Sculpting Water: Under the Spell of Roni Horn's Work

Have you ever been under the irresistible spell of an art work?

Art Story is a shorter episode exploring an art work, an artist, an exhibition or even a concept through a proudly subjective narrative. 

Narrated by: the host, Joana P. R. Neves

Joana explores an aesthetic shock involving a tongue twister and a photography by Roni Horn in a busy art fair. Maybe you’ll jump into the flow, maybe you’ll be touched by Joana's devotion to the art, the feeling, and the inscrutable nature of certain contemporary art attractions.

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Key themes: 

Roni Horn's work; conceptual art art; photography; art installation; art and language; identity and fluidity; androgyny, aesthetic shock

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to a new episode of Exhibitionistas with me, your host, Joanna Piernevis. Today I bring you an episode which is part of the segment Art Stories. Art Stories are shorter episodes where I focus on a specific, more narrative aspect of an artwork, of an aesthetic feeling, sometimes even a concept. So the last art story episode that we published was about the notion of contact. What is contact? Is it physical? Is it visual? Is it conceptual? And what is the difference between touching something, being touched by something? This time the perspective is completely different. I'm going to start with a question. Have you, dear listener, ever been under the spell, an unexpected state of complete and immediate devotion to a work of art? That's precisely the story I'm about to tell. I'm about to delve into this state of fascination and the pleasure of exploring finally a work that I've discovered, I think about 15 years ago or more, that kept me completely under its spell until I decided to record this episode. I've been thinking about this for a while, and I've been sort of fearing it because do you want to break the spell? Do you want to stay in that state? It turns out that even exploring that feeling made me look at other works. I think that sometimes there are certain works that just do not need to be investigated. They don't have that sort of conceptual depth. They have a different kind of depth. Oh, and the artist in question is an artist I really, really, really love. Ronnie Horn, even herself, is a bit spellbound by whatever it is that she is to produce or is producing. That's how she explains the work. And weirdly, I found that that's exactly the effect that the work has on me. It's a very personal thing, and I think we have to be personal. Don't we need a subjective relationship with the work to have our own subjective relationship with the work? And here I will misquote one of my favorite films by Jim Jarmush, Ghost Dog, where the main character says that, well, follows the book of the samurai, and in the book of the samurai it is said that you have to know the ways of the other samurai so that you are comfortable in your own ways. Having said all this, I think there is nothing else to do than to go on with the episode, so without further ado, let's do this. When my children were young, I recited a Portuguese tongue twister that goes like this. O tempo perguntou a tempo quanto tempo. O tempo respondo que tempo tem tanto tempo quanto tempo. As a child, I first loved the rhythm of this little text. The sounds T and P, which are the sounds of the main word, also appear in other words like quant. They create a sort of drumming of the mouth. The sound t is made with the tongue placed against the upper frontal teeth, whereas the sound p is a release of air after the lips were slightly pressed together. Something happens in the throat too, but unlike the vowels, it doesn't feel like singing, projecting sound with an open chest. It's quite the contrary. The consonants are the sounds that constrict the throat. Like a drum is a tap on a tense surface, a stretched piece of leather resonating in a wooden contained space. Drumming jumps immediately into your body. You feel it. It's not only in your ears, but in your flesh, your muscles. A finger starts tapping mindlessly. Drumming with words is what this little riddle was allowing me to do. It's what first caught my children's attention when they would ask me to say it again and again. So I repeated the repetition, I said it over and over, and within this recitation the repeated sounds would be played again, tongue tapping against the teeth, the mouth expelling air, forming a little channel for it to flow and carry the next vowel. Being able to create such a satisfying rhythm with a mouth, a tongue, throat, teeth, your own body is quite incredible if you think about it. I've always been attracted to art that uses simple and accessible means to mesmerise us. The French poet Emmanuel Ocar was puzzled by Anna Akmatova, saying that poets have a difficult task having to work with the same words that we use to invite someone over for tea. How about considering, Ucar suggested, that it is a great thing to work with the same words that people use every day? Why he asks, would we want our words to be the purest? But it's not only the economy or the handiness of a material or even a technique for me. It's more about seeing and understanding the world around you in a completely different way. To wonder what other things are there around me that could be something else? One day I overheard a child ask their mother can a dog be a cat? And for a moment I enjoyed that uncertainty, not finding any differences between them, and that they could in fact be the same thing, should you look at their size, at their vague morphology, and their interspecies alignment with humans, their common language with us, how they accommodate their throats and mouths to meow or bark in a certain way. Apparently, cats only meow to humans or when they're kittens. They found a way to stretch the use of their instrument in order to communicate with us. Perhaps they don't see us as humans at all. Like the little girl, they don't see any difference between us. We're just big, clumsy, lazy cats. So even if you don't understand the meaning of the tongue twister, you can enjoy its music, appreciate the drumming of the words, the rhythm, as we accelerate the repetition carried by the sound and the meaning. In fact, this may be a tongue twister with all its T's and P's, but I also see it as a riddle. You see, the meaning of this little text, which repeats the same word ten times, is also quite something. In English it would be something like this. Time asked time how much time time has, time answered time that time has as much time as time has. The idea of a time doubled imagines something we can only see as whole. But here there are two times chatting, one of them inquiring about their identity in terms of quantity. How much time does time have? Time is measured so you can wonder about the amount of time that time has, but the answer will always be time, the time asking the question. Time is how much time time has. But if time is doubled, then this can't be true. If time is doubled, there is a possibility of the existence of different times, with different amounts, which you will only know when the time is over. Time will last for as long as it lasts. My children inquired about the meaning of it. I remember answering but avoiding going as far as I did here. I wanted them to have the pleasure of discovering the hidden meanings by just giving away a side of it. That's the thing about this magical trick of doubling something so exquisitely unique and unmultipliable as a concept, but so numerous as a thing in itself. It's that the puzzle is there, available in your mind, whenever you feel like diving into it. Although it may not even be the purpose. The purpose is multiple. It involves the concept, the tongue, words, myth. The Greek god of time comes to mind, Kronos, who ate his children for fear of one of them dethroning him. Only Zeus escaped, to make Kronos throw up all of the other siblings, leading a war against his father and taking over the power. I was, and remain fascinated. Fascination may be a way to create distance, or perhaps it's an inebriation of the mind and senses. Indeed, fascination used to mean bewitched, being under a spell. Something has control over you, which ultimately is the power of time. You will only know at the end about this power. Anyway, speaking of fascination and a double, I'm reminded of a time when I was bewitched by an art piece. It doesn't happen to me often. I love falling for something slowly, feeling it slip under my skin. I love the slow mechanics of incorporating something, of noticing that something haunts you. But that day, at Art Basel of all places, I was completely and totally bewitched. Art Basel is an art fair established in the city of Basel, in Switzerland, and at least at the time, it was a most prestigious one, with all the blue chip galleries and the other established or less so on their tippy toes. Not the best place to be spellbound. It's not that you don't discover beautiful things or that you cannot have an intense sense of connection. You do, but it's like being in a bookshop reading a few paragraphs of a great book. You need to take it with you, spend time with it to fully enjoy it. Offers are not museums or art galleries, there are spaces where you start a conversation, confirm a suspicion, and meet like-minded people. All this to say that I was in the professional mode, walking in the aisles, stepping into the booths of the galleries, when two or three booths ahead from afar, I spot the most exquisite shape I've ever seen in my life. I walked towards it as if pulled by an imaginary rope, with a sense of urgency, need, devotion. I was also, I must add, asking myself, what is it? Because one of the strings of this attraction was the impossibility of knowing what that thing was, and yet to be heart and soul possessed by it. It was almost sexual, something that suddenly grabs your hole, and there is no other response than to follow. When I finally arrived at the booth, there it was for me. It was an elongated and sinuous soft thing with a visibly soft texture. I think it was dark blue or black. The artist was Rony Horne, whose work I knew. I had been progressively taken over by the work You are the weather, which was so banal that I took no notice of it in the museum. Ronie Horne created the sequence of images of the same woman's face. Her name is Margaret, and she's immersed in water in each photograph. I can't quite put words on her expression. It would be a discarded image for someone else perhaps, because the subject isn't particularly agreeable, a bit frowny even, and at times serious. She's always looking straight at the photographer. I remember walking out of the exhibition, thinking of those photographs lined up on the wall, and the title remaining like one of those little clouds that linger after a storm when the sky is blue again. It was absurd. Why after seeing so much art was I fixated on what seemed like discarded projects of a photography student? You are the weather Beautiful notion, and in fact the stupefying thing about this series, which Horn continued, is that the minute changes of the face, the weather, the water, the light are never a grand statement, nor a specific, easily identifiable state. No seduction, no fear, no rage, no happiness. The images were there precisely because we are the weather, I am the weather. You listening are the weather. We are all the weather asking each other what is the weather? What is a state of being? How long am I to be in it? Weather asked weather who the weather is, weather replied to weather that the weather is who the weather is. Horn took these images in Iceland in nineteen ninety four, where she fell in love with the landscape. Then there is the water, a fascination for Horn, which is also ever changing and always the same. In fact, in quite a few pictures, Margaret is wet, her hair pulled back, as you do when you come out of the sea, and she has droplets of water on her face sometimes. Her eyelashes stick together, still damp, and her skin has that thick compact texture it acquires when it's cold outside, and the body has been in that other element. In the video, Marguerite says that the work uses her face as a place, unquote. Horne first went to Iceland in the seventies when she was nineteen years old. There is something about it that overtook her. It's the only place where she goes just for the sake of going. In nineteen eighty two, she got permission to stay in the lighthouse off the southern coast, and she moved in for weeks, watching the weather, the birds, the puffins. For Horne, I imagine it was a complete immersion in a place that isn't hers, like the city you were born in can be. Margaret says that they stayed together for a long while there. Horne describes it as an almost wordless time, which was important, Margaret says, because it created trust. In that space of trust, and you trust someone as you trust water, because you observed it, you know the limits and the easiness of its body, you release something of yourself when you're not formulated, sprawling on a pin, as T. S. Elliot described being defined by someone else. The photographs shown in a single line also have an erotic component. The person is looking straight at the camera, as per the artist's instructions. So she's looking straight at us, at the viewers. Her expression is piercing, and there isn't a single smile. There is so much trust that there is no need to draw us in. It's in a way a triumph of reciprocity over the uncritical recording of the machine. At Art Basel there was no gaze, no face, no water. The work was also a photograph, but very different from You Are the Weather. I looked at the label, untitled, and then a number. Not much help. It was a thing covered with hair. In fact, for a short time, it seemed like a long haired head from the back, but the hair closer now was short, and it ran down the neck and below. The shape of the head and neck was too long, too thin, the place where it curved eerie and unnatural. I suddenly realized that I was looking at the back of a bird's head and neck, as I had never seen them before. How did she photograph birds as if they were in a professional photography chute? Doesn't matter. My mind quickly went back to that vision of a feathery phallus, that shape where every delicate detail showed the logic of a morphology and the intrinsic design of its nature, in its singularity and its difference, and made complete sense. What didn't make sense was the compulsive attraction. There were moments though, where I paused to contemplate the humour of the work a bird looking at the horizon, us looking at the back of the bird's neck, in total abandonment. Funnier even, in all of photography history that I know of, no one thought of this angle, this exquisite moment of personification, not turning bird into a person, but seeing the person also as a bird, that is, seeing the person as a person, a being, regardless of gender, of type, archetype, or any other marker of a group. Rony Horn was fascinated at a young age by the notion of androgyny, and early on decided that her gender was no one's business. There is another work of hers, whose title is This is me, this is you, which shows a great amount of snapshots of herself across the years, with different types of hair, different glasses, angles, where it's not clear if the photos are of the same person or not. They were edited and printed to be the same size, regardless of all the difference they bear. There is another thing to say about my sexy untitled. Each work is a diptych, that is, two photographs of the same bird, most times, at a slightly different angle. Two is where different starts, says Rony Horn. And many of her works are doubled. Her photo dead owl shows a white owl on a rock twice, or two different owls on two different rocks, how to know? The uncanny act of looking from one to the other tells you as much about what you see as what you don't see. Sometimes I think that Horn is talking about herself, about the fact that attraction for someone like her, often mistaken for a man, is whatever goes on between the cracks, what happens between male and female, between a soft small man and a strong bedazzled female rugby player. I came across a photo of her in Darby magazine. In the first page of the article, it says Art and Design, Rony Horn and then the text Who is Rony Horn? For years the artist has been asking that very question herself, exploring notions of perception and identity through sculptures of pure gold, photographs of taxidermied birdheads, and installations of melted glaciers by Julie Belcove, november first, two thousand nine. Next to it is a photo of Horn in a balcony somewhere in New York, pouring herself a glass of wine, sat beside a table on which you can see a lone mobile phone. She is absorbed in her task but is wearing different shoes, a black sandal with a black sock on the right foot, and a brown trainer with a black sock on the other, blue jeans, a navy blazer, topless underneath. One of her breasts is exposed, placing the punctum of the photo as Roland Bart has called the exact spot on a photo where your eye is drawn on its pink nipple. However, Horn has such a magnetic personality that I'm not sure if the picture is not about the whole thing being a punctum. Horn pulls on the nerve of attraction with such subtlety that this photo seems to say You didn't expect such a pretty pair of tits, did you? While the rest of the body is vaguely male, vaguely dairy. There, no fashion statement, no seduction, no affirmative butch attitude Rony Horn's subtle but commanding art demands a focused eye to be seen for what it is. The same can be said for Horne herself, with the exception of her eyes, which are the brilliant blue of a far off sea. She is almost devoid of colour. Her salt and pepper hair is shorn so short as to blend with her pale face, her mannish black shirt and jeans adds to the effect, further deflecting snap judgments. A quick glance at Horn on the street or in a restaurant would yield few conclusive clues to her gender, so complete is her androgyny. She must be looked at. When you listen to her talk, her discourse is precise, neither too familiar nor to conceptual. Honest, clear. She makes me think of another artist I love, Douglas Hubler, an understated American man, a New York artist who became a California professor. He was also fascinated with the way we perceive things how we are in his words, recipients. My favourite work of his is Location P seventeen, Turin, Italy, from nineteen seventy three, is the driest work, four photos and two documents framed. Two photos of a man and two photos of a place Turin, presumably, a map and a text. The text explains that on march seventeenth, nineteen seventy three, he chose a place some distance away from where he was in Turin because he wanted to go to a place where he'd never been and would never be again. He went there, took a photo, and when he developed it back in America, he discovered that at the instant that the photograph was made, a man was looking directly at the artist, and that man bears a strong resemblance to the artist, at least more so than most everyone else in the world. This is what is written on the paper of the artwork. Why do I find this work so hilarious? Because as soon as you read the text, you look at the photo and immediately feel your eyes telling your brain where to look to find a resemblance. In fact, Hubler reminds me that one of the most striking aspects of our relation to other people's face is to point out similarities between them and someone else. Don't you think that so and so looks like so and so? They're the spitting image of each other. Why, I wonder, are we so interested in looking for sameness? Why are we not looking for water? Why are we not like the weather? Hubler's work is a sleight of hand done with earnestness. He is an honest trickster, leading you to your own conceptual ticks, your obtuse desire for order and belief. One of his photography works from nineteen sixty nine is part of a series where he cut up a piece of time and handed it to us as an idea. He took fifteen photos from the same angle, a group of ducks in Central Park, at a one minute interval from each other. The photographs are in black and white, with a diagonal line across, which is a feature of the park, along which the ducks go about their life. There is a catch though. The text, which is always unlike Horn whose words are contained in the title, the dynamic element of the work says after describing the process fifteen photographs presented in no particular order, the birds here are the punctum, as with Horn's dead owl, or untitled. Their lives happen out of frame even when captured by the camera. Their difference is not caught by the camera, and the logic of their actions is not revealed by the disturbed sequence. They move like Horn in Iceland, not because they have to, but because they do. Exhibition Nistas is an independent podcast created and hosted by me, Joanna Pierre Nevers. We have episodes every two weeks, and this season, season three, is a bit of a turning point. We have five new episode types from more experimental art travelogues or art stories to conversational formats about solo exhibitions with people who are not part of the industry. Because we're all both actors and spectators of art and life. If you're new here, you have a whole catalogue of episodes to enjoy. Discover them at your own pace.