A Face Encountered

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A Face Encountered: Roni Horn’s You Are The Weather Barbara Garrie

You are the Weather is composed of a series of 100 colour, and black and white photographs grouped into sequences of between five and eight images which are then hung, frieze-like, around the four walls of the gallery space. Each image is a tightly cropped portrait of Icelandic woman MargrĂŠt HaraldsdĂłttir who was photographed by Horn over a six-week period in Iceland.

MargrĂŠt is repeatedly pictured in many of the outdoor hot springs that are scattered across Iceland, submerged to her neck or shoulders in these pools of water.

!#% -#.3-2%0%$ .-) .0-91 You are the Weather Barbara Garrie

Having been represented in major exhibitions including ‘Documenta IX’ (1992) and the ‘Venice Biennale’ (1997), and having participated in important collaborations with artists such as Donald Judd and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, American artist Roni Horn has established a reputation as a key figure in recent art practice. Since graduating with an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1978 she has built up a diverse body of work that traverses a range of different idioms, including sculpture, photography, drawing, installation and text based works. Notions of identity, place and the experiential nature of her work have been important and recurring themes in her practice.

A major survey exhibition of Horn’s work will be on show at London’s Tate Modern from 25 February – 25 May 2009.1 This essay focuses on Horn’s work You are the Weather (1996), which is probably one of her best-known photographic installations and a work that provides an interesting point of entry into her artistic practice, exemplifying many of the issues and tendencies that are central to her oeuvre. Drawing on the phenomenological writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I will situate Horn’s photography as an embodied practice that functions through an open-ended and mutual engagement between the real or literal space of the photographic object and the visual space of the photograph as image. Although these concerns have been broadly discussed by a number of commentators – Jeremy Gilbert-Rolf, Thierry de Duve, Lynne Cooke and Nancy Spector among them – there has been no direct study of Horn’s practice in relation to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty.2 My aim here, then, is to begin to consider how photographic work such as Horn’s might be understood and conceptualized within a phenomenological framework by considering three themes present in You are the Weather: the gaze, identity, and landscape.

As a photo installation You are the Weather utilizes the space of the gallery in very specific ways.

Hung at eye level, the photographs create a horizon-like effect that surrounds the viewer. The 100 images are encountered en mass, as a multitude. We are prevented from focusing on the photographs as individual images, or even images of an individual, and instead are asked to read them as a whole. What I mean by this is to suggest that it is not the image of MargrĂŠt that first meets our eyes, but rather the structure of the installation itself: the repetition of images, the alternating series of colour, and black and white, and the spaces that punctuate them.3 There is a sense of rhythm and movement that is echoed by the body of the viewer as they turn and move through the gallery.

As the viewer navigates their way around the installation, the image of MargrĂŠt comes into closer focus. We begin to look more intently at her face, noticing her changing expressions; a slight smile, a creeping grimace or more contemplative gaze. The more time one spends with these photographs the more these shifts in mood become apparent. These changes are slight but they are magnified through repetition and accumulation. For Horn, this is about activating the action of seeing.

Taking up the work of Edmund Husserl in the 1940s, Merleau-Ponty developed a phenomenological account of our being-in-the-world, addressing what he saw as the fundamental division in Western philosophy’s understanding of the human subject. In key texts such as The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), ‘Eye and Mind’ (1961) and The Invisible and the Visible (1964), he advanced the idea that subject and object are not separate entities but are reciprocally intertwined and interdependent.4 Within this paradigm, the body gained renewed significance. Merleau-Ponty’s work was heavily informed by accounts of perception but, crucially, he saw this perception as being located with the physicality of the body. In his own words, he argued that, since the same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world.

It is a marvel too little noticed that every movement of my eyes – even more, every displacement of my body – has its place in the same visible universe that I itemize and explore with them, as conversely, every vision takes place somewhere in tactile space.5 According to Merleau-Ponty, the body is our point of interface with the world. He articulates a ‘way of being’ that challenges the privileging of pure vision as our way of apprehending and making sense of the world. As he describes it, the ‘body is thus a way of saying that I can be seen as an object and that I try to see as a subject.’ 6 Merleau-Ponty’s theories gained renewed critical currency in the late 1960s when art critics Rosalind Krauss and Michael Fried looked to them as a way of conceptualizing current art practice beyond Clement Greenberg’s foregrounding of opticality in modern art.7 Although both

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A Face Encountered: Roni Horn’s You Are The Weather Barbara Garrie

took up Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the embodied subject, both Krauss and Fried put this idea to work in quite different ways. For Krauss, Merleau-Ponty pointed to a way of re-thinking art outside of the purely pictorial, allowing a reconsideration of new forms of art, such as Minimalism and Land Art that had begun to push the limits of modernist categories.8 Here we might think of Tony Smith’s imposing minimalist work, Die (1962), or Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970).

Both these works engage the viewer as physical, corporeal entities; Smith’s monumental cube dwarfs the viewer suggesting the vulnerability of the fragile human body, while Spiral Jetty exceeds the confines of the gallery space creating an outdoor sculpture which is also an environment that the viewer inhabits.

Fried’s response to Minimalism (what he referred to as Literalism) and Land Art was much more hostile. In his 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ he criticised these forms of art for what he pejoratively called their ‘theatricality.’ 9 This theatricality was ‘concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work’, and so for Fried, stood in opposition to the aesthetic experience of art.10 His answer was to posit ‘absorption’ as an anti-theatrical counterpoint that privileged painting which sought to draw the spectator into the space of the picture. The critical framework of absorption and theatricality (which is also the title of his 1988 book on painting in the age of Diderot)11 has since been the touchstone of Fried’s art historical work. Importantly for my purposes in this essay, a more positive notion of the theatrical and spectatorial gaze was presented in Fried’s 1996 book Manet’s Modernism, or The Face of Painting in the 1860s.12 Although introduced as a ‘crisis in absorption’, the striking frontality and ‘facingness’ of Manet’s work is positioned by Fried as a distinctly modernist gesture. Paintings such as Victorine Meurent (1862), Déjeuner sur L’Herbe (1863) and Olympia (1963) are marked by straightforward gazes that reconstruct the relationship between painting and beholder, a gaze which also characterizes You are the Weather.

Horn’s use of photography, then, is interesting in that it occupies a space somewhere between Krauss and Fried’s accounts of embodiment. Her photo-installations suggest a move away from photography simply as image, instead offering an experience of the photographic within three-dimensional space. This re-conceptualising of photography is one that allows the image to be read outside of, yet in connection to, traditional notions of the index or referent. This is significant since, as art historian Thierry du Duve has pointed out, ‘the trouble with photography … is that, being inescapably figurative, its content is all too easily confused with its subject matter.’ 13 While the form of the work, and the experience it creates, is very clearly also the content of You are the Weather, this form and experience nonetheless relies on the nuanced relation that Horn sets up between encountering the photographs as pictures of something or someone, and as objects that activate the space in which they are displayed.

For Horn, the viewer is an essential part of the work itself. Indeed, the work is not complete until it has been activated by the viewer. ‘I hope’ says Horn ‘that the ultimate residence of the viewer in relationship to that work is not with the object but with the experience that affirms their presence and brings them more deeply into the world.’14 In this sense, Horn’s work articulates Merleau-Ponty’s account of vision not simply as ‘a way of seeing’ but as an intertwining of seeing

and being seen. You are the Weather initiates a series of interrelated gazes between photographer, subject and spectator. These images do not solicit an anonymous voyeuristic gaze from the viewer, but rather position the viewer as subject. What we experience is not so much a reversal of the gaze, but rather a reciprocal gaze is set in motion where Margrét and the viewer become both subject and object at once. Horn’s installation, then, is a purposefully non-hierarchical one in which identity is constructed in relation to the other, not in opposition. I would argue that it is not the dominating capacity of the male gaze and its attendant subjugation of the female that is at issue here; instead there is a levelling of the gaze.

While the images of Margrét certainly have an undeniable erotic intensity, the exchange that takes place between Margrét and the viewer of the work does nothing to negate this levelling. Despite the vulnerable situation in which she is photographed – wet, bare faced, revealing her naked shoulders – Margrét maintains eye contact issuing a forthright and often demanding look, one that calls to mind the gaze of Manet’s Portrait of Victorine Meurent (1862), whose direct address similarly makes the spectator aware of themselves as a viewing subject. Margrét’s compelling gaze is intensified of course by the multiplication of that encounter. The effect of being circled by these images and addressed from every angle is one quite different from traditional engagements with the portrait.

Another aspect of the way the desiring subject is played out in You are the Weather can be found in the writing of Norman Bryson, who describes how the (female) body is eroticised in nineteenth-century French painting by disrupting the visual space of the image. He argues that

Roni Horn, You are the Weather, 1994 – 1995, 64 C-printed photographs and 36 gelantine-silver prints, 26.5 x 21.4 cm each.

Installation view, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 1996 (detail). Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London and Zurich.

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A Face Encountered: Roni Horn’s You Are The Weather Barbara Garrie

Horn, too, constructs her identity and sense of self in relation to the landscape she depicts and performs. Although composed of portrait images, You Are the Weather is a work that also speaks poignantly of Horn’s deep connection to the landscape of Iceland. In one way, Horn represents the geography and terrain of the country through the process of making the work. We know that she travelled across the country to take the images, and of course the hot springs themselves are a geological feature for which Iceland is famous. More than this however, landscape is present in You are the Weather, inscribed on Margrét’s face. Her changing facial expressions are, at least partly, a recording of the outside climatic landscape – the weather. That we can read the landscape through the images of Margrét in this way gestures toward Horn’s affinity with landscape and her understanding of it as a site of identity construction. As though invoking the words of MerleauPonty, Horn comments that ‘any sense of place is an ongoing summation of the dialectic relation the viewer maintains to the view.’19 Like Cezanne’s painting, then, Horn’s work can be seen as the outcome of an intense exchange in which both identity and landscape are constructed through a reciprocated encounter.

‘perspective lines running through flooring, windows, tables, chairs, anchor the body in its own space outside the picture-plane; however erotic the image, the anchoring functions as erotic obstacle.’15 By locating the body in an ambiguous pictorial space – through the use of amorphous substances such as water or steam, for example – Bryson suggest that the body is presented simply as posture, enacting the desire of the gaze and making the body sexually available.16 The pictures of Margrét in You Are the Weather play out this desiring of the body in just the way Bryson describes. Surrounded by water, and steam rising from the thermal pools, Margrét’s image is not fixed within space, existing rather in an indeterminate pictorial field as an object of a desiring gaze. Yet, in being seen and being desired Margrét’s gaze also, by Merleau-Ponty’s terms, gives body to the viewer as object of desire.

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology also provides a particularly salient means of coming to terms with Horn’s fascination with landscape, understanding not only the way landscape is visually represented in her work, but also how it is played out in a very physical way. As Merleau-Ponty conceives it, embodied vision involves a reciprocal connection between self and landscape. The visible landscape is neither the ‘field of vision’ of an observing subject, nor simply the sum total of external visible things. The visible landscape is instead an ongoing process of intertwining from which a sense of self as observing subject emerges. Merleau-Ponty finds a direct articulation of this idea in the work of Paul Cezanne.17 Of his experience of landscape Cezanne wrote, ‘the landscape thinks itself in me … and I am its consciousness.’ 18 This was a statement that held particular appeal for Merleau-Ponty. Cezanne is not a detached spectator of the landscape he paints. His gaze enters the landscape, and is entered by landscape in return.

Roni Horn, Pi, Pi, 1997-98, 45 Iris printed photographs on Somerset Satin paper.

Edition of 5.

Roni Horn, 1997-98, 45 Iris printed photographs on Somerset Satin paper.

Edition of 5.

Courtesy the the artist andand Hauser & Wirth, London andand Zurich.

Courtesy artist Hauser & Wirth, London Zurich.

The actual installation of You are the Weather demonstrates this relationship between landscape and identity in a more physical way. Circling the gallery space, the photographs create their own environment through the use of a horizon-like structure that demands the photographs be read as objects that inhabit and demarcate space. In the photo-installations Portrait of an Image (2005) – which features 100 framed colour photographs in twenty sequences of five images each – and Pi (1998) – an installation of 45 colour and black and white photographs, which is installed in a fixed, continuous sequence on four walls of a room, at a height of six feet – Horn employs similar presentational strategies. The photos in these works are again hung around the gallery walls in horizon-like form, the ultimate effect being the creation of an environment that has its own internal spatial logic. In You are the Weather, as with Pi and Portrait of an Image, the structure of the installation forces the viewer to move around the space in loosely choreographed ways. The spectator follows the flow of images as they run around the ‘circumference’ of the space, coming upon images one after another, almost like a filmic narrative. Of course there is no narrative thread here, just a constant though subtle shifting of expression, light and colour.

Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty has described the horizon as a vital component in our experiencing of the world. The horizon, for Merleau-Ponty, does not so much represent the end point, or limit, of our field of vision, but rather functions as the backdrop or ground against which we perceive objects. Indeed, he suggests that for each individual, multiple overlapping horizons are in play, which, taken together, constitute our experience. I’d like to suggest here that Horn’s frieze-like photo-installations replicate Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the horizon, albeit in a very literal way. The series of images that surround the viewer in You are the Weather function as a ground against which the viewers themselves become the figure. The viewer is plunged into the horizon, and thus into the work. As Merleau-Ponty puts it ‘he before whom the horizon opens is caught up, included within it’.20 You Are the Weather draws the viewer into an immersive environment where the work can only be apprehended in fragments. In addition to being led round the edge of the exhibition space,

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A Face Encountered: Roni Horn’s You Are The Weather Barbara Garrie

spectators – or participants – of these photo-installations are also pushed toward the centre of the floor as they attempt to grasp the work in its entirety. Meaningful engagement with the work, however, only ever occurs from a ‘point of view’ within the visible. Merleau-Ponty recounts this point of view experience observing: ‘when I walk around my flat, the various aspects in which it presents itself to me could not possibly appear as views of one and the same thing if I did not know that each of them represents the flat seen from one spot or another, and if I were unaware of my movements, and of my body as retaining its identity through the stages of those movements.’21 These ‘points of view’, like the overlapping horizons, work to build up an experience of Horn’s installation. As Merleau-Ponty points out, this is an embodied experience that relies on maintaining a dynamic relation between what we see and how our bodies move in space. You are the Weather thus performs Merleau-Ponty’s notion of perception and embodiment through its very structure.

You are the Weather is a complex work that grapples with a number of issues that are important in contemporary photographic practice and contemporary art in general. Horn’s interest in working between the visual and physical, where the spatial, optical and experiential qualities of photography function together is one which opens a new space for conceptualizing photography.

Horn’s practice is fascinating in the connectedness that exists between individual works. There is a continual opening out where new relations between images and spaces are constantly evolving, providing us as viewers with new ways of seeing and experiencing.

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‘Roni Horn aka Roni Horn’, curated by Mark Godfrey (Tate), is the first major exhibition of Horn’s work to take place in the UK. The exhibition will travel to the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Collection Lambert en Avignon, Avignon/France and the ICA, Boston.

See: Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, ‘Roni Horn’ in Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 218-225; Louise Nerli, Lynne Cooke, Thierry de Duve, Roni Horn (London: Phaidon, 2000); Marie-Laure Bernadac, Roni Horn, Nancy Spector, Events in Relation (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1999).

See also Thierry de Duve’s description of this installation in ‘You are the Weather’, Roni Horn, 78.

The dates given in-text refer to those of the original French publications. For later English translations see: Maurice MerleauPonty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, trans. Carlton Dallery in ed. James Edie, The Primacy of Perception, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Merleau-Ponty died in 1961. ‘Eye and Mind’ and The Visible and the Invisible were published pusthumously.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Intertwining – The Chiasm’ in ed. Thomas Baldwin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 2004), 252.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 167.

For more on Greenberg’s notions of opticality and surface see ed. John O’Brien, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4 Modernism with a Vengeance 1957-69 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

See Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT Press, 1981).

Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ in ed. Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (London: Studio Vista, 1969), 116-147. This essay was first published in 1967 in Artforum.

Ibid., 125.

Michael Fried Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, or The Face in Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). de Duve, ‘You are the Weather’, Roni Horn, 78.

Roni Horn quoted in Nancy Spector ‘Roni Horn: Picturing Place’, Events in Relation, 31.

15 Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 95.

16 Ibid.

17 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ in eds. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawler, The Merleau-Ponty Reader (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 69-84.

18 Ibid., 77.

19 Horn quoted in Nancy Spector, 24.

20 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 148-9.

21 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 203.

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