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

Art in America, Feb, 1994 by Ken Johnson

In Horn's most ambitious and spectacular effort to date, an installation called Pair Field presented at Mary Boone in 1991, the themes of singular and doubled objects were absorbed into an involvement in groups of objects. This work consisted of two identical sets of 18 smallish (soccer-ball scale), solid metal, variously knob-shaped objects. Within each set, each element was a unique combination of convex and/or concave topologies. In each set, 12 pieces were made of copper and six of stainless steel. Machined on computer-controlled lathes, some objects were bulbous, some conical, some tall, some flat, some shaped like cakes, some like pies.

Here we might do well to observe that Horn's conceptual scheme isn't always necessarily the first thing you respond to. Certainly in Pair Field, what was most immediately conspicuous was the work's esthetic and metaphorical qualities. Though they were nonrepresentational, these svelte objects had a curiously fantastic and slightly comic quality. (Elie Nadelman comes to mind.) They made one think of fanciful hats or giant board-game pieces or some futuristic, maybe extraterrestrial elements of unknown purpose. And the proliferation of these magical objects into landscape or gardenlike fields created an Alice-in-Wonderland ambience. Moreover, the doubling of such an odd collection of shapes seemed much stranger than does the doubling of a single object like a cone, as though some kind of sorcery had brought it about. You felt confronted by a kind of occult riddle or choice.

But, of course, whatever its dreamily imaginal qualities, this installation also involved the viewer in a complicated process of cognition. It was only after considerable study and several trips back and forth between the rooms that you could begin to discern certain facts about the situation, such as: that every object in a set was different from every other one in that set; that the set of objects in one room was identical in appearance to that in the other room; that the apparently random constellation of forms was the same in each room, except that it was squashed lengthwise in the shorter back room; that every piece was of the same volume, and that they were solid masses of metal and not hollow shells. Furthermore, there was the experience of the doubling itself, whereby one set hovered in mind as you examined the other, creating a psychic reverberation between immediate perception and memory image. All of this forced an intensified concentration on the perceptual facts and yielded a dramatic illumination of the psychological processes by which we relate to and try to make sense out of the world.

By contrast to the machined perfection of her recent sculpture, the drawings that Horn has been making since the mid-'80s are conspicuously handmade. In these works, Horn uses pure powdered pigments and small amounts of varnish to build up small, irregular shapes that resemble natural forms or rudimentary doodles--spirals, trapezoids, triangles or bow ties. The forms have an encrusted, objectlike quality. Some are intensely hued, others gray or earth-toned. Horn's procedure for each drawing is to make a number of nearly identical forms on a piece of paper and then to carefully slice it up and reassemble the pieces in order to set up complex relationships between the forms.