Pendulum with emu egg

05/29/12 • 2 min

Curator insights - Contemporary galleries

Rebecca Horn was born in Germany in the last years of World War II. Like Kiefer she was influenced by Joseph Beuys but it is Marcel Duchamp who seems to be most present in her machines and fabulous erotic installations, even in her strange and magical feature-length films. It was Duchamp who once said it is better to invent machines and do things to them than to do them to people. He also invented that great erotic machine-like masterpiece ‘The large glass’, also known as ‘The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even’ of 1915–23. Many of Horn’s installations take the form of kinetic apparatus that somehow enact a sexual encounter. Some of Horn’s earliest performance works involved body extensions. In ‘Finger gloves’ 1972 she created preposterously extended fingers with which she tried to pick up some objects from the floor. In another work her extended fingers scratched the walls on either side of a room; yet another included pencils attached to a face mask which she used to draw an inchoate muddle of lines on paper. All of these body extension pieces seem to somehow struggle with the impossible; the extended fingers hopelessly search out spaces and objects but fail to control the unruly world. She has also built drawing machines where long, jointed spears mechanically jerk around creating scratchy arbitrary compositions on the floor or wall. In nearly all of her works there is an exacerbated kinaesthetic sensibility. We are made acutely aware of our own space and we can easily enough slide into her dreamlike world, where our grasp on things slips away. ‘Pendulum with emu egg’ consists of an emu egg that sits on a precarious, almost invisible, support near the floor. The egg is of course a very powerful symbol of femininity and procreation. Hanging above the egg is a long javelin attached to a mechanism at ceiling height. The point of the javelin at rest sits just above the egg, almost but not quite touching it. Suddenly the javelin swings back jerkily, driven by a timed mechanism aloft. It seems destined to smash the egg as it swings past but it slowly settles down into a gently declining arc till it almost seems to caress the egg with its tip. The piece is at once threatening, humorous and an intensely erotic evocation of feminine pleasure, beyond the blossoming of Duchamp’s bride stripped bare and tickled by the breeze that ruffles her lingering veils. ‘Love thermometer’ 1988 (AGNSW collection) on the other hand is an image of male pleasure. It is a functioning thermometer with a large globe filled with red-coloured alcohol. At room temperature the fluid stays in the globe but if the object is picked up and held it responds to the viewer’s body warmth and the fluid runs up the stem, visibly engorging the form of the instrument. The enormous globe and stem of the thermometer nestle in a beautifully constructed case, like that designed for a musical instrument, while the lining is padded silk, again reminding us of Duchamp’s love of the mould and its cast, positive and negative, and the inevitable sexual allusion to male and female genitalia. © Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

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Untitled

‘In the 1950s and 60s Frank Stella was a leading advocate for American artists who were attempting to break with the tradition of European painting that made reference to the world of visual effects beyond the canvas beyond art. Stella wanted to make an art form that was complete in itself, with as little internal division of its form as possible. His early paintings were determined by certain givens, such as the width of the canvas or paintbrush, or the nature of the paint itself. Stella said he wanted to to ‘keep the paint as good as it was in the can’. He had a favourite house-painting brush 23⁄4 inches wide and stretched his canvas over stretcher bars that were also 23⁄4 inches wide – both determining the width of the stripes painted parallel to the stretcher. This structural premise can be considered as the trigger for American minimalism.’

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Void field

During the 1980s Anish Kapoor, along with his British counterparts Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley and others, significantly challenged prevailing sculptural practices. Referred to as New British Sculpture, their respective work (although largely unrelated) shifted away from the purely conceptual or minimal art that had dominated the previous decades to embrace lyricism and metaphor, and to reconfigure the relationship between subject, object and viewer. Kapoor was an influential figure in this development. From brightly coloured pigments spread over abstract bodily forms to concave mirror pieces and enormous sculptural installations, Kapoor’s sculpture is about sensory experiences. He makes sculptural forms which pervade or hold physical space and which deliberately explore metaphysical dualities such as light and darkness, earth and sky, mind and body. For Kapoor, space is not empty; rather it is full of meaning and potential, and it is this paradox that he explores in material and abstract terms. Since the 1990s Kapoor’s work has been concerned with the expression of negative space: openings and cavities which are often referred to as voids. While his earlier pigment works were shapes with luminously coloured surfaces, ‘Void field’, a sculptural installation of four craggy blocks of quarried Northumbrian sandstone, elaborates an internal space of darkness. At the centre of each stone is a deep velvety hole coated with black pigment, which figuratively signifies a threshold, a space that portends to infinity. Peering into the aperture of each stone, the space within appears beyond measure, revealing a balanced tension between the earthly weight of rock and the nothingness suggested by the dark opening, or void. Kapoor’s voids have been likened both to wombs and to contemporary notions of the sublime. About his understanding of a ‘modern sublime’ Kapoor has said: ‘I have always been drawn toward some notion of fear in a very visual space, towards sensations of falling, of being pulled inwards, of losing one’s sense of self’.1 The black holes at the centre of each stone in ‘Void field’ function in this way; their darkness is conspicuous and entrancing, denoting the amorphous margins between human perception and cognition. Similar sensations are invoked by Kapoor’s suite of prints ‘Blackness from her womb’ 2001 (AGNSW collection). Here, the void is literally associated with the womb, whose function is to harbour life. The yellows and reds that dominated Kapoor’s early work return, transformed more obviously into abstracted female sexual iconography. The aquatint bleeds into forms, dissolving and sometimes imploding their structure. In the unresolved play and metamorphosis between interior and exterior spaces and darkness and light, ‘Blackness from her womb’ is a graphic synthesis of Kapoor’s ideas. 1. Martin Caiger-Smith, ‘Anish Kapoor’, Hayward Gallery, London 1998, unpaginated © Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006