In a time where the current flow favours a rationality-driven focus regarding the thought of enhancement one can with much delight turn to the Body Extensions series from the German artist Rebecca Horn for a different take on the matter.
The body sculpture “Unicorn” (Einhorn) from 1970 challenges the mainstream impression of interaction between subject and enhancement by constituting a break with the purpose/solution-driven augmentation. “Unicorn”, with its impractical design features, is not meant to smoothen out the subject’s interaction with the adjacent environment but on the contrary make us much more conscious to our surroundings by increasing our vulnerability and, as product hereof, our vital imperfection.
Leave a Reply
6 Comments on "An extended horn towards our surroundings"
As a big Rebecca Horn fan I’m very glad you’re devoting her a post! I really like your reading of the ‘Body Extensions’ project as a series of unhandy body/prosthesis-assemblages which, through their obstructiveness, irritate – like an embodied early glitchr – (smart) environments through which the proper subject has to pass easily and smooth. Be it a horn to balance or a pencil mask, the sculptural extended body has to learn anew to move, to pass and to identify itself.
I wonder if you have any thoughts about why the artist leaves her breasts bare but wraps her torso with white strips. It seems to me to be part of her act of imperfect imitation. The geometrically shaped “horn” certainly does not look like any animal horn and it’s also clumsily and conspicuously strapped on her head; the strips on her torso also don’t quite invoke the stripes of a zebra. Perhaps this is her way of deriding the enterprise of xeno-transplantation or more fanciful dreams of seamless human-animal hybridity.
Hi Haiyan! Thank you for you spot-on comment. I think you are absolutely correct in analyzing the “clumsy imitation” as a very deliberate tool in ridiculing the idea of the smooth transition between human/animal or human/surroundings. One of the most beautiful aspects regarding the notion of posthumanism lies, in my opinion, not in the smoothening or problem-free transition from one entity to another, but in all of the entities co-existing at once autonomously and respectfully intertwined in the messy and sublimely grotesque mesh that is the ground under our feet.
Nice example and caption. I like your reading of Rebecca Horn’s extensions as a break with the purpose/solution-driven augmentation, but at the same time, I have some reservations when it comes to reading “Unicorn” as an example of a work of art that stresses our vital imperfection. Doesn’t the fact that Horn has chosen an imaginary animal that symbolizes pureness, potency and power invite to different reading? Isn’t it still a striving towards perfection/enhancement, just in another way than we traditionally understand it (as enhancement of features that we already have)?
Great point, now I see what you mean, thank you very much for the elaboration!