The pleasure of creation: Rebecca Horn’s poetic machines

This entry is posted on number 24-25 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until June 17, 2025.

Very young artist, Rebecca Horn (Rivoli Castle, until 21/9) was forced to pass a long period in a clinic for a lung infection due to the toxic materials he used for his art. It was there, one could say, that he discovered his body and, forced to breathe through machinery, the limits of each body.

From this experience, his first sculptures and performances are born which could be the inspiration for a Rick Owens parade or a Tim Burton type movie Edward of scissors. Long nails to collect objects, a mask with pencils attached above in order to draw by moving only the head. One could speak of “Sado-Art” or “Maso-Art”. The pleasure of creation through the discomfort of the body.

Over the years, the body has left room for objects and machines. A column of skeletons of beds with neon that suddenly light up for a moment as if they were lightning. The title Hell as a tribute to the first song of the Divine comedybut also a call to some evil for Harry Potter.

Then there are the kinetic sculptures. The mechanisms of the horn are not cold and inhuman, they contain their poetry. The Ballet of the Woodpeckersfor example, where iron hammers, beating on the walls of space, create a symphony. Or the Pfauenmaschine (Pavone machine), a device that opens and closes species of metal wings creating a rustle similar to that of the leaves.

If they made a movie about her they would choose Meryl Streepeven if the red hair remembered Vivienne Westwood more, with whom he shared an iconoclastic passion.

Very young, it was invited by the Guru of the curators Harald Szeemann to the famous exhibition Document 5 In 1972and since then there has remained one of the reference points of the history of contemporary art, a woman more interested in showing what she did than demonstrating who it was.

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