In the early 1970s, Rebecca Horn began her body extension performances, wherein she attached various wood, metal, and fabric structures to her body such as sweeping canvas wings, tantalizingly long finger gloves, a mask covered in pencils, and a lofty unicorn horn. Having been confined to a sanitarium early in life due to a terrible lung disease, Horn pressed at the edges between the self and its surroundings, questioning the end of the body and the beginning of its container. In the following years, the artist’s oeuvre expanded, shifting from bodily prostheses to kinetic sculptures and installations, as well as films that often featured her moving sculptures. In all her works, a tension resides at the edges of the body and in the space just before the moment of touch. In Horn’s Kiss of the Rhinoceros (1989), two enormous metal arms, each tipped with a metal rhinoceros horn, form an almost complete circle. The arms pull slowly apart from one another, and when the horns reach one another at the apex of the circle, a bolt of electricity flows between them. The work breathes with the rhythmic opening and closing of its steel arms. Horn, however, renders this human bodily gesture in a cyborg form of animal, metal, and mechanical parts, questioning the primacy or purity of the human form.
Melanie Kress
