Sculpting Water: Under the Spell of Roni Horn's 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

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

(00:00):
Hello and welcome to a new episode of exhibition Esters
with me, your host Joanna Pianevis.
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

(00:26):
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?

(00:48):
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

(01:12):
and immediate devotion to a workof 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

(01:34):
think about 15 years ago or morethat 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?

(01:56):
It turns out that even exploringthat 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.

(02:21):
They have a different kind of depth.
Oh, and the artist in question is an artist I really, really,
really love. Rooney Horn, even herself, is a
bit spellbound by whatever it isthat she is to produce or is
producing. That's how she explains the

(02:41):
work. And weirdly, I found that that's
exactly the effect that the workhas 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

(03:02):
relationship with the work? And here I will misquote one of
my favorite films by Jim Jarmusch, 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

(03:22):
the ways of the other samurai sothat you are comfortable in your
own ways. Having said all this, I think
there is nothing else to do thanto go on with the episode.
So without further ado, let's dothis.

(03:44):
When my children were young, I recited a Portuguese tongue
twister that goes like this withtemp preguntua temp quinte,
tempu tempu tempu tempu tempu, tempu, temp.
As a child, I first loved the rhythm of this little text.

(04:04):
The sounds T&P, which are the sounds of the main words temp,
also appear. In other words, like Quint, they
create a sort of drumming of themouth.
The sound is made with the tongue placed against the upper
frontal teeth, whereas the soundis a release of air after the

(04:28):
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 constricts the throat, like
a drum is a tap on a tense surface, a stretched piece of

(04:51):
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

(05:17):
little Riddle was allowing me todo.
It's what first caught my children's attention when they
would ask me to say it again andagain.
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

(05:40):
air, forming a little channel for it to flow and carry the
next vowel. Being able to create such a
satisfying rhythm with the 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 mesmerize

(06:03):
us. The French poet Emmanuel Oka was
puzzled by Anna Akhmatova sayingthat poets have a difficult task
having to work with the same words that we use to invite
someone over for tea. How about considering Ukaach
suggested that it is a great thing to work with the same

(06:25):
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.

(06:46):
To wonder what other things are there around me that could be
something else. One day I overheard the child
ask their mother, can a dog be acat?
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,

(07:07):
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

(07:29):
use of their instrument in orderto communicate with us.
Perhaps they don't see us as humans at all.
Like the little girl, they don'tsee any difference between us.
We're just big, clumsy, lazy cats.

(07:50):
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 TS and PS,
but I also see it as a Riddle. You see, the meaning of this

(08:14):
little text, which repeats the same word 10 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 hasas much time as time has the
idea of a time doubled. Imagine something we can only

(08:36):
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.

(09:00):
But if time is doubled then thiscan'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 enquired about the
meaning of it. I remember answering, but

(09:21):
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

(09:45):
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 themdethroning him.
Only Zeus escaped to make Kronosthrow up all of the other

(10:06):
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 meanbewitched, being under a spell.

(10:29):
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 the 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

(10:50):
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 andtotally bewitched.
Art Basel is an art fair established in the city of Basel

(11:13):
in Switzerland. And at least at the time, it was
the most prestigious one, with all the blue chip galleries and
the other established or less soon their tippy toes.
Not the best place to be spellbound.
It's not that you don't discoverbeautiful things so that you
cannot have an intense sense of connection.
You do. But it's like being in a

(11:35):
bookshop reading a few paragraphs of a great book.
You need to take it with you, spend time with it to fully
enjoy it. Our fears are not museums or art
galleries. There are spaces where you start
the 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

(11:56):
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 pulledby an imaginary rope, with a
sense of urgency, need, devotion.
I was also, I must add, asking myself what is it?

(12:19):
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 you whole 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

(12:43):
soft thing with a visibly soft texture.
I think it was dark blue or black.
The artist was Roni Horn, whose work I knew.
I had been progressively taken over by the work You Are the
Weather, which was so banal thatI took no notice of it.
In the museum, Roni Horn createdthe sequence of images of the

(13:06):
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 atthe photographer.

(13:28):
I remember walking out of the exhibition thinking of those
photographs lined up on the walland the title remaining like one
of those little clouds, finger 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?

(13:52):
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, I'm never a grand statement, nor
a specific, easily identifiable state.
No seduction, No Fear, no rage, no happiness.

(14:16):
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 the state of being? How long am I to be in it?
Weather asked whether who the weather is, Whether replied to
whether that the weather is who the weather is.

(14:39):
Horne took these images in Iceland in 1994, 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

(15:00):
you come out of the sea, and shehas 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, Margaret says thatthe work quote uses her face as

(15:24):
a place UN quote. Horn first went to Iceland in
the 70s when she was 19 years old.
There is something about it thatovertook her.
It's the only place where she goes just for the sake of going.
In 1982, she got permission to stay in the lighthouse off the
southern coast, and she moved infor weeks, watching the weather,

(15:46):
the birds, the puffins. For Horn, 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.Horn describes it as an almost
wordless time, which was important, Margaret says,

(16:07):
because it's 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 the pin, as TS Eliot describes being

(16:29):
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, the
viewers. Her expression is piercing and
there isn't a single smile. There is so much trust that

(16:51):
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.

(17:14):
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 randown the neck and below.
The shape of the head and neck was too long, too thin, the

(17:37):
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'd never seen them before.
How did she photograph birds as if they were in a professional
photography shoot? Doesn't matter.
My mind quickly went back to that vision of a feathery

(17:58):
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,

(18:19):
where I paused to contemplate the humor 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

(18:42):
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. Roni Horn was fascinated at a
young age by the notion of androgyny, and early on decided

(19:05):
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

(19:28):
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 2photographs of the same bird,
most times at a slightly different angle. 2 is where
different starts, says Ronnie Horn, and many of her works are

(19:51):
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

(20:14):
fact that attraction for someonelike her, often mistaken for a
man, is whatever goes on betweenthe 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
West Magazine. In the first page of the article

(20:34):
it says Art and Design, Ronny Horn and then the text quote Who
is Rooney 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 bird heads, and installations of

(20:55):
melted glaciers. By Julie Belkov November 1st,
2009 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.

(21:17):
A black sandal with a black sockon the right foot and the brown
trainer with a black sock on theother 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.

(21:38):
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 falls on the nerve of
attraction with such subtlety that this photo seems to say you
didn't expect such a pretty pairof tits, did you?
While the rest of the body is vaguely male, vaguely there, No

(22:00):
fashion statement, no seduction,no affirmative Butch attitude
quote Rooney, Horn's subtle but commanding art demands A focused
eye to be seen for what it is. The same can be said for Horn
herself. With the exception of her eyes,
which are the brilliant blue of a far off sea, she's almost

(22:21):
devoid of colour. Her salt and pepper hair is
shown so short as to blend with her pale face.
Her mannish black shirt and jeans adds to the effect,
further deflecting snap judgements.
A quick glance at Horn on the street or in the restaurant
would yield few conclusive cluesto her gender, so complete is

(22:42):
her androgyny. She must be looked at UN quote.
When you listen to her talk, herdiscourse is precise, neither to
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

(23:05):
California professor. He was also fascinated with the
way we perceive things, how we are in his words, percipients.
My favorite work of his is Location P17.
Turin, Italy from 1973 is the driest work.
Four photos and two documents framed. 2 photos of a man and

(23:29):
two photos of a place Turin, presumably a map and a text.
The text explains that on March 17th, 1973, he chose a place
some distance away from where hewas 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

(23:50):
when he developed it back in America, he, quote, 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. UN quote.

(24:12):
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

(24:32):
one of the most striking aspectsof 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?

(24:54):
Why are we not like the weather?Hubler's work is a sleight of
hand done with earnestness. He's an honest trickster,
leading you to your own conceptual tics, your obtuse
desire for order and belief. One of his photography works
from 1969 is part of a series where he cut up a piece of time

(25:15):
and handed it to us as an idea. He took 15 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 the diagonal line across which is a feature of the
park along which the ducks go about their life.

(25:37):
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.
Quote 15 photographs presented in no particular order, UN
quote. The birds here at the Punctum.
As with Horns, Dead Owl or Untitled, their lives happen out

(26:01):
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 bythe disturbed sequence.
They move like Horn in Iceland, not because they have to, but
because they do. Exhibitionist is an independent

(26:26):
podcast created and hosted by me, Joanna Pierre Nevers.
We have episodes every two weeksand this season, Season 3, is a
bit of a turning point. We have 5 new episode types,
from more experimental art travel logs or art stories to
conversational formats about solo exhibitions with people who

(26:50):
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 catalog of episodes to enjoy this cover them at your
own pace.