Flying Books Under Black Rain Painting

Often conceived for specific locations, Rebecca Horn’s new works build upon her past creations. She regularly returns to earlier performances and constructed objects, referencing, or even reworking, them in new works of art. As a result, she creates an ongoing web of associations that spans drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, poetry, and film. Here, ink (“black rain”) sprays across the wall and over three open-and-closing books: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Franz Kafka’s Amerika, and James Joyce’s Ulysses, all chosen by the artist for the way that they resonate in a university context. The resulting painting, in three dimensions, suggests large-scale gestural abstraction—typically associated with the physical action of the artist’s body and notions of subjective experience—yet created here by a machine. As stand-ins for the human body, Rebecca Horn’s machines dance, fly, get tired, rest, and nearly suffocate. “Consciousness” is regained only when the work is once again set in motion by the presence of the viewer (via motion detection). This installation seeks to achieve the artist’s long-standing goal of dissolving “barriers between passive spectators and active performers.” Franz Kafka “Alienation” and (self) “persecution” are two key words connected to Kafka’s literary work. They are essential for his stories and novels in a very subversive way. There is always humor in the way he writes on the struggle of a person who invents or faces an overpowering, almost surreal and nightmarish situation in order to solve it. It seems increasingly in vain. The momentum is Kafkaesque. A provocation of timeless beauty. Fernando Pessoa Pessoa means “person” in the Portuguese language. That’s one of the secrets of this great poet of Lisbon. How many persons live in a single person? Pessoa created more than 75 “personalities” to answer the questions of “I”—Who am I? Who speaks? Who dreams? Who lives my life? The lives of his heteronyms— as he called the personalities he invented—feels to be his life. A synthesis of them. As one of them said: “I have in me all the dreams of the world.” James Joyce How many thoughts and feelings pass through our mind? The processes of an interior monologue of thinking has a headword—Ulysses! The appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day: June 16th in 1904. A single day is sufficient to show life’s complexities. An Everyman becomes the microcosm of the world. —Rebecca Horn, November 2014