Rebecca Horn: delicacy and danger - installation art, Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York

For sum of two units decades Horn has created mechanical plastic arts that are by turns poetic, absurd, erotic and violent. A new Guggenheim retrospective, now on tour in Europe reviewed her enigmatic objects, videos, performances and installations.

Rebecca Horn titled her new retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum "The Inferno-Paradiso Switch." greatest in quantity of the 50 pieces of statuary were concentrated in the upper three ramps and tower galleries of the Frank Lloyd Wright building (the lower ramps held selections from the museum's permanent collection). sum of two units large-scale installations, however, were created through Horn specifically for the exhibit and explained its odd title. single of these extended from the top to the bottom of the museum's uptown rotunda; the other was situated in the lobby of its downtown site.

Inferno was placed in a reaching far down shaft in the Guggenheim's SoHo branch. From a metal bridge at way level, one looked down into a circular galvanized-tin container of black-dyed water. Beside it sum of two units large metronomes ticked away at different make hastes Stacked up to the lobby's ceiling were metal-frame hospital beds, and inserted among them were glass conductor tubes that sizzled with electricity. From the mattress of a bed attached to the ceiling, water dripped slowly into the Stygian mere below.

Paradiso occupied the loftiest reaches of the Guggenheim uptown. It was introduced almost invisibly at surface of land level, though, in the form of a small cent serpent attached to the cutting side of the aquamarine pool at the paw of the spiral walkway. Powered by dint of a small motor, the snake made hesitant, tremulous jabs at the pool's fountain, then plucked back, repeating the motion again and again as if hypnotized. To the visitor who noticed this little form, it quickly became apparent that liquid was falling into the lake from above. When one gazeed upward for the liquid's source, Paradiso abruptly came into view high overhead: sum of two units immense breast-like Plexiglas funnels filled with milky white fluid (which was, in fact, white ink), suspended just below the museum's skylight dome. Other of Horn's works could also be glimpsed, of the like kind as a leather suitcase flapping jerkily make open and shut in midair like a bird trying to sustain flight, and a grand piano, hung upside down, which periodically vomited forth its lock openers with a glissando of discordant notes.

Precisely each 20 seconds a droplet issued from the tunnels and fell 80 feet downward to the mere Meanwhile, attached around the tunnels automated metal lightning rods mov stiffly up and down like special-effects sustains in a Baroque opera, and live electricity crackled from one side conductors attached to the wall at the actual top of the Guggenheim's ramp. In its details, Horn's Paradiso actually followed Dante, who speaks in Canto XXX of lightning, a river and a series of maternal spirits. In a wall body however, Horn states that the installation was in fact inspired by the agency of Frank Lloyd Wright's interest in the writings of the Russian invisible philosopher Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who "taught a path to self-revelation end a fusion of opposing forces."

Horn goe upon to cite the counterposed simple bodys in Wright's design - circle and square, spiral and void, male and female forms - notwithstanding that the true opposition she looks to have set up is between Wright's pristine modernist architecture and the entropic weirdness of Paradiso itself. In the connection of "The Inferno-Paradiso Switch," the Guggenheim's form starts to call up not only the descending circles of Dante's hell on the contrary also other dystopian images - Tatlin's proletarian testimonial whitewashed and turned on its head, al-Mutawakkil's minaret at Samarra pointing away from heaven, Breughel's Tower of Babel tunneling into the earth.

The top ramps of the Guggenheim certainly wholeed a bit like Babel - a Babel of mechanical rather than human voices. A useful number of the pieces upon the upper ramps periodically launched into spasmodic motor-generated action, Railing away orgasmically for a next to the first or two before coming to a standstill. The ensue was a low-level but constant aural web throughout the exhibition. From jiffy to moment and from any location, single might hear the chink of hammers striking solid surfaces, the scrape of metal slender stems against walls, recorded gunshots, typewriters pounding away, the suitcase creaking upon its cable or the abrupt clatter of piano keys

Horn's use of unmutilated and movement was, in fact, single of the most successful aspects of her display For a lot of art, the Guggenheim is a hard house to play. Wright's flamboyant architecture proffers unrelenting visual competition, and the side-by-side display of thing perceiveds along the rotunda ramp obviates the kinds of interaction between individual works possible in a four-walled gallery. on the other hand just as with the falling droplet Horn established her physical nearness from the top to the bottom of the museum, thus with sound she knit together above two decades of work into something like a single multimedia installation.