmony out of disharmony.”

“In Vienna, I constructed a tower of ladders on a baroque staircase in a private house. It became a structure in which only one ladder was standing on the floor, and the others grew upward from it to the ceiling and out through a high window. Attached to the ladder tower were nine violins, mechanically playing to themselves in a manic, melancholy sigh. It was like passing through space to another floor where some other hope existed. I called it Space for the Nameless after a small cemetery on the banks of the Danube just outside Vienna, which is populated by the unidentified bodies of those found floating lifeless down the river. Every afternoon a gypsy violinist came and played and improvised for an hour with my nine mechanical violins. Some people felt that it was like East meeting West. To me, that is Vienna.” -R. Horn, 1994 interview

Quotes• “When you are very isolated or alone, you have

this tremendous longing for communication, and also this strong desire to communicate through the body.”

• “For me, all of these machines have a soul because they act, shake, tremble, faint, almost fall apart, and then come back to life again. They are not perfect machines… I’m interested in the soul of a thing, not the machine itself. I work closely with my technician, who actually builds the machines, but I know how they will look and function. It’s the story between the machine and its audience that interests me.”

• “If a machine stops, it doesn’t mean it’s broken. It’s just tired.”

Questions• Horn has said in interviews that her

machines often inspire people to move, even to dance, while viewing them. However, her pieces have described as being “melancholy;” Horn herself refers to the machines as, “Melancholic actors performing in solitude.” Why do you think they are able to make people move and shake?

• Horn humanizes her machines and is, “interested in the soul of [them].” Is she successful in imbuing her creations with a ‘soul?’ What is the draw of an ‘imperfect’ machine? Is it attractive because it is pitiful?

Sources

Alpers, Svetlana. “Rebecca Horn: Chorus of the Locusts I & II.” Artforum,Summer 1996.

Celant, Germano. Rebecca Horn. New York: Abrams, 1995.Drathen, Doris von. “On the Edges of Place and Time.” Rebecca

Horn: The Glance of Infinity. 1997.Haenlein, Carl. Rebecca Horn: The Glance of Infinity. New York:

Scalo Verlag, 1997.Morgan, Stuart. “The Bastille Interviews.” Rebecca Horn. 1993.Morgan, Stuart. “Round the Horn.” Frieze Magazine. June 1994.Spector, Nancy. “Neither Bachelors Nor Brides: The Hybrid

Machines of Rebecca Horn.” Rebecca Horn. 1995.Rebecca Horn’s homepage: http://www.rebecca-horn.de/index.html