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

The oeuvre that Roni Horn has produc since earning her MFA step at Yale in 1978 is small--she works slowly and deliberately -- on the other hand is consists of a number of distinct styles that are not obviously link togethered to one another. Eschewing the continuous disentanglement and repeated are not obviously uniteed to one another. Eschewing the continuous unfolding and repeated exhibition of single signature look, she has not made her work a nearly definable commodity. In new years, Horn has been producing machine-made, simple on the contrary slightly eccentric solid metal forms which are strategically installed--singly, in pairs or in collections She has also been incorporating literary body s (poems by Emily Dickinson greatest in quantity recently) into rectangular, Minimalistic closes of aluminum. In two dimensions, she has been making works upon paper revolving around small, irregular accretions of unpolluted pigment, and she has published a series of works in which certain aspects of the geographical division of Iceland are examined in drawings, photographs and writings.

In these endeavors, an exacting be of importance to for matters of form, technique, craft and material yields facts that are invariably handsome and repeatedly outright beautiful. What is of the central nature in her work, however, is a combination of conceptual, metaphorical and spiritual impulses. Horn's greatest in quantity 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 way of consciousness from internal, mental processe of ideation that can rayless our relationship to reality. on the other hand in addition to this empiricist, level quasi-scientific program, there is also in Horn's greatest in quantity memorable work an evocative, metaphorical side which gives it an idiosyncratically poetic and, at best, mystical resonance. It is the way these motives, intellectual upon the one hand and intuitive upon the other, are alloyed into reductive on the other hand 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 gymnasium she made long cast-rubber wedges that taper from 3 or 4 inches thick to almost nothing. These exhibit a dualistic opposition between the ideal--the thicker extreme point which seems an autonomous, archetypal geometric solid--and the empirical--the thinner extreme point where the rubber hugs the floor and visibly conforms to shapeless masss 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 conceive and that we would do well to pay more attention to things as they actually are.

In 1980-82 Horn disentangleed this actual/ideal duality into the greatest in quantity important of her early works, a piece called Gold Mat. This is the culmination of a series of works in which she focused upon material and process. Around 1980 she made a number of pieces in which she crumpl a single sheet of lead into a compact rounded oblong form. She also produc several flat, 4-by-5-inch mat-shaped pieces of lead, woven carbonized iron or wood. In both series, what is foregrounded is in what way the thing is made and what it is made of With Gold Mat, however, the issues become more mingled because gold, far more than of that kind 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 the agency of laying 3-inch-wide strips of nearly unspotted 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, fabric 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 diocese the degree to which our experience of gold (and hence of many other things in the world) is determined not by the agency of its inherent qualities but by means of what we project onto it--its institutionally determined value and its many traditional and mythic associations.

granting 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 next to the first half of the '80s to the not away however, the conceptual dimension becomes more mixed and expansive and the formal characteristics become more individualized.

This disclosure can be seen in a work called Asphere III, which was exhibited in novel York at Galerie Lelong in 1989 The piece consists of a single, apparently sphere-shaped ball of solid cent measuring about 12 inches in diameter. It was neared by itself on the floor in the middle of an otherwise destitute of contents room. Contrary to initial impressions, this thing perceived is not a perfectly circular ball; rather, it is, as its title indicates, aspherical. Shaped upon a computerized lathe, it is slightly, almost imperceptibly distorted of the like kind that its longest diameter caps its shortest by 6/15 of an inch. This deformation registers almost subliminally; the thing perceived is not obviously egg- or oval-shaped, on the contrary it isn't round either. Nor does it strike one as being to represent or express anything in particular. Being a solid 300-pound mass, it has no concealed interior, and being cent a readily identifiable metal, it does not appear to be anything other than what it is. notwithstanding 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 external reality may come to mind here, on the contrary it is not, ultimately, the percept as such that Horn wants us to think about. Rather, the Asphere present the appearances 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 in truth fits the generic categories into which we usually force our experiences.