FEATURE RONI HORN
“IT’S THE PARADOX OF SOMETHING EXTREMELY FAMILIAR to you being
also completely unknown. You never have the knowledge of it that
brings you greater understanding; it’s all on from the first moment; there
is no other moment with it. It has an origin that can never be determined,
but it may well have been everywhere. It maintains this look which is a
kind of metaphor for invisibility…” What is the ‘it’ of this riddle? Water, as “YOU GET
filtered through Roni Horn. Specifically, it is a sample of the American
artist’s ruminations on that which vivifies her own profoundly measured THESE STORIES:
body of work – an oeuvre, predominantly expressed through sculpture
and photography, and now advanced into architectural installation, that
creates the conditions for experiencing the fluid motion of identity. ‘THE WEATHER
In 1999 Horn produced Another Water, the first of three series
devoted to the moody surface and metaphorical undercurrents of NEVER BOTHERED
the River Thames (the others are 1999’s Still Water and 2000’s Some
Thames). In book form, these images were subtended by loquacious ME endash.cap THERE WAS
footnotes, a parallel stream of capricious thought (“a river, with its relation
to duration, time and passage, brings in a relation to consciousness”, ONE INCIDENT WHERE
says Horn; “to me the footnote is a metaphor for water, which at any
point is triangulating you with some unknown, something out there”). I WAS A KID, AND
In 2004 she invited four luminaries from various fields (sculptor Louise
Bourgeois, poet Anne Carson, feminist writer Hélène Cixous and MY BROTHER
movie director John Waters) to produce book-length responses to her
works’ titles; emblematising differential ventures into the rabbit hole
of subjectivity, these were collected together as Wonderwater: Alice WAS KILLED’ ”
Offshore. Cixous, whose circuitous sentences effectively counterpoint
Horn’s art, became a friend, ongoing collaborator and photographic
subject. ‘How to translate “the intangible” without touching it?’ she
wrote in the catalogue for Rings of Lispector (Agua Viva), a 2004 work
facing page: Arctic Circles, 1998 (vol 7).in which Horn embossed the poetry of Brazilian bard Clarice Lispector,
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zürich & London
which is similarly vitalised to the nuances of experience, in curving,
looping, whirling, occasionally reversed sentences onto a rubberised
floor. ‘Horn’, adds Cixous, seeks ‘to pursue the invisible that lives hidden
behind life.’
Another reason for Horn’s continued interest in water might one bilingual – Icelandic and English – and featuring words commonly
be its ubiquity in the great geographical love affair of her life: Iceland, used to describe the weather. This carpeting of language, says Horn,
where she has visited since 1975 and made countless photographs contains “that Freudian thought that when you talk about the weather
since the 1980s, and where she lives when not in New York (“one person you talk about yourself… here, you get this weather-as-yourself quality
uses marble”, she jokes; “I use Iceland”). Think of human mutability, in positive words like ‘sultry’, but also in others like ‘frigid’, less sexy words
and those experiences for which there are no words, as the heart of like ‘unpredictable’…”
Horn’s art, Iceland – with its changeable landscape and unpredictable This subconscious doubling is also likely to inflect a less static
weather – as their bountiful objective correlative, and water as a aspect of the work. “Stykkishólmur was the first place they started
motive force. In 1994, for instance, the artist essayed the idea of an to record weather reports in this country,” says Horn. “It’s sort of a
emotional and perceptual weather report with You Are the Weather, coincidence, but a fact.” And the tradition goes on. The project will also
a series of photographs of one woman, Margét Haraldsdóttir Blöndal, involve a website (whose content will spin off into publications: the first,
taken at different times, in the same position (near or up to her neck in Weather Reports You, coinciding with the library’s opening) to which
water), which recalibrates difference so that the smallest muscle shifts individual Icelanders can submit weather reports. Retired lighthouse
become seismic. keepers, farmers and librarians have already done so. “They’re extremely
And it is in Iceland that Horn, in collaboration with Artangel, reticent people,” Horn continues. “Mostly because they’ve had horrific
has embarked on her most ambitious project to date. Set to open experiences with the weather. You get these stories: ‘the weather never
this month, Vatnasafn/Library of Water is sited in a renovated former bothered me – there was one incident where I was a kid, and my brother
library looking out on the west fjords at Stykkishólmur, on the country’s was killed, but that’s it’… Weather in Iceland is a mirror.”
southwest coast. This is a faceted project, best approached through Alongside this are other aspects: “This work, which is partly a
two quasi-architectural aspects that connect overtly with Horn’s prior community centre, wants to operate in real time,” says Horn; there will
practice. First, an ‘archive of water’: 25 floor-to-ceiling glass columns, 30 be invited writers working here, alongside “a chess camp for young
cm in diameter and each containing a different body of water sourced girls, which is an Icelandic tradition that’s reached a vulnerable point
from Icelandic glaciers – several of them hundreds of years old. “Some – another part of my life is interested in the education of women
of the ice we took is black,” says Horn: that’s volcanic ash (once it has around the world, so I plugged into that here.” There’s talk of chess
settled in the columns, viewers will have to look at the sediment to see masters coming in to teach. But changeable weather appears to be at
that particular difference). Second, another rubber-floor text work, this the work’s heart.
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