Date: 09-06-1992
Owning Institution: Mayor Gallery
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999      
Subject:   Now    

A FEW years ago a German artist called nearly killed me. It was at the press view of the Hayward Annual in 1986 and I was watching one of her sculptural automata (I forget the title) go through its motions. It was a peculiar sight: a sharp metal object, like a cross between an axehead and an arrow, at-tached to the lever of a pendulum. The arm of the pendulum would seem on the point of swinging down-wards but each time it would catch and descend just a few inches to halt, juddering, in space. I remember thinking that this was probably meant to be erotic, in a vague sort of way: a phallic machine frustrated by its limited capacity for movement. Appearances can be deceptive.

I stepped closer, and was inspecting Horn's sculpture from beneath when suddenly the pendulum did swing free and the sharp object attached to it crunched into the gallery wall, embedding itself there a few inches to the side of my head. Who says modern art has lost the power to shock? I remember the startled expression on the face of the gallery attendant. We did not speak. When I saw Horn's piece again later that day, it was continuing to gouge holes out of the gallery wall. By that time it had been roped off.

Horn has a little in common with the Sharon Stone character in the film Basic Instinct. She is an erotic aesthete of sorts, a designer of bizarre and often sexually charged mises-en-scene who likes to keep you guessing. What's under the bed? Is she planning to use that ice-pick? You never can tell. She once made a sculpture called The Chinese Fiancee, a hexagonal box whose doors closed when the spectator entered (they opened again after a minute or two). This was art as bondage, or vice-versa.

All of which suggests why Horn's current exhibition at the Mayor Gallery may, by some, be considered a bit of a let-down. The show contains seven small examples of her automated art, none of which threatens you with anything more disfiguring than a light dusting of red pigment: this falls from a sieve filled with the stuff which is regularly struck by a small hammer. The ice-pick has definitely been left in the kitchen drawer. This is Horn working on the small, domestic scale; Horn being user-friendly, almost. After all, the sort of private collectors who can afford to spend pounds 30,000 on one of her works might not appreciate it if their kinetic sculpture should accidentally skewer the nanny.

But the modesty of these works - which makes them seem almost like maquettes for the more ambi-tious Gesamtkunstwerken in which the artist has recently specialised - translates into a form of clarity. When Horn works on this scale, it becomes easier to see just what she is up to, in general. She emerges as the creator of what is, in essence, a motor-driven variant of Surrealism.

Horn's mechanised oddities are deliberately imponderable. A pair of wooden shoe-trees on metal stalks mince back and forth across the gallery floor (Mr and Mrs Brown); two pairs of binoculars confront each other in a disembodied equivalent of a tete-a-tete (Dialogue of the Binoculars); a fistful of surrogate fingers punch endlessly away at the keys of a second-hand typewriter (Erika). No explanations are forthcoming, not even from Horn's phantom essayist, whose typed message to the world turns out to be the less than enlightening ''QJ!7''. The decoding is left to the audience.

Not that this is necessarily all that difficult. Horn's curious devices are carefully elaborated enigmas which - like many of the enigmas constructed by the Surrealists - usually have punchlines of a kind. The mechanism is the message. Horn's automata are sight-gags, little object-comedies that invite interpretation as metaphors of human feelings or predicaments. They declare themselves to be images of your life, of your sexual drives, of your relationships with those around you. Or at least they do if you happen to be an alienated, unhappy sort of person. Then you will be fairly likely to read the ritual procession of the shoe trees as, say, the image of a loveless marriage (together but apart on the road of life, that sort of thing); you might read those pairs of binoculars - which face each other the wrong way around: a significant detail - as an image of failed intimacy; and you might interpret that typewriter as an image of the impossibility of true communication.

Not that Horn's conception of things is entirely without its bright side. Brush Kiss is a mini-drama of arousal and consummation enacted by (very Surreal, this) a shaving brush and a clothes brush. The brushes rear up like mating insects, then mesh with one another, leaving you to contemplate a peculiar image of sexual fulfilment: a congress of bristles; a wedding of hair. You might say that the mechanics and imagery of Horn's vision are novel, but that the vision itself is not. The exhibition condenses an old modernist unhappiness with the world: a place filled with dissatisfied, yearning individuals, whose habitual condition of solitary discontent is relieved by the occasional, brief interlude of love.

Alienation takes many forms, a fact also demonstrated by the exhibition of the new work by Anselm Kiefer currently at Anthony D'Offay. Kiefer's sense of melancholy appears to deepen with each passing year, while his attempts to imbue it with a sense of consequence have sometimes seemed to verge on the desperate. The Women of the Revolution, the large installation around which the current show has been organised, is a good example of Kiefer's current strategy of self-aggrandisement, as well as a demonstration of the extent to which he has become preoccupied by the example of the most famous German post-war artist, the late Joseph Beuys.

The Women of the Revolution is deeply sombre, somewhat grandiose and extremely Beuysian. It is reminiscent, in particular, of Beuys's The End of the Twentieth Century, exhibited in the same space a couple of years ago (and now in the Tate Gallery), except that where Beuys filled the gallery with great chunks of stone, Kiefer has filled it with iron beds draped with rumpled sheets of lead. Kiefer's iconography differs from that of Beuys - affixed to the wall by each of these beds is a label bearing the name of a different ''woman of the revolution'': Marie-Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, and so on - but the conception which the work serves, and its mood, seem substantially similar. This is history envisaged as an assemblage of fragments, relics of once consequential human ideals, human fears, human actions. It is a dormitory for ghosts, resoundingly empty. At the far end of the gallery you find a vastly blown-up photograph of the artist, his back to you, walking past what appears to be an airfield.

Hard to say what this all adds up to, and doubtless at this very moment the army of scribes whose writings track Kiefer's every move are figuring out each nuance of the work's iconography. But the forms of literary or symbolic meaning attached to Kiefer's work seem virtually irrelevant - they look like alibis for his increasingly theatrical stagings of his own melancholy, for the expression of a general feeling of despondency and angst.

The paradox of all this is that it still seems inaccurate, too much of an easy solution to his work, to argue that Kiefer has exposed himself as an artist of minor significance, a figure whose reputation has been blown out of all proportion to his talent. His work is, still, undeniably impressive, and the power with which he deploys his chosen language of form - a sculptural idiom of decay and entropy, rooted in the worlds of the crypt or mausoleum - is considerable. Kiefer presents the unusual spectacle of a serious, gifted artist whose work seems poised uneasily between profundity and pretentiousness.