Rebecca Horn was my first art crush. During my first winter at art school, I spent most days alone in my apartment, avoiding both the harsh Rhode Island blizzards and the fact that I was far away from home and everyone I was close to. It was during this time that I stumbled upon Horn’s work, and I was instantly captivated by her life and artistic practice.
I had a living room containing nothing but a large mirror leaning against one wall and windows overlooking a small town square. It resembled the room in which Horn performed Scratching Both Walls at Once (1974–75) as part of her series Berlin Exercises in Nine Pieces. In the performance, her finger extensions reached the width of the room, allowing her hands to touch both walls and create a scratching sound.
Horn began making and wearing apparatuses for her performance work after experiencing an extended period of isolation. At age 20, she was studying at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts) but had to leave due to severe lung inflammation caused by inhaling fiberglass. “For a year, I was in a sanatorium,” she told an interviewer in 2005. “My parents died. I was totally isolated. That’s when I began to produce my first body-sculptures. I could sew lying in bed.” Naturally, her choice of materials became what was more accessible in domestic spaces: fabric, pencils, wood, feathers, cardboard, and wire.
Her use of prosthetic bandages rendered clinical the connections between apparatus and body, forming constraining crosses over the torso, head, and limbs. Strapped in, Horn’s body transformed: making marks with her Pencil Mask (1972), fully restrained like a mummy in Arm Extensions (1968), or creating two ever-changing semicircles with her movements in White Body Fan (1972), Horn’s ballet background was also evident. She choreographed the objects and brutally commanded the body to perform. It followed almost naturally then that she would create the film Der Eintänzer (The Dancer), 1978, featuring a surrealistic scene of two young ballet dancers bonded to each other, arms tied to legs, destined to fall.
Soon after her early experimentation with body extensions, Horn’s metamorphosis went beyond the human body and began to revel in the pleasure of precision engineering. The debut of her Peacock Machine (1982) at Documenta 7 was a testament to her ability to summon spirits. There are moments of intimacy, violence, and loss in her machines’ endless repeating dances, as in Kiss of the Rhinoceros (1989) and Love and Hate, Knuggle Dome for James Joyce (2004), as well as the empty swing moving back and forth in The Dancer, intimating something of the sitter who has jumped out a window. As Horn said, her automata “are more than objects. These are not cars or washing machines. They rest, they reflect, they wait.”
Every time I see Horn’s machines in action, I am lured by their elegant motions, which seem to slow time. Her intricate interlocking gears and actuators remind me of the extraordinary mechanism of life in writer Ted Chiang’s short story “Exhalation” (2019), where each wisp of gold leaf is a flake of consciousness. Horn imbued life in her creations long before intelligent machines had their moment.
To this day, women artists have not been widely recognized as leading figures in kinetic sculpture or for their mastery of technology. Despite Horn’s extensive work in both, she is mainly celebrated for her early performances highlighting bodies and their sewn extensions in domestic spaces.
Horn largely withdrew from public life after suffering a stroke in 2015. The most recent video I could find online was of her visit to the Harvard Art Museums while creating Flying Books under Black Rain Painting (2014). In the video, she talks about working with the University and her choice of the three books that figure in the work, each chosen for the messages it might impart to young people: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Franz Kafka’s Amerika, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The “black rain” in the work is ink, not paint, that splashes over a white wall in a manner at once precise and spontaneous. She described the programmed movement as the dance of a snake spitting ink.
I was trained in ballet and gymnastics, and later studied mechanics before making art. I am grateful for my encounter with Horn’s work in my early days. She showed me what kind of artist one can become: a storyteller, an inventor, an alchemist, and a sort of theater director all at once.
