Rebecca Horn

Moon Mirror. Site-Specific Installations 1982-2005. Vorwort von Marion Ackermann, Texte von Doris von Drathen, Steven Henry Madoff

von Kunstmuseum Stuttgart

1. Auflage

Rebecca Horn – Kunstmuseum Stuttgart schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG

Hatje Cantz Verlag 2005

Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 7757 9187 8 A Special Place RICHARD CORK

Rebecca Horn is acutely alive to the spirit of places far outside the limits of the gallery. Before making an installation, she takes her cue from the history, mood, and energy that she finds within a particular space. The results push at the boundaries of expression — challenging, extending, and ultimately transforming our ideas about what art might be. But Horn’s innovatory commitment to exploring an array of wholly unpredictable locations is underpinned by her awareness that artists have worked, throughout history, in a similarly wide range of arenas. Time and again, their intervention in a special place is profound enough to give it a radically different meaning. Nothing can prepare us for the experiences offered by artworks still inhabiting their original locations. Traveling round Italy in search of the Renaissance, we are soon overwhelmed by the powerful sense of unity between an image and the place it occupies. The revelation of looking at painting and sculpture across Italy lies in the continuous understanding that art can be installed in a whole variety of settings, rather than remain- ing limited to the gallery or museum context too often accepted as an inevitability today. Exploring the Italian Renaissance, we are gratified to discover that these settings empha- size the uniqueness of artworks — not simply by placing them in surroundings where they can be seen without distraction, but also by showing how many images seem to spring from a particular geographical and cultural site. In museums, art often appears to exist in a curatorial context, cut off from all nourishing connections with the life that initially brought it into being. Wherever we go in Italy, by contrast, the place and the image housed inside it are both part of an indis- soluble whole. We cannot possibly remain oblivious of the links between them, which makes us realize that art should never be seen as a remote phenomenon without any bearing on the world around it. Entering La Camera degli Sposi, Mantegna’s great painted room in the Ducal Palace at Mantua, is like being ushered into the presence of the Gonzagas themselves, ranged among the architecture of the walls in dignified assemblies showing how passionately their painter wanted them to satisfy his own yearning for a lost Roman magnificence. Moving into a shaft of sunlight from one of the windows in the Milanese refectory where The Last Supper is housed, we suddenly appreciate how well the damaged fresco is attuned to the dimensions of the wall at Leonardo’s disposal. The architecture within the painting appears to be an uncannily plausible extension of the room surrounding it, where the monks eating and drinking must once have provided an appropriate context for the more exalted meal depicted on the wall above them.