Serpentine Gallery

This is an invitation to walk around the exhibition and at the same time a warning of our inability to see. Walking into the Duveen gallery at the Tate, the long corridor at the center of the building, Rebecca Horn's sculptures and installation work fill the space with anthropomorphized kinetic objects, shaping her aesthetical language, addressing the fragility of the body, the satisfaction of the sexual encounter and defining the essence of life's emotions. "The immutability of human desire and its unending search for emotional and physical fulfillment,"said Nancy Spector.

I began to enjoy a sense of intense pleasure and wonder. The referential signs that she constantly uses; images, movements, objects and words, are there to deflect the meaning of her work.

The recurrent vocabulary of mechanical movement used in some sculptures is her excuse to illustrate a circular discourse with its cycle of passivity-action-passivity to express and describe human conflicts...

In another piece her concern with feminist issues is represented by Branches of destiny. 7 knives attached to long metal rods moving up and down penetrating round brushes in a direct allusion to the feminist idea of sexual relation as a violation of woman's body. The sharp knives and the brushes engage in a continuos sado-masochistic act. This is perhaps a very literal piece in which she abandons for a moment her main subject .

She is following a tradition where science and art share the same information but use it for different purposes. Her constant analogies and her appropriation of the material used in alchemy such as mercury, coal and egg shell, are best illustrated in a piece called Orlando, 1988, a direct reference to the novel of the same name by Virginia Woolf, where the central character assumes a different gender. This piece is composed of a pair of male shoes, between them lumps of coal and fixed on the wall two electrified heads of copper snakes which move slowly towards a meeting interrupted by the discharge of high voltage. The same idea of attraction and fulfillment can be seen at the Serpentine gallery in Kiss of the Rhinoceros.

Her discourse is charged with emotional tension but the representation is cool and calculated. Even the apparent contradiction between form and content helps to keep up the concentration her work demands. The most impressive piece in the Octagon room is Concert for Anarchy. A grand piano hanging upside down from the ceiling follows the pattern of the other sculptures: suddenly the keyboard cover opens and with spasmodic violence spills out the .keys. After a few minutes it retracts back into itself with an extraneous release of energy, the absurdity and the violence of the piece creating a sense of uncertainty and a simple question: What is next?...

In one of the small rooms next to the Octagon, the surrealist body sculptures that she has used in her performances are displayed packed in black boxes.

She comes from a society obsessed with organization and efficiency, where the sense of order and security nullify any attempt to depart from rational thinking. In order to confront this she appeals to poetry, developing new and describing old myths with which to challenge those values. (...)

In most of this early period she used these surreal body sculptures for her performances which she recorded on video and film. Her constant idea of equating machine with human being probably originates in her performance in 1970 Overflowing Blood Machine, where a naked male had plastic tubes strapped over him and blood, replicating his own circulation system, was pumped through them, reducing him to a part of a mechanism and to becoming a machine himself.

Rebecca Horn's retrospective keeps ours senses on constant guard, like an old boxer she is full of tricks and the intense pleasure and wonder with which I entered the exhibition are still with me.