Right at the outset of her prolific and ceaselessly inventive career, making art nearly killed Rebecca Horn. She had started to draw early in childhood, encouraged by an enlightened governess. Her passion for art grew so much that, after leaving school, she abandoned a plan to please her family by studying economics. Instead, the rebellious young Horn horrified her father by entering Hamburg art academy at the age of 19. And he became even more alarmed when, around 1967, the materials she was working with made her dangerously ill.
Horn had started making large sculptures with fibreglass and polyester. She was not alone in exploring their immense possibilities, but her near-fatal mistake lay in not wearing a mask. No one had warned her that the fumes were toxic and would damage her health. The academy was intensely libertarian and experimental: Horn’s professor had recommended that she read Jean Genet’s provocative The Thief’s Journal, declaring that it would give her all the education she needed as an artist. But the disastrous effect of the fumes ensured that her student days were cut short.
Stricken with serious lung poisoning, Horn was rushed to hospital for a relentless course of treatment and then transferred to a sanatorium. “I couldn’t stand it,” she recalled later. “It was a real nightmare. I was totally isolated from the world.” Apart from the ordeal of her medical treatment, Horn found herself struggling with the suspicion that her entire life was over before it had begun.
“The doctors could only count time in years and half-years,” she said. “After a few months they said I would have to stay a bit longer, perhaps another half year. I was very young, and for me it seemed to be the end.”
Eventually, Horn decided to escape from her incarceration. She simply got up one day and walked out. But her illness was still so severe that she could not resume her student existence. Horn was obliged to live very carefully, taking strong doses of antibiotics and sleeping for long hours. An acute sense of isolation set in, which could be combated only through art. Returning to polyester sculpture was out of the question. Lying in bed, she could only produce drawings with coloured pencils and design a new kind of art altogether: light, moveable body-sculptures, made of cotton, bandages or feathers. These haunting works, the earliest exhibits in her major exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, enabled Horn to define her direction as an artist. It was a very intense time: she later described how, “in isolation, you have this burning inside, and the imagination runs riot”.
But protracted suffering made her realise how much she wanted to break out of this loneliness by communicating through bodily forms. At first, her own sense of physical vulnerability dominated the work. She produced enormous fans which wrapped round her body like a form of protection. But as well as locking her in, they could also open out and embrace the world.
This fundamental ambiguity gives Horn’s art its potent richness. Some of the materials act like instruments of healing, and promote a sense of wellbeing. In this respect, she has links with Joseph Beuys, who was obsessed with the trauma of the Second World War. But Horn can also be related to the burgeoning of performance art. In 1970, after returning at last to the Hamburg academy, she invited a fellow female student to wear a specially built body-construction crowned by a tall unicorn horn on her head. Although the woman had reservations about appearing naked, she finally agreed. And the performance began at dawn in a forest, where she walked all day like a phantom. “Two hunters passed by on bicycles and literally fell off in disbelief,” Horn remembered. But the unicorn performance was recorded on film, and has now become one of her most enduring achievements.
She experimented with all kinds of bodyextensions. They enclosed heads in masks, thrust out from fingers or stretched in a dramatic curve from mouth to breasts. And when a friend gave her a bag of white feathers, they inspired more key works. At first, Horn could not bear to look at the feathers. She had never forgotten a terrifying girlhood experience with a headless chicken, so a year passed before she summoned up the courage to put her hand in the bag and even touch them.
But she eventually managed to make an unforgettable piece, building the feathers into a wing that covered an entire body. And another work, Paradise Widow, isolates a woman inside a feathered prison. Horn based this piece on her own emotional life: she was in Berlin, and yearned to be with someone in New York. Alongside the sadness of separation, though, Paradise Widow also conveys a feeling of pleasure at being alone.
After a while, the mechanical aspects of these early body pieces became more important. Horn started making machines capable of performing a range of movements, from the dramatic to the poignant and even comic. The most familiar, for a British audience, is the immensely arresting Concert for Anarchy, a popular work in Tate Modern’s collection. Hanging upside down from the ceiling far above our heads, a silent grand piano suddenly erupts into action. First the keyboard thrusts into space, fanning outwards into strips like an explosion before the piano’s hefty lid falls open with a jarring hum. At once exuberant and alarming, Concert for Anarchy typifies the conflicting extremes of emotion generated by Horn’s work.
She is admirably unpredictable, and employs a huge range of materials in her determination to invade our senses. An uncanny recent work, called Light imprisoned in the Belly of a Whale, reflects luminous words from black water on to the surrounding walls. Here they describe circular movements, and the words — combined with choral music composed by Hayden Chisholm — convey a feeling of primal origins: the birth of language and sound in the cosmos.
Some of the implements Horn uses in her mechanical works are frankly menacing. In Knuggle Dome for James Joyce, eight large kitchen knives are manipulated on the end of metal arms attached to a central cluster of motorised elements. The whole contraption looks baleful. And yet, as the tips of the knives reach across space and touch each other, we realise that Horn can conjure an arching grandeur from these lethal blades.
Hammers appear in another work called Ballet of the Woodpeckers. They peck at mirrors, like birds beguiled by their reflections. But then they recoil, as if shocked by the realisation that nothing is there except glass. Presence turns into absence, resulting in a sense of dismay. Such bodily concerns remain paramount for Horn, and she believes that all her machines “have a soul because they act, shake, tremble, faint, almost fall apart, and then come back to life again. They are not perfect machines.”
Horn has not forgotten hospitals, either. In 1986 she and Jannis Kounellis decided to make work in a Viennese psychiatric clinic, the Theater am Steinhof. Horn wanted to involve the patients on a bodily level, and built a Black Bath where the water rippled and then lapsed into a marble-like stillness. The patients were encouraged to walk through the water, as though taking part in a healing ritual.
Horn is acutely alive to the spirit of places far outside the boundaries of the art gallery. Before making an installation, she takes her cue from the history, mood and energy that she finds within a particular space. Nowhere more controversially than in Munster, where she discovered a mysterious round tower bricked-up in the park. She was advised not to go near it, and nobody wanted to talk about what had happened inside. But Horn persisted, and found out that people during the war were tortured and even guillotined in the tower by the Gestapo.
Defying the furore that erupted around her, she went ahead and made a work there called Concert in Reverse. While 40 silver hammers banged on the walls, like protesting prisoners from the past, lit candles were suspended in the tower and water dripped from a large glass funnel suspended in the trees above. Finally, two live pythons galvanised the interior with their sinister, undulating energy.
The work as a whole had a cathartic effect, enabling the citizens of Munster to confront a traumatic abomination they had wanted to forget. And a similar desire underlies everything Horn has produced since the unbearable time when she struggled for life, trapped and despairing inside her own poisoned body.
Rebecca Horn, Bodylandscapes, Hayward Gallery (0870 3828000), Thursday until August 29
