Roni Horn, The Detour of Identity, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art by Malene Engelund

17 Jul

Roni Horn, ‘The Detour of Identity’, Louisiana Museum of Art, installation view. (Image credit: All works © Roni Horn. Photo: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art / Kim Hansen)

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is accessed through the front doors of The Old Villa of Louisiana, a country home built in 1855 by the nobleman Alexander Brun in the small seaside town of Humlebæk, now a 40-minute train ride outside Copenhagen. Brun named the home after his three wives, all called Louise, fastening their merged identities to a building which, since its conversion into a museum in 1958, has undergone seven expansions. Several modernist wings unfold from the original structure – the 1958 glass corridor leads to the North Wing exhibition rooms while the West Wing, built in several stages between 1966-76, comprises two floors of exhibition space and a concert hall. A 1982 addition, The South Wing, built into the terrain around the museum, brings the refracted light from the sea into the white rooms through large glass panels, undoing the division between exhibition space and the outdoors, and the 1991 expansion The East Wing connects the previously separate wings through a circular underground structure.

Louisiana rests at a cross point. Here the outside meets the inside, the dividing line between nature and culture undone by large windows and glass corridors which push and pull at the gaze and the body. The eye moves between artworks and the large old trees towering above the minimalist modernity, while rooms open up into the landscape. You enter and exit exhibitions and the built structures through sculpture parks, small paths running through the woods and a trail surrounding a lake. And beneath the light filled square spaces, like a part-cognisant, part-subconscious thread, the circular underground frame binds Louisiana together.

I’ve spent the last year reading and writing about these types of cross-points, examining the possibilities that lie in the merging of dualistically structured categories, in the moments where genres spill into one another and the dividing line of binary structures is washed out. As an allegory, think of the mixing of saline and freshwater, the formation of a brackish composition whose unique qualities create the condition for the lives of species such as the mudskipper and the archer fish. Works of art, music, literature can likewise dissolve distinctly defined categories and new creative ‘species’ and discoveries can form in spaces where genres merge. Something stirs at the cross point; take the swamp as a space for hybridity where land and water meet. Emily Dickinson will describe this as a site for discovery, ‘Sweet is the swamp with its secrets’ and her voice rises up through a number of the works on display at Louisiana’s latest exhibition The Detour of Identity by Roni Horn, the first Nordic exhibition on the acclaimed American artist and writer. Moving through exhibition rooms where Horn’s works weave through a diverse range of artistic practices from drawing and photography through to text and sculpture, it becomes evident that Horn is both in dialogue with Dickinson through sculptural installations, and that Dickinson in turn informs Horn’s submersion into the many states of ‘inbetweenness’.

The most striking meeting between the two can be found in Horn’s sculpture Key and Cue, No. 288 whereDickinson’s words I’m nobody! Who are you? spill their black letters over the edges of a shiny square aluminium pole. The poem from which the quote is taken is one of Dickinson’s small but blazing works that speak of the refusal of classification, of being assigned to and identified by gender, place, even name. Horn’s piece leans casually against the wall but there is nothing laid back about it; it is a work fueled by questions about and defiance of the many identifiers that fixate us, and by categorisation can reduce us. The three Louises might have a thing or two to add here.

Roni Horn, ‘The Detour of Identity’, Louisiana Museum of Art, installation view. (Image credit: Photo: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art / Kim Hansen)

As the title The Detour of Identity will tell you, Horn’s exhibition brings together years’ of works that collectively speak about identity; its slippage, its mirroring and doubling; its spillage into ‘othernesses’; and its fluid nature versus its apparent solidity. In the corridor leading to the exhibition, a small collage also leads us to the questions Horn poses at large through the retrospective. The collage features a newspaper clipping reporting on a group of tourists who discover a woman missing from their party. The clipping describes how members of the newly assembled group organise a search and rescue operation only to discover, hours later, the missing woman to be among the searchers. Having changed her clothes, the woman has failed to recognise herself in the description of the missing and has embarked on a search for a self which has slipped through a narrow opening into parallel existence.

Water too slips into all crevices and folds throughout the exhibition, crossing a seemingly solid line of division between past, present, and future; fluidity and solidity; it flows as a key element in Horn’s catalogue, informing her sculptural practice, drawing the lens of her camera to its surface, washing up short poems, long texts, sometimes a body. In 2012 at twilight on the shore of Louisiana, Horn performed her monologue Saying Water. The text from the performance was developed from Horn’s 1999 work Still Water, a series comprising 15 photographic works which display a body of water alongside Horn’s written notes of observation, facts, poetry, thoughts. There is a circling quality to the inclusion of Still Water in the exhibition; 13 years after conception, the photographs and texts informed Horn’s 2012 live performance at Louisiana, and 12 years after said performance, Still Water is exhibited in the same location.

The water is anything but still though, it is the source reaching for the spring, circling itself, dissolving time and place and hauling Horn’s 1999 quote, ‘Time has no direction near water’ into the present. The series bear the subtitle (The River Thames, for Example). The unlocking of water from place speaks further about dissolution and exemplifies how Horn’s work with the element is an act of resistance, a refusal to be fixed to place and form; As she also writes in 1999, ‘No water is separate from any other water. In the River Thames, in an arctic iceberg, in your drinking glass, in that drop of rain, on that frosty window pane, in your eyes and in every other microcosmic part of you, me, all waters converge’.

But of course Horn will turn an element, a definition, a material on its head. In a room which illustrates the mastery of Horn’s sculptural practice, a series of yellow and light green circular structures rise from the white floor in the light-filled space. Louisiana has, at Horn’s request, removed the blinds from its South Wing and exhibit her works in natural light. The result is a series of drums, wells even, where water lies still in the brightness of the Nordic daylight, almost asking a finger to disturb their peaceful, soft surfaces. Only, it is solid; the hard stone, turned powder, turned glass, now in disguise as water.

This way, the works in the exhibition display an almost obsessive examination of instability and collectively exercise a resistance of fixation. They speak for themselves and to each other, turn up in slightly altered forms in new rooms, change our understanding as we see them in an altered state or setting. Take Horn’s Things That Happen Again, two pairs of cylinder copper sculptures, created three years apart. The first pair are positioned as heavy, unquestionable objects lying apart, their solid presence marking them as objects in their own right, indifferent to definition. Each sculpture is guarded by Louisiana’s invisible ‘sound fence’, and while this is separate to the pieces themselves, I find myself circling the works with an uncertainty of their meaning and a constant vigilance of my own acceptable closeness to the object. As I exit the room, I feel almost relieved to have passed the meeting, to not have set off these strange objects. Only, I discover them again in the adjoining exhibition room. Here though, their reappearance gives way to a sense of recognition and surrounded by works from Horn’s Still Water series, they now take on the identity of strange copper bodies washed up by water.

The transition from otherness to familiarity and the reverse, runs throughout the exhibition. Series of photographs fill the different rooms; Untitled (Weather) from 2010-2011 is a close photographic portraiture examination of change and transition, the head shots in the series, taken of a woman submerged in water and at close intervals, illustrate how a small change of light, of water’s reflection, of one’s inner landscape and thoughts will bring transition and alteration as the woman’s face changes from peaceful to troubled, vulnerable to strong.

Likewise, the 2005-2006 series Portrait of an Image contain a series of close-ups, this time of the French Actress Isabelle Huppert. Here however, the transition into and alteration of identity is conscious, Huppert’s head shots taken as she is instructed to impersonate herself in various film roles. Both series speak of fluidity, how we may slip from one emotion or identity into another, our being in the world edging us towards transitions and states of otherness. And the inclusion of the photo series Bird from 2008 take us to the edge of such otherness; here Horn’s photographs of the heads and shoulders of birds, taken from behind, render the unfamiliar of another creature familiar. The portraits enact a slippage of species – they spill across the line that so comfortably divides the human from the non-human and speak of how the categories we identify ourselves and others by are more permeable than we realise and are perhaps comfortable with.

It’s this positioning of series alongside series which gives way for the expansion and interillumination of Horn’s catalogue. The fascinating part of a retrospective are the choices made, the inclusion of certain works, the exclusion of others, and how such choices thematically define a practice – at worst it can reduce the catalogue of an artist, at best it will blow it open. We read an artist’s works through a lens, and while I could go on about each individual work on display, I want to bring focus to the framing of The Detour of Identity. With this exhibition, Louisiana invites the viewer to consider Horn’s catalogue through the medium of film, passing up on the standard curatorial format of an informative introductory text as the lense to a given room.

Instead, the rooms are introduced by a short film clip which acts as a prism through which Horn’s works assume a certain tinge or shape. Where a curatorial text can perform a voice of authority and factuality, the use of the film clips underlines that every text acts a stencil, a particular shape through which we may consider the artwork. It’s a bold and illuminating choice where the voices of male directors - Jean Genet, Alfred Hitchcock, Carl Th. Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Michelangelo Anonioni to name but a few – enter into dialogues with Horn’s works.

Further, the clips encourage – in fact request - a different mode of engagement by the viewer. We enter the room, turn our attention to the film, absorb its glimpses, and then view Horn’s photographs, sculptures, collages, texts, and drawings with these in mind. In fact, if we approach the clips as curatorial texts, their scenes layer Horn’s practice; we turn from the clips and approach Horn’s works with the film’s images, narratives, characters, landscapes, and rooms burnt onto the retina. To illustrate the effect of this layering, come back to the room of the yellow and green glass wells. Along its walls, a series of screens repeat Carl Th. Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, specifically the close-up scene where the tormented and empassioned face of Reneé Jeanne Falconetti as Joan of Arc, refuses to renounce her beliefs. Falconetti’s tormented and empassioned face overlayers the wells of water made of glass and here, at the cross point of artistic practices and voices, where death by fire awaits a young woman, you can almost see a small rippling in the solid glass surface.

In other rooms Horn’s concern with identity is unlocked further through the lens of film. A clip from Antonioni’s The Passenger tells the story of journalist David Locke’s doubling of personas through the assumption of a dead man’s identity; Hitchcock’s Psycho shows Norman Bates’ slippage from his own identity into that of his mother, while a clip from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona examines the gradual merging of identities between the young nurse Alma and her patient, the actor Elisabeth. These clips accompany rooms of works such as the 2008-2009 a.k.a. a series of 30 portraits of Horn taken of her by friends and family, from childhood through to the completion of the series. The photographs are organised into 15 pairs and while it could be tempting to define the pairing of vastly different looking portraits of Horn as a commentary on the identities we assume and curate through social media, I consider the works more about identity as shaped by the gaze of others. The photographs taken of Horn are not only seen through the lens of a camera but through the eyes of different people passing through or taking up residence in her life. They are taken in private settings in which the photographer too has a place before and after the camera enters the room and they document Horn as she exists in certain dynamics, through the eyes of others. The series tell us how, through our relationships, we too assume personas, show certain sides of ourselves to people in our lives, and that we are also shaped and altered by their idea of and gaze on us.

This way we all to some extent enact a doubling, a refracted view or a blurring of ourselves.

And a doubling, blurring of story occurs in the viewing of the film clips too; your entry into each room rarely coincides with the beginning of a clip, and you watch part of it to the end before you can watch the entirety of the clip. As a result, scenes replay, doublings occur, repetition plays its game of otherness and familiarity, and you find yourself on detour after detour. Eventually, though, you exit the final room of Horn’s remarkable gathering of works; The doors of The South Wing open up into the most unkempt part of the museum grounds. You can walk a narrow path that runs along the shore and if you follow it you will arrive at the water. If you ask Horn she will tell you that water is solid, fluid, soft, hard; that water is made of water, of glass, words, text; That water is now, which is also 2012, 1999, 1982, 1958 and that to follow it is a detour where the familiar is made strange and the strange made familiar as it mirrors, doubles and circles itself.

Roni Horn a.k.a. © Roni Horn. Photo: Poul Buchard / Brøndum & Co. /Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

https://louisiana.dk/en/exhibition/roni-horn/

Malene Engelund

Roni Horn, The Detour of Identity, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art by Malene Engelund

Sophie Calle, Ma mère aimait qu’on parle d’elle

HEAVEN /George Storm Fletcher by Kerry Harker