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

Art in America, Feb, 1994 by Ken Johnson

As in the sculpture, though, there is, in addition to this incipiently didactic (albeit personalized) side of Horn's writing, something more mysterious and visionary. Included among the stories are word pictures that call to mind the Romantic sublime of Caspar David Friedrich. In "Anatomy and Geography" she writes:

I've been to a desert of ice and ash, the uninhabited interior of Iceland. The desert is complete without living things; the desert is occupied with simple duration. Staying here is having intimate relations with the weather. You exist. You live with the forces that define it. But you remain outside of it even when you're in the heart of it. The desert is just and fully what it is.

What you feel in these essays is that what Horn finds in Iceland is not only cognitive clarity but also spiritual fulfillment. By means of an ascetic withdrawal from the social and material comforts and confusions of contemporary civilization, she might achieve a mystical purification of consciousness. This is a good way to characterize her artistic enterprise as a whole.

"Roni Horn: Inner Geography" opens this month, at the Baltimore Museum of Art [Feb. 23-Apr. 17] and later travels to tile List Visual Arts Center at MIT [Oct,. 7-Dec. 18]. Recent drawings by Horn will be on view at the Matthew Marks Gallery [Mar. 17-Apr. 30]. Another show, "Selected Installations," will appear at the De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art, Tilburg, Holland [March-July].

Author: Ken Johnson is a freelance critic.