Material metaphors - mixed media, sculpture and installation pieces by artist Roni Horn - Cover Story

Art in America, Feb, 1994 by Ken Johnson

The oeuvre that Roni Horn has produced since earning her MFA degree at Yale in 1978 is small--she works slowly and deliberately -- but is consists of a number of distinct modes that are not obviously connected to one another. Eschewing the continuous development and repeated are not obviously connected to one another. Eschewing the continuous development and repeated exhibition of one signature look, she has not made her work a nearly definable commodity. In recent years, Horn has been producing machine-made, simple but slightly eccentric solid metal forms which are strategically installed--singly, in pairs or in groups. She has also been incorporating literary texts (poems by Emily Dickinson most recently) into rectangular, Minimalistic blocks of aluminum. In two dimensions, she has been making works on paper revolving around small, irregular accretions of pure pigment, and she has published a series of books in which certain aspects of the country of Iceland are examined in drawings, photographs and writings.

In these endeavors, an exacting concern for matters of form, technique, craft and material yields objects that are invariably handsome and often outright beautiful. What is of the essence in her work, however, is a combination of conceptual, metaphorical and spiritual impulses. Horn's most consciously asserted intentions (those she describes in interviews) involve an exploration of issues related to empirical awareness. She wants to call attention to perceptual experience and to distinguish that mode of consciousness from internal, mental processes of ideation that can obscure our relationship to reality. But in addition to this empiricist, even quasi-scientific program, there is also in Horn's most memorable work an evocative, metaphorical side which gives it an idiosyncratically poetic and, at best, mystical resonance. It is the way these motives, intellectual on the one hand and intuitive on the other, are alloyed into reductive but physically alluring forms that accounts for the intrigue of Horn's work.

Horn's empiricist themes were evident--perhaps somewhat too literally--at the beginning of her career. While still in graduate school, she made long cast-rubber wedges that taper from 3 or 4 inches thick to almost nothing. These represent a dualistic opposition between the ideal--the thicker end which seems an autonomous, archetypal geometric solid--and the empirical--the thinner end, where the rubber hugs the floor and visibly conforms to lumps, cracks, dips and other accidental features of the underlying surface. The point is that empirical reality is always more situational than our preconceptions lead us to suppose, and that we would do well to pay more attention to things as they actually are.

In 1980-82, Horn developed this actual/ideal duality into the most important of her early works, a piece called Gold Mat. This is the culmination of a series of works in which she focused on material and process. Around 1980, she made a number of pieces in which she crumpled a single sheet of lead into a dense, rounded oblong form. She also produced several flat, 4-by-5-inch mat-shaped pieces of lead, woven steel or wood. In both series, what is foregrounded is how the thing is made and what it is made of. With Gold Mat, however, the issues become more complex because gold, far more than such common materials as wood or lead, is a substance heavily loaded with associations.

An approximately 3 1/2-by-5-foot rectangle of gold foil, Gold Mat was made by laying 3-inch-wide strips of nearly pure gold edge to edge and hammering the overlap to create a compression weld. What you have in this piece is the substance itself divorced from its cultural associations--pecuniary, decorative, symbolic, historical and otherwise a material with certain perceptual properties of color, weight, density, texture, luster, etc. To present gold in this noncommittal way, however, is not necessarily to erase from consciousness all that it means. It may be, rather, to begin to see the degree to which our experience of gold (and hence of many other things in the world) is determined not by its inherent qualities but by what we project onto it--its institutionally determined value and its many traditional and mythic associations.

Though these early works are conceptually focused and clear, there is something rather simplistic about the way they demonstrate Horn's ideas. In work from the second half of the '80s to the present, however, the conceptual dimension becomes more complex and expansive and the formal characteristics become more individualized.

This development can be seen in a work called Asphere III, which was exhibited in New York at Galerie Lelong in 1989. The piece consists of a single, apparently sphere-shaped ball of solid copper measuring about 12 inches in diameter. It was presented by itself on the floor in the middle of an otherwise empty room. Contrary to initial impressions, this object is not a perfectly round ball; rather, it is, as its title indicates, aspherical. Shaped on a computerized lathe, it is slightly, almost imperceptibly distorted such that its longest diameter exceeds its shortest by 6/15 of an inch. This deformation registers almost subliminally; the object is not obviously egg- or oval-shaped, but it isn't round either. Nor does it seem to represent or express anything in particular. Being a solid 300-pound mass, it has no concealed interior, and being copper, a readily identifiable metal, it does not seem to be anything other than what it is. Yet what it is is difficult to name; it falls between conceptual categories and thereby frustrates your impulse to place it. Donald Judd's notion of the specific object may come to mind here, but it is not, ultimately, the object as such that Horn wants us to think about. Rather, the Asphere seems meant to subvert our ordinary habits of consciousness, to sharpen our awareness of the perceptual facts and lead ultimately to a Zenlike epiphany that nothing in the world truly fits the generic categories into which we usually force our experiences.