Art
The man machine
by Bridie Lonie
German artist Rebecca Horn’s emergence within European conceptual art in the late 60s and early 70s has been followed by many large-scale installations dealing with the darker elements of European history. This current collection, Time Goes By, will be shown only in Dunedin and is well worth seeing. Horn marries a literal approach to materials and form with the sorts of desires that the Surrealists were concerned with, and maybe art always is concerned with underneath: complaints about love and death.
Prints, drawings, texts and sculptures explore the issue of gesture, undermining its rhetoric but never losing its force. For instance, a drawing machine throws Prussian blue over a wall in a machine’s imitation of expressionism. The image it makes can be read as the expression of a delicacy of thought that is attempting to capture the unquantifiable. And indeed that’s what it is doing, but that kind of endeavour is meant to be the province of the human mark-maker, not the machine. Of course, the artist has made the machine, so the problem is simply one of elongation or extension, and that’s what much of Horn’s work is about. But extension exaggerates anxiety as metre-long fingernails, and pencil-filled masks set up heart-stopping conditions for failure when they judder on the surfaces they work so hard to mark.
In a different kind of distancing, Horn also borrows the apparently pragmatic visual aids of science. Neither exactly a representation nor a symbol, a Jacob’s Ladder machine, used to demonstrate high-voltage discharges, flickers and hisses above Buster Keaton’s shoes in a work which considers that artist’s modulated but enduring pathos.
Horn’s interest in stretching the space between artistic cause and effect grew from a period in hospital after working with toxic material. But maybe it was also to an extent dormant in the ways German artists dealt with increased industrialisation and materialism in a country already confused by its implication in genocide. Horn has explored these political issues more explicitly than the works in this collection indicate, although this is represented in the films. Consistently, her work argues that private emotion is mediated by the political contexts of our lives.
So the conjunction of this work with Peter Robinson’s is interesting. His collection of three pieces is called The Humours. There were always four humours, neatly arranged in the bifurcated kinds of structure Robinson has usually played with. But here there are only three works and at least one humour missing: perhaps sanguine, the hopeful one. Instead, Bile, Phlegm and Choler are certainly present. We see on the floor a flow of bits of stuff, reminiscent of the description of vomit as a Technicolor yawn: sausages, doughnuts and more broken-up material, slippery and shiny. The colours are those of Neapolitan ice-cream: chocolate, strawberry and vanilla, with a bit of liquorice. The precision of the parts, however, indicates that this is a language system (possibly Italian) in disarray. Choler is a set of bulbous figures, oozing worm-like shapes – nematodes, flows of egg-bubble foam. The third, Das Es, references philosophical and Freudian concerns with the relation between the forces that impel us and our experience. Freud’s description of this process was: “Where it [das Es] was, so shall I come to be.” The image that horribly conveys this inescapable tape-loop of drive and experience is a simple human-scaled conjunction of a sausage and a doughnut, gross and offensive in a self-reliant manner. No going back on this one, it seems: neither art nor the soul can escape materiality.TIME GOES BY, Rebecca Horn, Dunedin Public Art Gallery (until January 26, 2006).
THE HUMOURS, Peter Robinson, Dunedin Public Art Gallery (until January 28, 2006).
A correction. In my last column I described Ana Terry’s small tiles as ceramic. They weren’t: they were modified keys from an extraordinary number of computers, literalising the virtual, hiding the life of things in a nondescript digital code.
