Rebecca Horn is a performance based artist who works with film, sculpture, spatial instillations, drawings, and photographs. Her work revolves around issues of the body and its relation to space. Avant-garde in multiple ways, each of Horn’s individual work is in dialogue with the next, creating a continuous stream of thought throughout her collective body of work. Her work stems from highly influential personal experiences that have allowed her to break the normative boundaries of the body and its environment(1). Specifically examining two of her performance based artworks, Spirit di Madreperia and Concert Riverse, the connection between body and space, time and environment will demonstrate how Horns work uses audience interaction to create a world all her own. Sprirt de Madreperia is an outdoor instillation located in the Italian city square of the Piazza del Pelbiscito. The instillation is charged by magnetic energy. Light rings made of mother of pearl hover high above the square. Beneath the cobble stone ground, cast iron is buried, which creates a charged magnetic energy field. When the viewer walks through the instillation they instantly become a part of the magnetized environment, and the space becomes activated due to the human interaction(1). It has been stated when critiquing this artwork that “each single instillation is a step towards breaking down the boundaries of space and time- that it opens up a crevice to a universe, the existence of which we can only see.(1)” Horn is creating a charged space that becomes engaged when the audience interacts with it. It creates a visceral space where the senses of the body are charged within the world the Horn has created. Horn is not constructing a passive environment to look at but she is creating an actively charged environment for the audience to become submerged in. Interaction is the activator within this instillation. Without the audience directly entering the space the charged environment is not activated. That is not to say that it does not exist without the dependency of the audience, for it would still be a magnetically charged space with or without the audience, but it is to say that the work is directly affected by interaction. It is interesting to take a pause for a moment and examine an aspect of Horns personal history in order to better understand her artistic creation. Horn, as a young art student, worked with fiberglass. Unaware of the safety precautions that working with fiberglass entails, Horn became ill because she spent too much time inhaling the shards of class. Horn was force to leave school and spend a year in a sanatorium(6). This time in quarantine made Horn very aware of her body’s frailty, and of what long term confinement can do to one’s mental state. Within a New York Times critic of Horns’ work it was stated that, Horn found herself thinking in terms of images of confinement and became obsessed with healing after her stay at the sanatorium(5). This experience occurred at the beginning of Horn’s artistic career and so it is an important element for consideration when examining the work that Horn creates. Going back to the first artwork, Spiriti di Madreperia, it is interesting to explore how confinement and healing, as well as body and space, play a role within the interaction of the artwork. Horn has created a space removed from the world, a quarantined space in the middle of a city that allows for isolation from all that surrounds her. Yet at the same time, her space is in dialogue with the city; mimicking the “charged” city that the piece is within. Furthermore she invites the audience to directly engage with this contained space. There is a duality between removal and invitation, interaction and isolation, which creates an interesting tension within her piece(2). Without the audience interaction, Horns work would not be activated, yet it would still be active. Just like Horn in quarantine, she was not actively engaged with the world, but she was still active and existing. She was still within the world just in a different space. It is as if she creates a space much like the time she was quarantined, but within her created space the audience is asked to engage and directly enter, something that could not occur while she was in quarantine. Another artwork that engages with the audience in a monumental way is Concert Reverse. Concert reverse is located in Germany in Der Zwinger, which is an ancient tower in Munster that has a long history of uses. First used as a shelter in WW1, it was then allocated to Hitler Youth. Later it was used by Gestapo for holding and torturing Russian and Polish prisoners. After the war it was boarded up and never used again, until Horn was introduced to it. Horn re-ignited the historically loaded sight. The sight begins at a center corridor, which was lit by kerosene lamps. The walkways echoed the noise of small steal hammers hitting the walls, and were also lit by the kerosene lamps. The different cells were treated the same. The central area was over run with vegetation, and the architecture had begun to break down and crumble. Located at the highest point of a tree within the central area was a glass funnel. The funnel dropped one drop of water, which fell on placid surface of water, located in a circular basin below the funnel. The final cell contained an egg pierced by needles and a cage perched on a table. The cage held a pair of snakes, which it has been made clear in all documentation, were feed weekly(6). This artwork takes a historic environment, a space full of destruction and shames and brings it back to life(6). It pierces the veins of history which bleeds out the infected moments of humanity. It has been reported that the egg alludes to the killing of prime reason and that the snakes are the dark reason. Again, Horn is taking a space of isolation and quarantine, a removed place from society, and she is re-opening it for visitation. She is dualistically re-claiming the space while at the same time maintaining the history found within it. It is not that by re-engaging with this space that Horn is transforming it, but she is personally marking the space with her own artistic voice. Furthermore, she creates an environment for the viewer to interact with and travel through becoming completely submerged within the work and space(3). She is permitting a historical conversation between those who enter the space to become re-engaged. This tower, at one time injected with human life, suffering, and heritage, was castrated and removed from society. Yet, the people that this place affected have not been removed; they have not been boarded up and pushed aside. Horn creates a means to reenter that area, a back door into the historical perils of the time. Without the audience moving through the work, through the environment, there would be no connection, no direct interaction. The work is dependent on people to enter the building and explore its crevices; it encouraged the audience to become engulfed by the environment and everything that it stands for(4). It is within that element that her work creates enigmatic interaction between audience and work. Neither one element is dominated over the other, but both need each other to fully translate the conceptual idea that Horn has attempted to create. Her work ranges from interactive to image based, but the commonality between all of them is undeniable. As an artist her conscious decision to make each work in dialogue with the next, to create a constant flow of ideas, allows for her conceptual ideas to take many shapes and forms(6). Her interactive work engages space and the audience, but at the same time creates an intriguing sense of isolation and removal.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Felix Gonzalez-Torres is a Cuban artist who was born in 1957 and died in 1996 of AIDS. He is represented by the Andrea Rosen Gallery and his works range from photography, video, sculpture, to interactive environment pieces. His works often asks for direct interaction with the audience and tends to be centered around the complex questions of public and private space(4). Torres, through his interactive pieces, broke many of the early traditions of museum and gallery etiquette. An artistic pioneer, Torres used his art to submerge the gallery environment with personal experiences and political issues(1). The infiltration of the personal into the public environment allows for the audience to have an intimate relationship with Torres’ work. Torres’ work, at times, directly engages with the audience by allowing the audience to take a part of the work with them. It has been written “that the artist becomes the goods offered of sale to be consumed by recipients”(1). Looking at two works, Untitled, 1991, Printed Billboard, and Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) 1991, 175 lb of fruit flasher candy, the duality between public and private, immortality and time, allows for the audience to have a heavy hand in the life and solidity of Torres’ work. Torres had a grounded reality of his mortality that is much stronger then most of those in the world. He knew his death was imminent, he knew what would kill him, and he had witnessed death directly through the loss of his partner Ross(3). This is a crucial aspect when understanding some of the conceptual choices that Torres made within his work. It has been stated that “The nature of his work, in general, subtly yet emphatically intensifies ones own self-awareness, subjectivity, and sense of personal history-it sets up a conflation of public and private and the personal with the professional(3).” The two works selected allow for the two main dualities of his work, the pubic and private, and the immortality verses mortality, to be discussed. The first work, Untitled 1991, consists of a printed billboard that depicts the top half of a white bed which is unmade. The sheets and pillows of the bed depict the imprints of two bodies that once laid in the bed. Displayed on a city street corner, this billboard pushes a physical symbol of the private life into the public sphere. It has no descriptive symbols to suggest who laid within the bed, but is simply the markings of an act, the physical blueprint of a moment. Furthermore, this artwork directly engages with the duality between public and private spheres of life(1). The highly intimate image is publically displayed for all to see; it takes the personal and pushes it out into the public. This work, which depicts such a generic image of an imprinted bed, allows for all who see it to connect with the work because each one of us can identify with the image(3). What is further interesting is that it creates an androgynous image, because there is no suggestion of specific genders. The bed is intimate, the lack of figures allows for any person to transplant themselves with the work, creating an intimate connection with the work. The audience interacts with the work because it invades their space. By being a billboard, the artwork is transforming itself into a symbol of communication. If this image were in an art gallery the dependence on interaction would be drastically different. The audience would simply look at the image, interpret it, and move on. But, by blowing the image into enormous size and placing it in a public space, this artwork is interacting with the community that it invades. It pushes the public to view this image, which stems from the private domain, and it asks them to interact with the context of the image in their public life. In a sense, this is an image of absence; an image where a human interaction should occur, and yet there is no human visible. The second artwork that will be examined is the Untitled (Portrait of Ross in La) which contains 175 lbs of Fruit Flasher Candy. This Piece consists of brightly wrapped candy which is compiled in a corner of the room in a mound on the floor. The audience members are encouraged to take pieces of the candy as they please. This artwork, and many others like it, completely interacts with the audience by allowing the audience to take a part of the artwork into the personal life of the audience(3). It is a sensory driven object; visually pleasing candy which can be touched, removed, held, eaten, smelt, and saved all by the audience. Both figuratively and literally, the work could be consumed by the audience without the artist having any say in the matter. It is an interesting analogy compared to the personal situation of Torres. AIDS was slowly eating away at Torres, just as the audience slowly eats away at his work. Furthermore, once Torres was finally gone from the world, his memories and influences within the art community are left in the hands of those still alive. Much like once the candy is gone, it is in the hands of the audience who interacted with the piece to chose how they wish to have the artwork integrated into their lives. Even pushing this further, one could argue that Torres is entering into the personal domain of each individual that takes the candy, because they are taking a piece of him with them. The interplay between personal and public is vast within the work of Torres. On a more broad scope, the work pushed for a break in the museum mold by encouraging an unconventional use of gallery space(4). Not only is the artist encouraged to take the work with them, but the work is constantly in flux, moving and shrinking based on how much the audience chooses to interact with it. Without the audience interaction this piece would be a stagnate object, but because of the audience, it is an ever evolving work of art. Torres’ work is vast in medium choice and conceptual ideas. It addresses a broad spectrum of issues, from AIDS awareness to the loss of a lover(2). But within the two specifically examined works there is a push for the audience to make artwork something more. What I mean by this is that Torres lays out an artwork, be it an image of a bed or a pile of candy, and then he asks the viewer to bring something more to the table. He encourages the viewer to take his work to the next level and allow it to invade their lives. Ether through walking to work and interacting with a billboard of ghost lovers, or by eating a piece of the artwork, he is pushing the responsibility of the audience within his work.
Bibliography of Rebecca Horn
1.) www.Rebecca-Horn.cle/pages/biography.html. Accessed Between February 22-25th. 2.) www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/Horn/biography/. Accessed Between February 22-25th. 3.) www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?Cgroupid=99999961&aristid.org . Accessed Between February 22-25th. 4.) Cooke, Lynne. “Rebecca Horn New York Guggenheim Museum.” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 135, No 1086 (Sept 1993.) 5.) Hugher, Robert. “Mechanics Illustrated.” Time Magazine. Monday, September 13, 1993. 6.) Morgan, Stuart. Celant, Germano. Rebecca Horn. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995.
Biography of Felix Gonzalez-Torres
1.)www.Queerculturalcenter.org/pages/FelixGT/FelixIndex.html. Accessed Between February 22-25th.
2.) Storr, Robert. T. “Felix Gonzalez-Torres Interview” Art Press. January 1995, p24-32.
3.) Elger, Dietmar. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Ostfildern-Ruit : Cantz ; New York, N.Y. : Distribution in the US, Distributed Art Publishers, c1997.
4.) www.Andrearosengallery.com/artist/felix-gonzalez-torres.com. Accessed Between February 22-25th.
Research for Project 2
Rebecca Horn
Rebecca Horn is a performance based artist who works with film, sculpture, spatial instillations, drawings, and photographs. Her work revolves around issues of the body and its relation to space. Avant-garde in multiple ways, each of Horn’s individual work is in dialogue with the next, creating a continuous stream of thought throughout her collective body of work. Her work stems from highly influential personal experiences that have allowed her to break the normative boundaries of the body and its environment(1). Specifically examining two of her performance based artworks, Spirit di Madreperia and Concert Riverse, the connection between body and space, time and environment will demonstrate how Horns work uses audience interaction to create a world all her own.
Sprirt de Madreperia is an outdoor instillation located in the Italian city square of the Piazza del Pelbiscito. The instillation is charged by magnetic energy. Light rings made of mother of pearl hover high above the square. Beneath the cobble stone ground, cast iron is buried, which creates a charged magnetic energy field. When the viewer walks through the instillation they instantly become a part of the magnetized environment, and the space becomes activated due to the human interaction(1). It has been stated when critiquing this artwork that “each single instillation is a step towards breaking down the boundaries of space and time- that it opens up a crevice to a universe, the existence of which we can only see.(1)” Horn is creating a charged space that becomes engaged when the audience interacts with it. It creates a visceral space where the senses of the body are charged within the world the Horn has created. Horn is not constructing a passive environment to look at but she is creating an actively charged environment for the audience to become submerged in. Interaction is the activator within this instillation. Without the audience directly entering the space the charged environment is not activated. That is not to say that it does not exist without the dependency of the audience, for it would still be a magnetically charged space with or without the audience, but it is to say that the work is directly affected by interaction.
It is interesting to take a pause for a moment and examine an aspect of Horns personal history in order to better understand her artistic creation. Horn, as a young art student, worked with fiberglass. Unaware of the safety precautions that working with fiberglass entails, Horn became ill because she spent too much time inhaling the shards of class. Horn was force to leave school and spend a year in a sanatorium(6). This time in quarantine made Horn very aware of her body’s frailty, and of what long term confinement can do to one’s mental state. Within a New York Times critic of Horns’ work it was stated that, Horn found herself thinking in terms of images of confinement and became obsessed with healing after her stay at the sanatorium(5). This experience occurred at the beginning of Horn’s artistic career and so it is an important element for consideration when examining the work that Horn creates.
Going back to the first artwork, Spiriti di Madreperia, it is interesting to explore how confinement and healing, as well as body and space, play a role within the interaction of the artwork. Horn has created a space removed from the world, a quarantined space in the middle of a city that allows for isolation from all that surrounds her. Yet at the same time, her space is in dialogue with the city; mimicking the “charged” city that the piece is within. Furthermore she invites the audience to directly engage with this contained space. There is a duality between removal and invitation, interaction and isolation, which creates an interesting tension within her piece(2). Without the audience interaction, Horns work would not be activated, yet it would still be active. Just like Horn in quarantine, she was not actively engaged with the world, but she was still active and existing. She was still within the world just in a different space. It is as if she creates a space much like the time she was quarantined, but within her created space the audience is asked to engage and directly enter, something that could not occur while she was in quarantine.
Another artwork that engages with the audience in a monumental way is Concert Reverse. Concert reverse is located in Germany in Der Zwinger, which is an ancient tower in Munster that has a long history of uses. First used as a shelter in WW1, it was then allocated to Hitler Youth. Later it was used by Gestapo for holding and torturing Russian and Polish prisoners. After the war it was boarded up and never used again, until Horn was introduced to it. Horn re-ignited the historically loaded sight. The sight begins at a center corridor, which was lit by kerosene lamps. The walkways echoed the noise of small steal hammers hitting the walls, and were also lit by the kerosene lamps. The different cells were treated the same. The central area was over run with vegetation, and the architecture had begun to break down and crumble. Located at the highest point of a tree within the central area was a glass funnel. The funnel dropped one drop of water, which fell on placid surface of water, located in a circular basin below the funnel. The final cell contained an egg pierced by needles and a cage perched on a table. The cage held a pair of snakes, which it has been made clear in all documentation, were feed weekly(6).
This artwork takes a historic environment, a space full of destruction and shames and brings it back to life(6). It pierces the veins of history which bleeds out the infected moments of humanity. It has been reported that the egg alludes to the killing of prime reason and that the snakes are the dark reason. Again, Horn is taking a space of isolation and quarantine, a removed place from society, and she is re-opening it for visitation. She is dualistically re-claiming the space while at the same time maintaining the history found within it. It is not that by re-engaging with this space that Horn is transforming it, but she is personally marking the space with her own artistic voice. Furthermore, she creates an environment for the viewer to interact with and travel through becoming completely submerged within the work and space(3). She is permitting a historical conversation between those who enter the space to become re-engaged. This tower, at one time injected with human life, suffering, and heritage, was castrated and removed from society. Yet, the people that this place affected have not been removed; they have not been boarded up and pushed aside. Horn creates a means to reenter that area, a back door into the historical perils of the time. Without the audience moving through the work, through the environment, there would be no connection, no direct interaction. The work is dependent on people to enter the building and explore its crevices; it encouraged the audience to become engulfed by the environment and everything that it stands for(4). It is within that element that her work creates enigmatic interaction between audience and work. Neither one element is dominated over the other, but both need each other to fully translate the conceptual idea that Horn has attempted to create.
Her work ranges from interactive to image based, but the commonality between all of them is undeniable. As an artist her conscious decision to make each work in dialogue with the next, to create a constant flow of ideas, allows for her conceptual ideas to take many shapes and forms(6). Her interactive work engages space and the audience, but at the same time creates an intriguing sense of isolation and removal.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Felix Gonzalez-Torres is a Cuban artist who was born in 1957 and died in 1996 of AIDS. He is represented by the Andrea Rosen Gallery and his works range from photography, video, sculpture, to interactive environment pieces. His works often asks for direct interaction with the audience and tends to be centered around the complex questions of public and private space(4). Torres, through his interactive pieces, broke many of the early traditions of museum and gallery etiquette. An artistic pioneer, Torres used his art to submerge the gallery environment with personal experiences and political issues(1). The infiltration of the personal into the public environment allows for the audience to have an intimate relationship with Torres’ work. Torres’ work, at times, directly engages with the audience by allowing the audience to take a part of the work with them. It has been written “that the artist becomes the goods offered of sale to be consumed by recipients”(1). Looking at two works, Untitled, 1991, Printed Billboard, and Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) 1991, 175 lb of fruit flasher candy, the duality between public and private, immortality and time, allows for the audience to have a heavy hand in the life and solidity of Torres’ work.
Torres had a grounded reality of his mortality that is much stronger then most of those in the world. He knew his death was imminent, he knew what would kill him, and he had witnessed death directly through the loss of his partner Ross(3). This is a crucial aspect when understanding some of the conceptual choices that Torres made within his work. It has been stated that “The nature of his work, in general, subtly yet emphatically intensifies ones own self-awareness, subjectivity, and sense of personal history-it sets up a conflation of public and private and the personal with the professional(3).” The two works selected allow for the two main dualities of his work, the pubic and private, and the immortality verses mortality, to be discussed.
The first work, Untitled 1991, consists of a printed billboard that depicts the top half of a white bed which is unmade. The sheets and pillows of the bed depict the imprints of two bodies that once laid in the bed. Displayed on a city street corner, this billboard pushes a physical symbol of the private life into the public sphere. It has no descriptive symbols to suggest who laid within the bed, but is simply the markings of an act, the physical blueprint of a moment. Furthermore, this artwork directly engages with the duality between public and private spheres of life(1). The highly intimate image is publically displayed for all to see; it takes the personal and pushes it out into the public. This work, which depicts such a generic image of an imprinted bed, allows for all who see it to connect with the work because each one of us can identify with the image(3). What is further interesting is that it creates an androgynous image, because there is no suggestion of specific genders. The bed is intimate, the lack of figures allows for any person to transplant themselves with the work, creating an intimate connection with the work.
The audience interacts with the work because it invades their space. By being a billboard, the artwork is transforming itself into a symbol of communication. If this image were in an art gallery the dependence on interaction would be drastically different. The audience would simply look at the image, interpret it, and move on. But, by blowing the image into enormous size and placing it in a public space, this artwork is interacting with the community that it invades. It pushes the public to view this image, which stems from the private domain, and it asks them to interact with the context of the image in their public life. In a sense, this is an image of absence; an image where a human interaction should occur, and yet there is no human visible.
The second artwork that will be examined is the Untitled (Portrait of Ross in La) which contains 175 lbs of Fruit Flasher Candy. This Piece consists of brightly wrapped candy which is compiled in a corner of the room in a mound on the floor. The audience members are encouraged to take pieces of the candy as they please. This artwork, and many others like it, completely interacts with the audience by allowing the audience to take a part of the artwork into the personal life of the audience(3). It is a sensory driven object; visually pleasing candy which can be touched, removed, held, eaten, smelt, and saved all by the audience. Both figuratively and literally, the work could be consumed by the audience without the artist having any say in the matter. It is an interesting analogy compared to the personal situation of Torres. AIDS was slowly eating away at Torres, just as the audience slowly eats away at his work. Furthermore, once Torres was finally gone from the world, his memories and influences within the art community are left in the hands of those still alive. Much like once the candy is gone, it is in the hands of the audience who interacted with the piece to chose how they wish to have the artwork integrated into their lives. Even pushing this further, one could argue that Torres is entering into the personal domain of each individual that takes the candy, because they are taking a piece of him with them. The interplay between personal and public is vast within the work of Torres.
On a more broad scope, the work pushed for a break in the museum mold by encouraging an unconventional use of gallery space(4). Not only is the artist encouraged to take the work with them, but the work is constantly in flux, moving and shrinking based on how much the audience chooses to interact with it. Without the audience interaction this piece would be a stagnate object, but because of the audience, it is an ever evolving work of art.
Torres’ work is vast in medium choice and conceptual ideas. It addresses a broad spectrum of issues, from AIDS awareness to the loss of a lover(2). But within the two specifically examined works there is a push for the audience to make artwork something more. What I mean by this is that Torres lays out an artwork, be it an image of a bed or a pile of candy, and then he asks the viewer to bring something more to the table. He encourages the viewer to take his work to the next level and allow it to invade their lives. Ether through walking to work and interacting with a billboard of ghost lovers, or by eating a piece of the artwork, he is pushing the responsibility of the audience within his work.
Bibliography of Rebecca Horn
1.) www.Rebecca-Horn.cle/pages/biography.html. Accessed Between February 22-25th.
2.) www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/Horn/biography/. Accessed Between February 22-25th.
3.) www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?Cgroupid=99999961&aristid.org . Accessed Between February 22-25th.
4.) Cooke, Lynne. “Rebecca Horn New York Guggenheim Museum.” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 135, No 1086 (Sept 1993.)
5.) Hugher, Robert. “Mechanics Illustrated.” Time Magazine. Monday, September 13, 1993.
6.) Morgan, Stuart. Celant, Germano. Rebecca Horn. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995.
Biography of Felix Gonzalez-Torres
1.)www.Queerculturalcenter.org/pages/FelixGT/FelixIndex.html. Accessed Between February 22-25th.
2.) Storr, Robert. T. “Felix Gonzalez-Torres Interview” Art Press. January 1995, p24-32.
3.) Elger, Dietmar. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Ostfildern-Ruit : Cantz ; New York, N.Y. : Distribution in the US, Distributed Art Publishers, c1997.
4.) www.Andrearosengallery.com/artist/felix-gonzalez-torres.com. Accessed Between February 22-25th.