Celebrating Rebecca Horn’s Radical Experiments in Movement and Chance

This piece will appear in the columns section of frieze 246, Dance

At the age of 21, after damaging her lungs through prolonged exposure to toxic materials at art school, Rebecca Horn spent a year convalescing. Confined to her sick bed, she began experimenting with prosthetics and restrictive choreographies, eventually going on to develop the series ‘Body Extensions’ (1968–ongoing). An early example, documented in a photograph, depicts a nude woman bound in red fabric bandages that extend down from her arms and seemingly anchor her to the ground (Arm Extensions, 1968). In the catalogue for her 1977 exhibition ‘Drawings, Objects, Video, Films’ at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Horn described the arms as ‘isolation columns’ while her body is ‘crisscrossed like a mummy; all movements became impossible’. Shaped through the prism of youthful illness, Horn’s understanding of bodily movement instigated a career-long reckoning with corporeal limitations.

The artist, who passed away this year at 80, studied ballet growing up in postwar Germany. Her father would take her to see live performances in Munich and Vienna, sparking a lifelong fascination for the discipline, and ballet dancers often featured in her experimental documentaries of the 1970s and ’80s. In Der Eintänzer (The Dancer, 1978), for instance, filmed in the artist’s New York studio, one dancer performs in Horn’s The Feathered Prison Fan (1978) – a wing-like sculpture, made from white ostrich feathers, which metamorphoses its wearer into a human-animal hybrid, at once alluring and fantastical. Reminiscent of a large, somewhat surreal tutu, the feathered contraption envelops the dancer, seemingly swallowing her whole.

The confinement and isolation Horn experienced in ill health appear to have informed the ways in which her body sculptures act out unsettling forms of suffocation or ingestion. In another scene from Der Eintänzer, two dancers face each other, bound together by Horn’s sculpture Body Harp (1978). One dancer’s arms are connected to the other’s legs: in an almost perversely symbiotic relationship, they need each other to be able to move. Der Eintänzer’s motifs – which recur throughout Horn’s practice, as in her film La Ferdinanda: Sonata for a Medici Villa (1981) – read like a form of unconscious symbolism synonymous with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical approach: an uncanny engagement or a series of recollections of memory, desire and fear.

Examining how people relate to their (often domestic) environments, Berlin Exercises in Nine Pieces (1974–75) sees the artist don Finger Gloves (1972) – two black prostheses with large fingers attached – to draw lines on the interior walls of an apartment. The grating sound of Horn’s fingers as they scratch down the walls, combined with the heavy contraptions restricting her movements, would seem to allude to a desire to reach beyond the physical boundaries of the building that contains her, perhaps towards her distant German homeland.

The artist is adept at enlisting those around her – whether strangers, newly made friends or everyday acquaintances – to participate in her artworks. In the catalogue to accompany her 2024 retrospective at Haus der Kunst, Munich, art dealer, publisher and long-time friend Timothy Baum describes the importance of surrealist writers on Horn’s practice, and how she once persuaded a sushi chef to perform in a film because of how he cut up fish. Horn acts as a kind of experimental choreographer – not just of dance, but of the chance circumstances of life itself.

Horn’s protagonists frequently find themselves reckoning with one of life’s most fundamental questions: how do we relate to the other? The ‘other’ in Horn’s work might range from a desired lover, to the animals and birds that frequently populate her practice, to the body in flux, to external forces that control us. The artist’s relational philosophy is echoed by the theorist Judith Butler, who notes in Undoing Gender (2004) that ‘despite our best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel’. Here, the muscle memory contained in Horn’s multidisciplinary oeuvre springs to action: by returning to dance, to desire, to love, she reminds us that repetitive actions, almost a form of rumination and a dissection of memory and feeling, can help us to make sense of ourselves – alone or with another. 

This article will appear in frieze issue 246 with the headline ‘In Pleasure or Pain’

‘Rebecca Horn’ is on view at Haus de Kunst, Munich, until 13 October, and ‘Concert of Sighs’ will be on view at Thomas Schulte, Berlin, from 11 September – 2 November

^{Main image: Rebecca Horn, Berlin (10.11.1974–28.1.1975) – Übungen in neun Stücken (Berlin – Exercises in Nine Pieces, 1974/75), film still. Courtesy: Archive Rebecca Horn, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024}