“When I develop a title it’s usually a critical
part of thinking about the piece. It’s my way into
the work.”
“The viewer’s relationship to the portrait is
very erotic because there is eye contact and ambiguity,
and in my mind the ambiguity is very much about the viewer—about
what the viewer wants from the subject.”
There’s so much written
about titles. I don’t like descriptive titles. I don’t
like titles that if you don’t read them you don’t
get the piece. I want a title that can be an entrance to something
but never an explanation. A title is more about staying away
from certain things, but sort of showing you an entrance without
naming it.
When I develop a title it’s usually a critical part
of thinking about the piece. It’s my way into the work.
Sometimes (and I know this sounds kind of contradictory) it
actually comes at the end. With "Her, Her, Her, and Her...,"
I’d gone through the experience of the piece and the
title came afterwards. With "Becoming a Landscape,"
I had the title before I created the piece—I had the
understanding of where I wanted to go but I didn’t have
the place where I was going.
ART:21:
What about the title "gurgles,
sucks, echoes"?
HORN:
"gurgles,
sucks, echoes" was a phrase taken from a text
I wrote. Those drawings were mostly just pictures of words.
I don’t
really think of them as visualizing the content
of the word, necessarily, or the meaning of the word. It
was just "gurgles, sucks, echoes"—pretty
arbitrary in a way—but a little bit about holding
on to that phrase in my life. Every time I use that phrase
it’s
like eating, like savoring something.
ART:21:
How do text and sculpture function
together in your work?
HORN:
I often get questions about
text pieces like "Key and Cue".
This type of work, where you’re supposedly in this
visual realm and all of a sudden there is text, is not
easy for a
lot of people. I think of text as visual—but that,
I think, is oddly Jewish. When you are brought up with the
graven
image as forbidden, because the graven image is a metaphor
for a visualization, then it’s absolutely primary that
language would replace that role. I never questioned it.
It
was only when I was asked about language in my work, in the
finished object, that it became clear to me from a conscious
level. I never really distinguished between symbolic
visual ‘language’ versus descriptive visual ‘photograph’.
It’s pretty obscure, but I think there is some Jewish
cultural element to that.
My relationship to my work is extremely verbal, extremely
language-based. I am probably more language-based than I am
visual, and I move through language to arrive at the visual.
So I’ve always questioned whether I am really a visual
artist. You get into this situation where your ‘identity’
takes over your actual being because you get stuck with whatever
it is you resemble to other people—not who you are.
They’re not necessarily the same thing.
For example, Margret in "You Are the Weather," that
was fascinating because that was out of the context of this
Iceland series. I did have a very specific idea that I wanted
to see if I could elicit a place from her face—almost
like a landscape. It was very much a wordless interaction,
the two months we spent together. When you do a portrait,
it’s about mutual trust...that the person you’re
working with trusts you so that the image is fluent with whom
she or he is.
There’s a story about Georgia that hits the nail on
the head for me. She had seen "You Are
the Weather" as a kid. I asked if I could photograph
her. She was maybe five or six years old. She said, “Oh,
Roni, you can take pictures but you can’t show
them.”
I thought, “Wow, that’s interesting.” I
let it go. And a couple of years later she said, “Okay,
Roni, you can...” I really just recorded her in action...a
girl becoming a woman...trying on identities. That was
very
much her energy. It wasn’t orchestrated.
ART:21:
What about the title of the piece
with Georgie?
HORN:
"This is
Me, This is You." Georgia didn’t give
it to me, I took it from her. When she was very young she
used
to look
at pictures and point at different things in the picture,
kids do that. Like the dandelion, they’ll say, “This
is me.” And then the rabbit, they’ll say, “This
is you.” I just very much hooked into that. Every
time she would come to visit me we’d look at
pictures and she would pick herself out and pick me
out.
ART:21:
Are there differences between
the installation and book?
HORN:
In the case of "You
Are the Weather," I originally went into that work
thinking it was going to be part of this series of books.
So I knew
whatever I came up with already had a frame around it with
a certain identity to it. When I started looking at all
the
material it became clear to me that there was something else
here that I wouldn’t be able to get at with a book form.
That became the photographic installation, the experiential
element.
What I like about photographic installation—and
I think that what I do with photographic work is very much
informed by having been a sculptor, meaning someone who works
in the actual—is that you’re working with the
image which is the opposite of the actual. You’re
working with the thing that you can peel off of something
and still
have the actual. That idea of image introduced into the actual
was part of what I was questioning. "You
Are the Weather," which is a photographic surround,
is definitely connected or linked up with the architecture—more
or less synonymous with it—because it goes on
all four walls. You walk in and you’re surrounded
by up to a hundred images...which are one portrait
of a person who is
a multitude. So it comes in, and goes back out. The viewer’s
relationship to the portrait is very erotic because there
is eye contact and ambiguity, and in my mind the ambiguity
is very much about the viewer—about what the viewer
wants from the subject.
ART:21:
What’s the rest of this
piece about?
HORN:
Identity in general—in
a very broad sense. A moment-to-moment shift in image and
identity. In a photograph, that shift in image is all you
know from one sequence to the next sequence. I’m not
saying that those are mutually exclusive identities, but little
parts of a whole that the viewer brings in their own.
