Bibliography
Jörg Daur, Volker Rattemeyer et alii, Rebecca Horn. Jupiter im Oktogon, exh. cat. Wiesbaden, Museum Wiesbaden, Nuremberg, Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2007.
Giuliana Bruno, Germano Celant et alii, Rebecca Horn, exh. cat. Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Vienna, Kunsthalle Wien, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Eindhoven, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, London, Tate Gallery and Serpentine Gallery, Grenoble, Musée de Grenoble, Paris, Réunion des musées nationaux, 1995 (1993).
Rebecca Horn made her first kinetic sculptures in the 1980s, building on a major period of creativity following the artist’s graduation from the Hamburg Hochschule für bildende Künste and a stay in a sanatorium that forced her to rest and solitude. She explored how the body moves through space, drawing on performance art and body art to design objects that function as excrescences, redrawing the body and pushing it to come up with new movements and interactions with its surroundings. Her work from this period includes a horn placed on the head and attached under the chin, gloves with long, stiff fingers, and a mask of leather strips bristling with pencils.
Machines progressively replaced the body in her art. The transition from one group of works to the other drew on the use of identical materials such as feathers, used to create cocoon-prisons that protect the body by enclosing it and hiding it from view. They also symbolise humanity’s age-old dream of flight.
The strange, often erotic beauty of Horn’s creations, evoking the surrealist associations of seemingly opposite realms, explores the aesthetics of the machine. This refined propeller, lit and decorated with large raven feathers arranged in a neat circle, is echoed by its shadow on the wall. The feathers fold onto one another very slowly, like a fan, and then open again. The smooth movement and anti-naturality inherent in the motorised mechanisation of animal remains are fascinating. The artist plays with this paradox, the title of her work representing an invitation to wisdom and self-control.