The Risk-takers
Nina Zivancevic
Rebecca Horn, who has a major retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery, has always considered both life and the act of artistic creation as a form of a perpetual risk-taking. Frida Kahlo, whose work is at Tate Modern right now, was also very much a risk taker: she would gamble with her life and sanity to prove that creating art is the only worthwhile thing. After being in a terrible car accident when she was very young, Kahlo had a painful, difficult life, scarred by surgical operations and internal bleeding.
At the entrance to the Hayward we first observe Horn’s masks, made of cotton and bandages with pencils poking out. Horn uses the masks as artificial bodily extensions in her performances. The pencils move with her head, and draw energetic lines on head-height canvases that no artist’s hand has ever been able to make. Horn invented this process during the two years she spent in a hospital bed at the very start of her artistic career, robbed of the use of her hands. A bit like Frida Kahlo, Horn was destined to make an extra human effort to preserve her sanity and remain devoted to her work even as she was fragile and incapacitated. All Horn’s later performances, such as The Walk of a Unicorn-Woman, as well as her installations with metal rods with a pencil or a pen at their end stem from the artist’s primordial experience of being an invalid who attempted to turn a disability to artistic advantage. Such an experience seems to have prompted Horn to think about the amount of energy consumed in a chance-operation in which, for instance, a pen moves across a certain material and leaves an occasional trace on it.
Later on, Horn expanded her interests in the domain of a chance-operation movement as she began to develop multicoloured ink drawings, in small and large formats. Some recent pieces in this exhibition, the Bodylandscapes, were already seen earlier this year in the Galerie de France in Paris. These particular drawings show traces of real landscapes (mountains, hills, lakes), and the more abstract lines of dynamic circles, such as wind spirals and hurricanes. It seems that with her "Painting Machines," Horn is examining the amount of energy focused on a single spot within a single drawing, the energy of which is carried over the paper by a single movement of a pen. What is particularly important to her is the circular movement of a pen that can enhance the amount of energy that, in turn, acquires a metaphysical dimension somewhat like the energy that propels a dancer to leap or pirouette. Horn’s work does not struggle with the universe. Rather it communicates with it, opening itself up to those who take the trouble to look at it.
A lot has been written on Frida Kahlo’s work, and several monographs of her life have been already published. One of my favourites is de Clezio’s brief account of the tempestuous life of this artist-invalid and her famous husband, the Mexican constructivist painter, Diego Rivera. How was it possible for the short and stocky Rivera, who had been painting revolutionary murals all his life, to live with Frida, who had been painting nothing but her pain and physical suffering in small format? Who, in fact, was Frida Kahlo?
Some fifty years after her death there seem to be many answers: the critics agree that Kahlo was an artist who enriched later generations with her vision of the woman-bohemian, a victim/invalid who rose above her own tragedy and become a feminist almost against her will. She was to become one of the first Modernist women artists who began to shift the boundaries of human sexuality, and, because of her mixed origins, also became as one of the hybrid icons of the post-colonial world. Kahlo’s sensuality in life and her sincerity in art have become the stuff of legend, threatening to weaken serious analysis of her work as her numerous biographers tend to focus more on anecdotes about her life rather than on her the work itself.
