Have you ever been under the irresistible spell of an art work?
Art Story is a shorter episode exploring an art work, an artist, an exhibition or even a concept through a proudly subjective narrative.
Narrated by: the host, Joana P. R. Neves
Joana explores an aesthetic shock involving a tongue twister and a photography by Roni Horn in a busy art fair. Maybe you’ll jump into the flow, maybe you’ll be touched by Joana's devotion to the art, the feeling, and the inscrutable nature of certain contemporary art attractions.
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Key themes:
Roni Horn's work; conceptual art art; photography; art installation; art and language; identity and fluidity; androgyny, aesthetic shock
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Created & Hosted by Dr. Joana P. R. Neves, art curator and writer with over 20 years of experience in the contemporary art field. Artistic director of Drawing Now Paris since 2018, she has worked across the industry, from the art market to education. She co-launched the art residency and project space Worlding in 2020. Exhibitionistas’ first year offered exhibition discussions with guest co-host Emily Harding; organically, it grew into a more experimental show exploring art topics, stories and interviews complemented by Joana’s publication Art Thinkosaurus on Substack. She champions ‘Art Wonderment’s’ embrace of complexity against the lure of ready-made opinions. A polyglot, she grew up in Lisbon, studied and lived in Paris, to finally settle in London with her artist husband, four children and two cats.
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Copyright: Joana P. R. Neves, 2024.
00:00:00
Hello and welcome to a new episode of exhibition Esters
00:00:04
with me, your host Joanna Pianevis.
00:00:08
Today I bring you an episode which is part of the segment Art
00:00:14
Stories. Art stories are shorter episodes
00:00:19
where I focus on a specific, more narrative aspect of an
00:00:26
artwork, of an aesthetic feeling, sometimes even a
00:00:32
concept. So the last art story episode
00:00:37
that we published was about the notion of contact.
00:00:42
What is contact? Is it physical?
00:00:45
Is it visual? Is it conceptual?
00:00:48
And what is the difference between touching something,
00:00:52
being touched by something? This time the perspective is
00:00:57
completely different. I'm going to start with a
00:01:00
question. Have you, dear listener, ever
00:01:05
been under the spell? An unexpected state of complete
00:01:12
and immediate devotion to a work of art.
00:01:16
That's precisely the story I'm about to tell.
00:01:20
I'm about to delve into this state of fascination and the
00:01:26
pleasure of exploring, finally, a work that I've discovered, I
00:01:34
think about 15 years ago or more that kept me completely under
00:01:39
its spell until I decided to record this episode.
00:01:45
I've been thinking about this for a while and I've been sort
00:01:48
of fearing it because do you want to break the spell?
00:01:53
Do you want to stay in that state?
00:01:56
It turns out that even exploring that feeling made me look at
00:02:02
other works. I think that sometimes there are
00:02:07
certain works that just do not need to be investigated.
00:02:15
They don't have that sort of conceptual depth.
00:02:21
They have a different kind of depth.
00:02:23
Oh, and the artist in question is an artist I really, really,
00:02:28
really love. Rooney Horn, even herself, is a
00:02:32
bit spellbound by whatever it is that she is to produce or is
00:02:39
producing. That's how she explains the
00:02:41
work. And weirdly, I found that that's
00:02:46
exactly the effect that the work has on me.
00:02:50
It's a very personal thing. And I think we have to be
00:02:53
personal. Don't we need a subjective
00:02:58
relationship with the work to have our own subjective
00:03:02
relationship with the work? And here I will misquote one of
00:03:07
my favorite films by Jim Jarmusch, Ghost Dog, where the
00:03:13
main character says that well follows the book of the samurai.
00:03:18
And in the Book of the Samurai it is said that you have to know
00:03:22
the ways of the other samurai so that you are comfortable in your
00:03:28
own ways. Having said all this, I think
00:03:31
there is nothing else to do than to go on with the episode.
00:03:35
So without further ado, let's do this.
00:03:44
When my children were young, I recited a Portuguese tongue
00:03:48
twister that goes like this with temp preguntua temp quinte,
00:03:52
tempu tempu tempu tempu tempu, tempu, temp.
00:03:59
As a child, I first loved the rhythm of this little text.
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The sounds T&P, which are the sounds of the main words temp,
00:04:10
also appear. In other words, like Quint, they
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create a sort of drumming of the mouth.
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The sound is made with the tongue placed against the upper
00:04:22
frontal teeth, whereas the sound is a release of air after the
00:04:28
lips were slightly pressed together.
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Something happens in the throat too, but unlike the vowels, it
00:04:35
doesn't feel like singing projecting sound with an open
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chest. It's quite the contrary.
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The consonants are the sounds that constricts the throat, like
00:04:47
a drum is a tap on a tense surface, a stretched piece of
00:04:51
leather resonating in a wooden contained space.
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Drumming jumps immediately into your body.
00:05:00
You feel it. It's not only in your ears, but
00:05:03
in your flesh, your muscles. A finger starts tapping
00:05:10
mindlessly. Drumming with words is what this
00:05:17
little Riddle was allowing me to do.
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It's what first caught my children's attention when they
00:05:23
would ask me to say it again and again.
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So I repeated the repetition. I said it over and over, and
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within this recitation, the repeated sounds would be played
00:05:36
again, tongue tapping against the teeth, the mouth expelling
00:05:40
air, forming a little channel for it to flow and carry the
00:05:44
next vowel. Being able to create such a
00:05:48
satisfying rhythm with the mouth, a tongue, throat, teeth,
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your own body is quite incredible if you think about
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it. I've always been attracted to
00:06:00
art that uses simple and accessible means to mesmerize
00:06:03
us. The French poet Emmanuel Oka was
00:06:07
puzzled by Anna Akhmatova saying that poets have a difficult task
00:06:13
having to work with the same words that we use to invite
00:06:16
someone over for tea. How about considering Ukaach
00:06:21
suggested that it is a great thing to work with the same
00:06:25
words that people use every day? Why, he asks, would we want our
00:06:30
words to be the purest? But it's not only the economy or
00:06:35
the handiness of a material or even a technique.
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For me, it's more about seeing and understanding the world
00:06:43
around you in a completely different way.
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To wonder what other things are there around me that could be
00:06:50
something else. One day I overheard the child
00:06:53
ask their mother, can a dog be a cat?
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And for a moment I enjoyed that uncertainty, not finding any
00:07:01
differences between them and that they could in fact be the
00:07:05
same thing. Should you look at their size,
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at their vague morphology and their interspecies alignment
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with humans, their common language with us, how they
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accommodate their throats and mouths to meow or bark in a
00:07:20
certain way. Apparently cats only meow to
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humans, or when they're kittens, they found a way to stretch the
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use of their instrument in order to communicate with us.
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Perhaps they don't see us as humans at all.
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Like the little girl, they don't see any difference between us.
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We're just big, clumsy, lazy cats.
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So even if you don't understand the meaning of the tongue
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twister, you can enjoy its music, appreciate the drumming
00:07:57
of the words, the rhythm as we accelerate, the repetition
00:08:01
carried by the sound and the meaning.
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In fact, this may be a tongue twister with all its TS and PS,
00:08:10
but I also see it as a Riddle. You see, the meaning of this
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little text, which repeats the same word 10 times is also quite
00:08:19
something. In English it would be something
00:08:22
like this time asked time how much time time has.
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Time answered time that time has as much time as time has the
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idea of a time doubled. Imagine something we can only
00:08:36
see as whole. But here there are two times
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chatting, one of them inquiring about their identity in terms of
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quantity. How much time does time have?
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Time is measured so you can wonder about the amount of time
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that time has, but the answer will always be time.
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The time asking the Question Time is how much time time has.
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But if time is doubled then this can't be true.
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If time is doubled, there is a possibility of the existence of
00:09:07
different times with different amounts which you will only know
00:09:12
when the time is over. Time will last for as long as it
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lasts. My children enquired about the
00:09:18
meaning of it. I remember answering, but
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avoiding going as far as I did here.
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I wanted them to have the pleasure of discovering the
00:09:27
hidden meanings by just giving away a side of it.
00:09:30
That's the thing about this magical trick of doubling
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something so exquisitely unique and unmultipliable as a concept,
00:09:38
but so numerous as a thing in itself.
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It's that the puzzle is there, available in your mind whenever
00:09:45
you feel like diving into it. Although it may not even be the
00:09:49
purpose, the purpose is multiple.
00:09:52
It involves the concept, the tongue, words, myth.
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The Greek God of time comes to mind, Kronos, who ate his
00:09:59
children for fear of one of them dethroning him.
00:10:02
Only Zeus escaped to make Kronos throw up all of the other
00:10:06
siblings, leading a war against his father and taking over the
00:10:10
power. I was and remain fascinated.
00:10:17
Fascination may be a way to create distance, or perhaps it's
00:10:21
an inebriation of the mind and senses.
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Indeed, fascination used to mean bewitched, being under a spell.
00:10:29
Something has control over you, which ultimately is the power of
00:10:33
time. You will only know at the end
00:10:36
about this power. Anyway, Speaking of fascination
00:10:40
and the double, I'm reminded of a time when I was bewitched by
00:10:44
an art piece. It doesn't happen to me often.
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I love falling for something slowly, feeling it slip under my
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skin. I love the slow mechanics of
00:10:53
incorporating something, of noticing that something haunts
00:10:57
you. But that day at Art Basel, of
00:11:00
all places, I was completely and totally bewitched.
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Art Basel is an art fair established in the city of Basel
00:11:13
in Switzerland. And at least at the time, it was
00:11:16
the most prestigious one, with all the blue chip galleries and
00:11:20
the other established or less so on their tippy toes.
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Not the best place to be spellbound.
00:11:27
It's not that you don't discover beautiful things so that you
00:11:29
cannot have an intense sense of connection.
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You do. But it's like being in a
00:11:35
bookshop reading a few paragraphs of a great book.
00:11:38
You need to take it with you, spend time with it to fully
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enjoy it. Our fears are not museums or art
00:11:44
galleries. There are spaces where you start
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the conversation, confirm a suspicion and meet like minded
00:11:50
people. All this to say that I was in
00:11:53
the professional mode, walking in the aisles, stepping into the
00:11:56
booths of the galleries, when two or three booths ahead, from
00:12:00
afar, I spot the most exquisite shape I've ever seen in my life.
00:12:05
I walked towards it as if pulled by an imaginary rope, with a
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sense of urgency, need, devotion.
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I was also, I must add, asking myself what is it?
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Because one of the strings of this attraction was the
00:12:22
impossibility of knowing what that thing was and yet to be
00:12:26
heart and soul possessed by it. It was almost sexual, something
00:12:30
that suddenly grabs you whole and there is no other response
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than to follow. When I finally arrived at the
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booth, there it was for me. It was an elongated and sinuous
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soft thing with a visibly soft texture.
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I think it was dark blue or black.
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The artist was Roni Horn, whose work I knew.
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I had been progressively taken over by the work You Are the
00:12:57
Weather, which was so banal that I took no notice of it.
00:13:01
In the museum, Roni Horn created the sequence of images of the
00:13:06
same woman's face. Her name is Margaret and she's
00:13:09
immersed in water in each photograph.
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I can't quite put words on her expression.
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It would be a discarded image for someone else.
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Perhaps because the subject isn't particularly agreeable.
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A bit frowny even, and at times serious.
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She's always looking straight at the photographer.
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I remember walking out of the exhibition thinking of those
00:13:31
photographs lined up on the wall and the title remaining like one
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of those little clouds, finger after a storm, when the sky is
00:13:40
blue again. It was absurd.
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Why, after seeing so much art, was I fixated on what seemed
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like discarded projects of a photography student?
00:13:52
You are the weather. Beautiful notion.
00:13:56
And in fact, the stupefying thing about this series, which
00:13:59
Horn continued, is that the minute changes of the face, the
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weather, the water, the light, I'm never a grand statement, nor
00:14:08
a specific, easily identifiable state.
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No seduction, No Fear, no rage, no happiness.
00:14:16
The images were there precisely because we are the weather.
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I am the weather. You listening are the weather.
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We are all the weather, asking each other what is the weather?
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What is the state of being? How long am I to be in it?
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Weather asked whether who the weather is, Whether replied to
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whether that the weather is who the weather is.
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Horne took these images in Iceland in 1994, where she fell
00:14:44
in love with the landscape. Then there is the water, a
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fascination for Horn, which is also ever changing and always
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the same. In fact, in quite a few
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pictures, Margaret is wet, her hair pulled back as you do when
00:15:00
you come out of the sea, and she has droplets of water on her
00:15:04
face. Sometimes her eyelashes stick
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together, still damp, and her skin has that thick, compact
00:15:12
texture it acquires when it's cold outside.
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And the body has been in that other element.
00:15:18
In the video, Margaret says that the work quote uses her face as
00:15:24
a place UN quote. Horn first went to Iceland in
00:15:28
the 70s when she was 19 years old.
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There is something about it that overtook her.
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It's the only place where she goes just for the sake of going.
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In 1982, she got permission to stay in the lighthouse off the
00:15:42
southern coast, and she moved in for weeks, watching the weather,
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the birds, the puffins. For Horn, I imagine it was a
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complete immersion in a place that isn't hers, like the city
00:15:55
you were born in can be. Margaret says that they stayed
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together for a long while there. Horn describes it as an almost
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wordless time, which was important, Margaret says,
00:16:07
because it's created trust in that space of trust, and you
00:16:13
trust someone as you trust water, because you observed it.
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You know the limits and the easiness of its body.
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You release something of yourself when you're not
00:16:24
formulated, sprawling on the pin, as TS Eliot describes being
00:16:29
defined by someone else. The photographs shown in a
00:16:33
single line also have an erotic component.
00:16:37
The person is looking straight at the camera, as per the
00:16:40
artist's instructions, so she's looking straight at us, the
00:16:44
viewers. Her expression is piercing and
00:16:47
there isn't a single smile. There is so much trust that
00:16:51
there is no need to draw us in. It's in a way a triumph of
00:16:56
reciprocity over the uncritical recording of the machine at Art
00:17:04
Basel. There was no gaze, no face, no
00:17:07
water. The work was also a photograph,
00:17:11
but very different from You Are the Weather.
00:17:14
I looked at the label Untitled and then a number.
00:17:18
Not much help. It was a thing covered with
00:17:21
hair. In fact, for a short time it
00:17:24
seemed like a long haired head from the back, but the hair,
00:17:28
closer now, was short and it ran down the neck and below.
00:17:33
The shape of the head and neck was too long, too thin, the
00:17:37
place where it curved eerie and unnatural.
00:17:41
I suddenly realized that I was looking at the back of a bird's
00:17:44
head and neck as I'd never seen them before.
00:17:48
How did she photograph birds as if they were in a professional
00:17:51
photography shoot? Doesn't matter.
00:17:55
My mind quickly went back to that vision of a feathery
00:17:58
phallus, that shape where every delicate detail showed the logic
00:18:04
of a morphology and the intrinsic design of its nature
00:18:08
in its singularity and its difference, and made complete
00:18:12
sense. What didn't make sense was the
00:18:15
compulsive attraction. There were moments, though,
00:18:19
where I paused to contemplate the humor of the work.
00:18:22
A bird looking at the horizon, us looking at the back of the
00:18:28
bird's neck in total abandonment.
00:18:32
Funnier. Even.
00:18:33
In all of photography history that I know of, no one thought
00:18:37
of this angle, this exquisite moment of personification, not
00:18:42
turning bird into a person, but seeing the person also as a
00:18:47
bird. That is, seeing the person as a
00:18:50
person, a being, regardless of gender, of type, archetype, or
00:18:55
any other marker of a group. Roni Horn was fascinated at a
00:19:00
young age by the notion of androgyny, and early on decided
00:19:05
that her gender was no one's business.
00:19:08
There is another work of hers whose title is This Is Me, This
00:19:12
Is You, which shows a great amount of snapshots of herself
00:19:16
across the years with different types of hair, different
00:19:19
glasses, angles where it's not clear if the photos are of the
00:19:23
same person or not. They were edited and printed to
00:19:28
be the same size regardless of all the difference they bear.
00:19:35
There is another thing to say about My Sexy Untitled.
00:19:38
Each work is a diptych that is 2 photographs of the same bird,
00:19:43
most times at a slightly different angle. 2 is where
00:19:47
different starts, says Ronnie Horn, and many of her works are
00:19:51
doubled. Her photo Dead Owl shows a white
00:19:56
owl on a rock twice, or two different owls on two different
00:20:00
rocks. How to know?
00:20:02
The uncanny act of looking from one to the other tells you as
00:20:06
much about what you see as what you don't see.
00:20:10
Sometimes I think that Horn is talking about herself, about the
00:20:14
fact that attraction for someone like her, often mistaken for a
00:20:18
man, is whatever goes on between the cracks, what happens between
00:20:22
male and female, between a soft small man and a strong,
00:20:26
bedazzled female rugby player. I came across a photo of her in
00:20:30
West Magazine. In the first page of the article
00:20:34
it says Art and Design, Ronny Horn and then the text quote Who
00:20:41
is Rooney Horn? For years the artist has been
00:20:44
asking that very question herself, exploring notions of
00:20:48
perception and identity through sculptures of pure gold,
00:20:51
photographs of taxidermied bird heads, and installations of
00:20:55
melted glaciers. By Julie Belkov November 1st,
00:21:00
2009 Next to it is a photo of Horn in a balcony somewhere in
00:21:06
New York, pouring herself a glass of wine, sat beside a
00:21:09
table on which you can see a lone mobile phone.
00:21:13
She is absorbed in her task but is wearing different shoes.
00:21:17
A black sandal with a black sock on the right foot and the brown
00:21:21
trainer with a black sock on the other blue jeans, a Navy blazer
00:21:26
topless underneath one of her breasts is exposed, placing the
00:21:30
punctum of the photo as Roland Bart has called the exact spot
00:21:34
on a photo where your eye is drawn on its pink nipple.
00:21:38
However, Horn has such a magnetic personality that I'm
00:21:42
not sure if the picture is not about the whole thing being a
00:21:45
punctum. Horn falls on the nerve of
00:21:48
attraction with such subtlety that this photo seems to say you
00:21:53
didn't expect such a pretty pair of tits, did you?
00:21:56
While the rest of the body is vaguely male, vaguely there, No
00:22:00
fashion statement, no seduction, no affirmative Butch attitude
00:22:04
quote Rooney, Horn's subtle but commanding art demands A focused
00:22:10
eye to be seen for what it is. The same can be said for Horn
00:22:14
herself. With the exception of her eyes,
00:22:18
which are the brilliant blue of a far off sea, she's almost
00:22:21
devoid of colour. Her salt and pepper hair is
00:22:25
shown so short as to blend with her pale face.
00:22:28
Her mannish black shirt and jeans adds to the effect,
00:22:32
further deflecting snap judgements.
00:22:35
A quick glance at Horn on the street or in the restaurant
00:22:38
would yield few conclusive clues to her gender, so complete is
00:22:42
her androgyny. She must be looked at UN quote.
00:22:48
When you listen to her talk, her discourse is precise, neither to
00:22:52
familiar nor to conceptual, honest, clear.
00:22:57
She makes me think of another artist I love, Douglas Hubler,
00:23:01
an understated American man, a New York artist who became a
00:23:05
California professor. He was also fascinated with the
00:23:09
way we perceive things, how we are in his words, percipients.
00:23:13
My favorite work of his is Location P17.
00:23:17
Turin, Italy from 1973 is the driest work.
00:23:22
Four photos and two documents framed. 2 photos of a man and
00:23:29
two photos of a place Turin, presumably a map and a text.
00:23:34
The text explains that on March 17th, 1973, he chose a place
00:23:40
some distance away from where he was in Turin because he wanted
00:23:44
to go to a place where he'd never been and would never be
00:23:47
again. He went there, took a photo, and
00:23:50
when he developed it back in America, he, quote, discovered
00:23:55
that at the instant that the photograph was made, a man was
00:24:00
looking directly at the artist, and that man bears a strong
00:24:04
resemblance to the artist, at least more so than most everyone
00:24:09
else in the world. UN quote.
00:24:12
This is what is written on the paper of the artwork.
00:24:16
Why do I find this work so hilarious?
00:24:20
Because as soon as you read the text, you look at the photo and
00:24:23
immediately feel your eyes telling your brain where to look
00:24:27
to find a resemblance. In fact, Hubler reminds me that
00:24:32
one of the most striking aspects of our relation to other
00:24:36
people's face is to point out similarities between them and
00:24:40
someone else. Don't you think that so and so
00:24:43
looks like so and so? They're the spitting image of
00:24:47
each other. Why, I wonder, are we so
00:24:50
interested in looking for sameness?
00:24:52
Why are we not looking for water?
00:24:54
Why are we not like the weather? Hubler's work is a sleight of
00:24:58
hand done with earnestness. He's an honest trickster,
00:25:02
leading you to your own conceptual tics, your obtuse
00:25:06
desire for order and belief. One of his photography works
00:25:10
from 1969 is part of a series where he cut up a piece of time
00:25:15
and handed it to us as an idea. He took 15 photos from the same
00:25:21
angle a group of ducks in Central Park at a one minute
00:25:25
interval from each other. The photographs are in black and
00:25:29
white with the diagonal line across which is a feature of the
00:25:33
park along which the ducks go about their life.
00:25:37
There is a catch though, the text, which is always unlike
00:25:40
Horn, whose words are contained in the title, the dynamic
00:25:44
element of the work says after describing the process.
00:25:48
Quote 15 photographs presented in no particular order, UN
00:25:53
quote. The birds here at the Punctum.
00:25:56
As with Horns, Dead Owl or Untitled, their lives happen out
00:26:01
of frame even when captured by the camera.
00:26:04
Their difference is not caught by the camera and the logic of
00:26:08
their actions is not revealed by the disturbed sequence.
00:26:11
They move like Horn in Iceland, not because they have to, but
00:26:17
because they do. Exhibitionist is an independent
00:26:26
podcast created and hosted by me, Joanna Pierre Nevers.
00:26:31
We have episodes every two weeks and this season, Season 3, is a
00:26:36
bit of a turning point. We have 5 new episode types,
00:26:40
from more experimental art travel logs or art stories to
00:26:45
conversational formats about solo exhibitions with people who
00:26:50
are not part of the industry. Because we're all both actors
00:26:54
and spectators of art and life. If you're new here, you have a
00:27:00
whole catalog of episodes to enjoy this cover them at your
00:27:04
own pace.