Horn’s Retrospective in Seoul
By Seo Dong-shin
Staff Reporter
Just imagine slowly moving mirrors, peacock feathers and musical scores; a pair of shoes is placed over scattered coal amid bundles of developed films, with metal construction occasionally sparking electricity in the place of a head; piano keys made of oyster shells; and mechanical devices spewing out ink over the white wall and canvass.
You might think it is just another cryptic world of contemporary art, from which ordinary viewers can never dare to dream about fishing out any plausible message. But in this case, a little patience may pay. The world of Rebecca Horn, arguably one of the best-known German performance and installation artists alive, is actually beautiful to see, with the objects programmed in slow movements of meditative, almost dreamy nature. There is a strange air of romanticism, with abundant literary and cultural references, a world that is not likely to completely alienate viewers.
``The meaning and the appearance of artwork is inseparable,'' said the 62-year-old artist, who is visiting Seoul for her first retrospective here. The feathers, for example, are frequently used, not only because of their sensuous feel, but also because they are to the artist the ``second skin and extension of body.''
``The body disappears after death, but things like feathers and human hair remains,'' she said. Her decades-long exploration into the possibility of confining and extending the body began when at the age of 20 she was confined to bed after falling ill in Barcelona. She had traveled there impressed by Jean Genet's ``The Thief's Journal,'' which influenced her artistic temperament along with the works of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett.
The German artist is best known with her performance project ``Unicorn'' during the 1970s. For it, she dressed up her friends with a white bandage, similar to the fashion of Milla Jovovich in ``The Fifth Element,'' but with a horn on the head, and made them walk in the forest in a mythical fashion.
Some 20 pieces of Horn's installation and photography works are on display at the retrospective, which is currently under way at Rodin Gallery in central Seoul. Documentations of her past performances are also present along with three feature-length films made by Horn.
While it is a world-traveling retrospective, the artist made some site-specific changes to her installations for the first exhibition venue in Asia. The way the bundles of films are arranged for the piece ``Time Goes By'' was inspired by the islands she saw over from the sky in the airplane as she flew in to Incheon Airport, Horn said.
For more information, visit www.rodingallery.org.