Rebecca Horn: devising intersubjective connections

Abstract

German artist Rebecca Horn (b. 1944) produced some of her most innovative and consequential work during the 1970s, yet the body sculptures she designed have not received the attention they deserve, especially when compared with her later feature films, installations, and machine-like pieces. Horn created her works during the seventies while recovering from a severe lung poisoning that isolated her in a hospital for a long time. Looking closely at the works themselves, Horn’s own statements, and existing art-historical and theoretical commentaries, this study argues that her artistic production of this time articulated a longing for communication that followed her isolation, and considers her pieces to have the potential to transcend one’s own subjectivity in order to explore that of the other and create intersubjective connections between the performers. Her sculptural costumes will thus be interpreted as enabling their wearers to reconsider the perception of their surroundings in a less rational and more intersubjective way. In this paper, Horn’s work makes powerful contact with that of her teacher Franz Erhard Walther, Joseph Beuys, and artist and therapist Lygia Clark.