Rebecca Horn's Magical Prostheses
Between 1968 and 1972, German artist Rebecca Horn (b. Michelstadt 1944) created a series of performances titled “Personal Art.” Drawings served as the initial basis for the wearable sculptures, or “body extensions,” she sewed and constructed of cloth, wood, bandages, belts, feathers, and found objects. As seen in photographs here and on the far wall, Rebecca Horn’s masks and extensions elongate, contain, or constrain the bodies of their wearers. The performances are meditations on the body in space (moving, touching, groping), on space itself (verticality and horizontality, interior and exterior), and on the relationship between the two.
Just as she tailored the early body extensions to fit her own measurements and those of her friends and collaborators, the dimensions of the paper support in Rebecca Horn’s large-scale paintings on view here correspond to the size, and thereby the limits and possibilities, of her own body. The viewer, too, encounters these works, called Bodylandscapes, face-to-face. From the outset, Rebecca Horn placed the body extensions and other objects she constructed for her performance pieces—from mirrored leg braces to feather masks—in specially made traveling cases (Reisekoffern), often exhibiting them together with the related still photographs and films. Some of these objects were reproduced as a multiple, or editioned artwork. For example, her first multiple, Handschuhfinger (Finger Gloves), is a version of the prosthesis used in the 1972 performance of the same name. Housed in their own boxes, and presented here in cases designed by the artist, these editioned objects reference (and frequently provided the funding for) large-scale, site-specific, and often ephemeral installations by the artist.
Rebecca Horn’s three-part Out of the Black Rain, painted mechanically during the activation of her Flying Books under Black Rain Painting (2014) at the Harvard Art Museums, has also become a work of art in its own right. Rebecca Horn’s artistic production over the past four decades can thus best be understood as an ongoing work in progress. As the artist herself has said, “It all interlocks.”*
*This blurb was authored by Lynette Roth, Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard Art Museums
Lesson Plan
Rebecca Horn's “body extensions” (Körpererweiterungen) offer language instructors an opportunity to integrate German cultural knowledge into early language teaching. The construction of and play with these fanciful prostheses can help students to learn the names of body parts and movement verbs. Additionally, because so many of Horn's works are housed at the Harvard Art Museum, a lesson on Horn would give students a chance to work with some of Harvard's unique resources.LINK TO THE LESSON PLAN
