Vol. 20 No. 22 · 12 November 1998
pages 16-18 | 3150 words
Performing Art
Rosalind Krauss
- Rebecca Horn: The Glance of Infinity edited by Carl Haenlein
Scalo, 400 pp, £47.50, January 1997, ISBN 3 931141 66 7
On one wall of the gallery a fan of black feathers slowly parts in the centre and folds back like a bird on a perch stowing its wings. From the lower area of another wall, 11 black stiletto-heeled shoes project outwards in a sparse cluster, while high above them a mechanical device suddenly jerks two extended ladles upwards against two metal arms so that with each repeated spasm a clang directs the viewer’s attention to the great splatters of blue paint that have been thrown by the device, spraying not only the wall behind it but defiling the shoes and floor below.
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 1 · 7 January 1999
From Peter Briggs
Rosalind Krauss (LRB, 12 November 1998) makes some excellent points about the origins of Rebecca Horn's work, but makes no mention of Jean Tinguely. Tinguely's speciality, the introduction of an eccentric element to transform rotation into a lateral movement, is at the basis of most of Horn's mechanically driven pieces. His Hayward show in the early Seventies had a hose pipe ejaculatory piece of this kind on one of the outside terraces, I remember.
Feather-dusters (rotated or jerked up and down) often crown his nouveau-realist pieces; parts of belt-driven machinery and sewing machines are often used. He also made machines that splashed paint around. This particular passage in modern sculpture must surely have been in Rebecca Horn's mind as she made her first moving sculptures.
Peter Briggs
Tours
Vol. 21 No. 4 · 18 February 1999
From Barry Martin
Peter Briggs (Letters, 7 January) is right to say that certain characteristics of Rebecca Horn's machines were already developed in earlier artists' works, such as Tinguely's. My own machines, which have been shown in various galleries, also use rotational means to develop lateral movement. One of my works, called Tret, a motorised and all steel open-structured sculpture, approximately four feet high, made in early 1966, and now in the Arts Council of Great Britain's collection, uses exactly the methods Mr Briggs describes. It was exhibited on three occasions in the late Sixties – one of these being the international kinetic show at the Hayward Gallery. Like Horn's work, it has associations with The Penal Colony, as I've indicated on more than one occasion. This work and others in private and national collections were well documented in three 16mm films and a book entitled Light and Movement published in 1985. So why hasn't Carl Haenlein, the editor of Rebecca Horn: The Glance of Infinity, made a more thorough job of his research? The autobiographical traces in a work – on which Horn is so keen – only partially account for its existence. And they're present in every artist's output. I remember a V2 rocket landing on a neighbouring block and killing 16 people in South-East London. An enormous bang woke me in the light of the afternoon and I can still see the ceiling plaster breaking into small parts and descending as a fragmented surface to engulf me.
Barry Martin
Artist in Residence<br />Chiswick House London W4
