ريبيكا هورن
רבקה הורן
レベッカ·ホルン
레베카 호른
Ребекка Хорн

Cinema Verite

source: andrewgrahamdixon

The life of an art critic is not, in the normal run of things, a hazardous one, but some works of art are more dangerous than others. A number of years ago I was nearly decapitated by one of Rebecca Horn’s sculptures. The sculptor, who was born in Germany at the end of the Second World War, was one of the more illustrious foreign artists to have been invited to exhibit at the Hayward Annual, a now extinct exhibition of contemporary art formerly held every year on London’s South Bank. Her principal contribution was an intriguingly peculiar automaton, which seemed afflicted by some mechanical version of Parkinson’s Disease. The contraption in question (I forget its title) consisted of a sort of ice-pick attached to a motorised pendulum, suspended from the gallery ceiling. The mechanism whirred and clicked but every time that it seemed on the point of release the ice-pick would stutter to a halt and hang, quivering, in the air. Then, all of a sudden, it did release, to startling effect. A sudden, flashing glint of silver was followed by a loud splintering noise, as Horn’s pointed hammer crashed into the gallery wall just a few inches from my face. I remember exchanging glances, but no words, with a gallery attendant. This was the press preview. A few days later, returning to the gallery, I noticed that the work in question had been roped off.

Rebecca Horn is back at the Hayward Gallery for the summer, but this time she has been given the run of the whole place. “Bodylandscapes” is a retrospective exhibition, spanning the past four decades of the artist’s career. The show has not been arranged chronologically, but in sequences that appear calculated to evoke a series of different moods, from the eerily sinister to the elegiac. The result resembles a fine art version of an fairground experience, like taking a ride on some slightly creaky old-fashioned ghost train – but one freighted with all kinds of heavyweight literary and mythological references. Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka and James Joyce are obscurely alluded to, in sundry automated sculptures that incorporate copies of their works – opening and shutting them with mechanical hands, spattering them with paint splashed by automated paintbrushes, and so on. But the overall balance of the presentation is skewed towards Horn’s more recent work, much of which takes the form of large and somewhat hectically scribbled drawings. Even in the domain of mechanised sculpture, she has increasingly taken to working with lights, mirrors, and reflections, rather than the eccentric, heath-Robinson-like machinery for which she is principally known.

Horn has also taken up a career as a poet, of sorts, to judge by the liberal quantities of rather portentous doggerel that the visitor encounters in the various spaces of the exhibition, either in the form of wall texts or as words projected in light. Brief quotation suffices to convey the general effect: “In the night words are wandering / Like shadows inside the head / Gliding across the marble water / A golden rod interrupts the flow / Writing in reverse upon black water / Redeems sentences through waves.” Perhaps surprisingly, given the customary health and safety implications of her work, there are relatively few cordons and barriers in evidence. But not many of the works require them. Perhaps this signals a certain softening of approach, on the artist’s part.

Horn came of age in the 1970s, when her work trod a fine line between performance and so-called “body art”. Before specialising in the production of sculptural automata, she herself animated her own creations. These mostly took the shape of outlandish pieces of headgear, or other thoroughly impractical articles of dress, rather like twentieth-century versions of the theatrical costumes worn by the performers of Renaissance masques. She would wear long black finger extensions that made her resemble a person who had not cut their nails since childhood; or she would don a great horn, fashioned from a piece of stuffed white fabric ingeniously strapped to her head, and pose in it. Occasionally, she would film her activities while in costume – standing naked in a field wearing her unicorn’s horn, for example, or dabbling her long black fingernails through a willing accomplice’s hair. Some of these films can be seen, at the Hayward, in a projection room that has been installed on the second-floor roof. Such gestures may have been a feminist’s metaphors for the entrapment of women through fashion or through symbolism. The unicorn, according to medieval legend, would only lay its head in the lap of a virgin, so perhaps by playing the part of both unicorn and virgin, Horn was not only punning on her own surname but intending to comment on the confinement of women within such stereotypes.

An element of fetishism runs through much of her work, manifest in the knives, the high-heeled shoes and the sundry rubberised appendages that appear in many of her motorised assemblages. In one of her earliest filmed performances, Pencil Mask, she contrived to turn the very act of creating art into a form of human bondage. Strapped into a leather mask that extruded pencils from every interstice, she filmed herself rubbing her face obsessively from side to side against a piece of paper pinned to a wall in front of her. The fruits of this deliberately perverse method of draughtsmanship amounted, inevitably, to nothing more than a welter of incoherent marks. Horn may have meant to poke fun at the Surrealists’ obsession with what they called “automatic drawing” – drawing that would bypass the usual stratagems of the conscious mind and hand, to produce something resembling diagrams of subconscious thought.

The walls of the Hayward are hung with a considerable acreage of Horn’s drawings. In fact the title of the exhibition as a whole, “Bodylandscapes”, also happens to be the generic title chosen by the artist for these recent works, done in pencil with the occasional wash or spatter of paint. They are both repetitive and ineloquent, being formed of multi-coloured clouds of scribble from which, very occasionally, some distant form appears as though half-struggling into visibility. Some have titles, such as Saint Sebastian or On the Cross, which hint that the artist has cruelty or atrocity on her mind. A drawing entitled Painpaper bears a fragment of the artist’s handwriting, declaring it to be a “rose for wounded Iraq”.

A similar air of portentousness hangs like a pall over many of the sculptural installations in the exhibition, especially the more recent ones. Book of Ashes, created in 2002, is said to have been made “in response to 9/11”. It consists of a mechanised gilded rod dabbling in a tray of ashes, as if striving to write a message for posterity. A metaphor for man’s inability to learn from the mistakes of history, it still resembles a cliché turned into an art object. The most recent of all her installations is entitled Cinema Verite and is formed from a shallow drum of metal filled with water – a plinthed puddle – at which a spotlight is directed, casting a bright watery reflection on the wall beyond. At regular intervals, a metal finger descends to disturb the surface of the water, throwing the reflection haywire. The piece is accompanied by the throbs and pulses of some mood music designed by the New Zealand composer Hayden Chisholm. The effect is at once soothing, solemn and rather vacuous.

Tracey Emin, the most blatantly self-obsessed British artist of her generation, is showing new work at the White Cube Gallery. Principally famous for exhibiting her own unmade bed as a work of art, for creating a tent embroidered with the names of all her lovers, and for having drunkenly enlivened an otherwise stultifyingly dull live television broadcast of the Turner Prize a few years ago, Emin has also taken up weekly journalism in the form of a regular column for The Independent. “My Life as a Column” is a sort of one-woman Pseud’s Corner, so excruciating as to constitute compulsive reading, in which the artist’s meandering musings on such big issues as child abuse or the world at war always seem to come back to the subject of her own deep inner pain and near-mystical powers of creativity. Emin’s new show, succinctly entitled When I Think About Sex, may surprise those who have written her off as one of the more spectacularly obnoxious narcissists currently in the public eye. Against the odds, it is full of all kinds of poignant and rather beautiful things.

The exhibition is dominated by a sculpture in the form of a rickety miniature rollercoaster, which like all of her works is presumably intended as a piece of metaphorical autobiography. The fragile, teetering form of this object has its counterpart in the frail, cursive line of her draughtsmanship. This is an exhibition full of drawings, many of them on an extremely intimate scale, which collectively amount to an imperfect, fragmented journal of one woman’s sexual dreams and obsessions. Even when the artist works on a larger scale, as she does in a number of works where her drawings have been none too perfectly needleworked into old blankets or coverlets – the bed being the fons et origo of Emin’s work – the results still feel intimate, like blurted confessions or memories. A vulnerable, naked woman is the principal motif, often posed awkwardly, almost as if hobbled, her form surrounded by or enmeshed in words, drawn, painted or scribbled. The words are Emin’s but they could be almost anyone’s, because they are presented in such a disembodied, fragmented way. Often these snippets of text suggest abandonment, sorrow, or self-recrimination. The colour scheme of the works as a whole is muted, generally whites and greys, and so is their frame of reference. Emin will never exactly be a self-effacing artist. But here she has, to an altogether surprising and effective extent, managed to transcend her own formidable ego.
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source: blognaver

굳이 수식어를 붙이자면 독일의 대표적인 여성 예술가라고 할 수 있는 레베카 호른(Rebecca Horn, 1944~)을 한마디로 정의하기란 결코 쉽지 않다. 현대미술의 흐름에 대해 이야기할 때 빠짐없이 거론되곤 하지만, 그녀의 작품 세계는 미술이라는 한정된 영역을 뛰어넘어 다양한 장르로 뻗어나가고 있기 때문이다. 시공을 초월한 상상력을 통해 전 세계에 충격을 주고 있는 그녀의 인생과 작품세계에 대해 알아보자.

다양한 경험으로 가득했던 어린 시절
레베카 호른은 1944년 독일 미켈슈타트에서 의류업자의 딸로 태어났다. 아버지의 사업 때문에 유럽 각지를 떠돌아다니며 살아야 했던 호른의 어린 시절은 무척 다채롭고 자유로웠다. 그녀는 화려한 패션쇼, 만국박람회 등이 열리는 대도시들을 두루 돌아다니며 다양한 문화가 교차하는 분위기 속에서 어린 시절을 보냈다. 유럽 각지의 서로 다른 문화의 차이에서 오는 이질감은 그녀에게 자유로운 환상과 상상의 세계로 가는 길을 열어주었다.
호른은 화가였던 삼촌을 통해 처음 미술에 관심을 가지게 되었다. 삼촌의 자유분방하고 화려한 삶은 어린 호른의 동경의 대상이었다. 세살 때부터 가정교사에게 미술을 배우기 시작한 호른은 대부분의 화가들이 그러하듯 아주 어린 시절부터 미술적 재능을 인정받았다.

인생 없이는 예술도 없다
호른은 대학에 진학할 무렵에 부모님의 권유로 미술이 아닌 경영학을 잠시 공부하기도 했지만, 곧 경영학은 자신의 길이 아님을 깨닫고 함부르크 미술학교에 진학해 미술을 공부했다. 실험적인 발상을 중시했던 이 학교의 자유분방하고 예술적인 분위기 속에서 호른은 자유롭게 자신의 예술 세계의 기초를 다질 수 있었다.
대학시절 호른에게 가장 큰 영향을 미친 것은 지도교수의 추천으로 읽게 된 쟝 쥬네의 ‘도둑일기’라는 책이었다. 사생아로 태어나 파란만장한 삶을 살았던 쟝 쥬네의 자전적 방랑기인 ‘도둑일기’는 호른에게 인생을 모르고는 예술이 만들어질 수 없다는 사실을 알려주었다. 훗날 호른은 이 책에 대해 다음과 같이 회상한다. “그 책은 계시와도 같은 것이었다. 그 책으로 인해 내 인생은 완전히 바뀌게 되었다.”

병원에서 얻은 깨달음
고난은 때때로 인생의 자양분이 되기도 한다. 호른의 경우도 그렇다. 호른은 1967년 졸업 작품을 준비하는 과정에서, 마스크를 쓰지 않고 폴리에스테르와 유리섬유 등 유독한 물질로 작업을 하다가 폐 중독증에 걸려 거의 죽기 직전까지 가게 됐다. 1년간 세상과 격리된 채 요양원에 누워서 지내야만 했던 호른은 그 곳에서 육체라는 감옥에 갇혀 있는 자신의 현실을 인식하고, 예술을 통해 육체를 초월하고자 하는 열망을 품게 되었다.
퇴원 후 그러한 열망은 행위예술로 승화되었다. 호른의 초기 작품인 ‘Body Sculpture’시리즈는 밴드로 참가자들의 몸을 감싸고 잡아 당겨 그들의 신체 감각을 한껏 끌어올리는 행위를 통해, 치유와 극복을 이야기하고 있다.

새로운 자아를 향한 몸부림
호른이 활동을 시작하던 1970년대의 미술계는 포스트모더니즘의 물결이 휩쓸고 있었다. 절대적 진리를 거부하고 대중성, 자율성, 다양성 등을 추구하며 기존의 질서나 제도에 저항하는 예술 사조인 포스트모더니즘은 미술, 문학, 연극 등 여러 예술 장르의 패러다임을 바꿔놓았다.
화가들은 캔버스에 그림을 그리기를 멈추고 신체미술 및 행위예술, 설치 미술 등 새로운 시도를 시작했다. 호른 역시 시대의 흐름에 발맞춰 주로 신체를 소재로 작품 활동을 펼쳤다. ‘Body Sculpture’시리즈 중 한 작품인 ‘연장된 팔(Arm Extensions, 1968)’은 초기의 대표작 중 하나이다. 그녀는 스스로의 몸을 재료로 삼아, 벌거벗은 채 붕대와 같은 천으로 신체를 감싸고 팔에 붉은 튜브를 연결해 팔의 길이를 바닥에까지 확장시킴으로서 만들어진 자아의 모습에서 벗어나 새로운 자아를 스스로 창조했다.
또한 연금술과 초현실주의에 큰 관심을 가지고 있었던 호른은 여체를 검은 깃털로 덮거나 머리에 마치 유니콘처럼 뿔을 다는 등, 인간과 동물을 혼성시킨 듯한 새로운 생명체를 창조해 인간과 주변 환경과의 관계에 대해 이야기하기도 했다.

다양한 장르를 넘나들다
1970년 말경에 접어들면서 호른은 인체 대신 움직이는 기계를 이용한 설치작업을 발표하기 시작했다. 그녀는 벽에 잉크를 뿌려 자동으로 그림을 그리는 ‘청색 페인팅 기계(Painting Machine Prussian Blue,(1999)’, 앙상한 뼈대를 화려한 깃털들로 뒤덮은 ‘공작 기계(Peacock Machine, 1982)’ 등을 만들며 인체의 한계를 영속성을 지닌 기계로 보완하고 모든 사물에 영혼이 깃들어 있다는 사실을 주장했다. 또한 호른은 전문 배우를 캐스팅해 직접 영화를 제작하기도 했다. 처음엔 기록의 차원에서 자신의 작품을 촬영하다가 차츰 영화라는 장르에 관심을 가지게 된 호른은 ‘데어 아인탠저(Der Eintanzer, 1978)’, ‘라 페르디난다(La Ferdinanda, 1981)’ 등 초현실주의적인 부조리극을 몇 편 발표했다.

‘레베카 호른’이라는 이름은 종이 위에 고정된 문자가 아니라 어떠한 모양도 될 수 있는 유동체이다. 그녀는 한 시대를 풍미하며, 다양한 매체를 넘나들며 인간 한계의 극복과 소통에 대해 이야기했다. 70을 훌쩍 넘긴 나이에도 불구하고 베를린, 뉴욕, 파리 등을 오가며 바쁘게 상상력을 펼치는 레베카 호른의 작품 활동은 아직 현재진행형이다.

※참고문헌
박창은, ‘레베카 혼(Rebecca Horn)의 작품에 관한 연구’, 홍익대학교 대학원 조소과 조소전공 석사학위논문, 2003
[출처] 자유로운 상상력으로 인간의 한계를 극복한 예술가 레베카 호른 |작성자 비닐