The Self and the Other:
A photographic dialogue
Roni Horn
IN THE MAKING
When Tide informed me their upcoming issue would revolve around resilience and dreaming I was researching forms of resilience through lens-based media by women artists. How can visual language be a tool for structural change by moulding both strength and adaptability, I asked myself. While assessing the topic, what I found interesting is that there are forms of resilience that lead to freedom of expression by sizing the same media that are said to subjugate us. Within the neoliberal image culture of today, that media is photography and that tactic has been employed by feminist artists since the Seventies to radically transform and reimagine the possibilities of self-realisation as well as of aesthetic representation. Roni Horn doesn’t call herself a feminist, but the power of feminist-situated knowledge at times resides precisely in the subtle shades of an artist’s inexplicable view. If the question would be: “How do we resist dilution of meaning perpetuated by the current flood of image productions?” Roni Horn’s only apparently counterintuitive answer would aver “repetition”. As it is precisely through the photographic reiteration of a trope that the American artist tackles and vaporises the idea of selfhood.
You are the Weather, 1994-96
64c prints, 36 black and white prints
100 units, each 26.5 x 21.4cm / 10 2/5 x 2/5 in
Detail
As Milanese gallerist Raffaella Cortese recounted through an email conversation we had just recently, “Roni Horn has been exploring and confronting the question of identity in depth, overcoming it and tracing paths that are extraordinarily intriguing and individually meaningful”. Cortese, who has represented Horn since the very beginning of the artist’s career, in the early Nineties, captures a crucial aspect of Horn’s wide-ranging and multidimensional artistic practice. This interest stems from her personal situation, but evolves in a process of full awareness that transcends gender boundaries. I would go as far as to say that Roni Horn works starting from herself to go beyond herself – to find herself in the self of Others. That this practice leads outside of the concept of gender is an unexpected prospect, and that’s what makes it today all the more interesting. This is highlighted by her work on portraiture that has characterised her photography since theNineties, with series such as You Are the Weather (1994–96), Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert) (2005–06), and the publication Index Cixous (Cix Pax), of the same year. These works visually thematise an organic dialogue between the artist and the subject, but also inter-subject. In You Are the Weather the main subject is not a familiar face to us – she is the artist Margrét Haraldsdóttir Blöndal –, nevertheless the oeuvre has gained a certain recognition, to the point that a single image is identifiable as “Roni Horn”.
You are the Weather, 1994-96
64c prints, 36 black and white prints
100 units, each 26.5 x 21.4cm / 10 2/5 x 2/5 in
Installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, 2010
Photo Bill Jacobson
The series consists of close-up portraits of a young woman with a beautiful pale face and deep blue eyes emerging from geothermal pools in Iceland, a land that is very dear to the artist. The frames are similar but different, and form a sequence. The work is not about the subject itself, but rather about how she is and how she isn’t – a work on the constant changeability of the human being, on the volatility of time reflected in her facial movements, in the flow of a cloud over them, in the refraction of light that changes during the exposure time. Margrét is one, no one and a hundred thousand. Margrét is, as a result of a practice of mirroring, also Horn and her camera – her Self is transfigured by way of the exchange with the photographer through the gaze. Mirroring is a term that I take up from feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey and her reconceptualization of the mirror stage postulated by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in her seminal text Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) – in other words, the identification, according to Mulvey, of the female spectator with the female subject represented in cinema by the male gaze. But what if, fifty years after Mulveys’ work, we take a step further and apply the idea of identification to photography itself, and repurpose it so that it connects the artist and the subject, freed of the negative connotation Mulvey gave to the process? Removing the objectifying male gaze from the equation, what I intend to draw attention to is not a possible objectification of the subject but, on the contrary, of a generativity provided by the exchange and the process of both imitation and identification between Horn and her muse. By renegotiating the principles of the gaze, it can shift from a solid, objective tool into a documentary of a shared experience devoid of the heteropatriarchal structures. This is possible in Horn’s work through the repetition that I was mentioning earlier: not a single portrait but the construction of a fragmentary and multifaceted depiction through multiple representations. Something that we need to consider is also that the realisation of this series involves spending a lot of time alone with the subject, in an isolated environment and by keeping a certain position. Through the superficial fixity of this process, Roni Horn manages to convey to us the instability of the notion of identity.
Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert), 2005-06
Mounted and framed c prints
100 units, each 38.1 x 31.8cm / 15 x 12 1/2 in
Detail
As far as the gaze is concerned, the interpretative difficulty posed by Lacan’s discourse around it and its elusive, shifting meaning, has not prevented it from becoming a major focus of interest in visual as well as feminist studies. The French psychoanalyst asserts that the gaze, more than any other drive object, imposes a modification in the presentation of the imaginary. We owe to him the contemporary idea that an artist’s gaze is somehow manifested in the artwork, but what’s even more interesting is his further proposition that the gaze causes a visual fascination for the viewer. For Lacan, the gaze provides structure and stability to the fantasies of the Self and the Other. Looking at art is not a neutral process though, but a process in which the viewer is a desiring subject, open to the dialogue that the artwork asserts. Also, the gaze between the artist and the subject creates a relationship that is sustained by desire, and in capturing that gaze, I would add, there is certainly an erotic and transformative aspect. In Roni Horn’s photographic dialogue a female subject is usually involved, and sometimes even the artist herself, but their identities are both intangible – they both fluctuate between genders, thus exploring fluid representations of gender long before terms such as nonbinary entered public discourse. “She shows humans as organisms constantly manifesting themselves in a state of perpetual transformation” (Yilmaz Dziewior, 2024). In this sense, Horn’s practice transcends the idea of the female gaze, as this construct is based on the gendered binary opposition. But Horn defies any definition. Certainly, moving away from any forced production of femininity, the subjects, with their expressiveness, have a voice of their own. This propels the public to question the meaning of this photographic series that is as conceptually as much as emotionally powerful.
Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert) adds another element to the artist-subject-gaze equation. Huppert is an established and well-known actress. The series of portraits dedicated to her fits in with the ideal Huppert represents, and it is difficult to determine whether the actress in the pictures is herself and whether that self can even exist, or if it is a continuous personification of roles, or a personification of self – “this exercise left Horn with the ineradicable impression that Huppert had engaged in an act of ‘self-impersonation’ (Lauren Sedofsky, 2005). The artist seems to tell us that there is no such thing as an original, embracing the dynamism of post-structuralist thinking as it has been repurposed by the art world since the Nineties, largely defying unidimensional approaches. Photography, in its constant process of aesthetic mutation, is the medium par excellence that over the last thirty years has ended up representing the idea of imperfect copies, always different from the previous development. But the changeability for Horn also lies in the photographic process itself – you can start with an idea but you never really know how and what the photography will produce. In her own words: “Even if I take the photograph myself, or I direct somebody else, I have no one way to go to where I want to go. That is a discovery process for me. For example when I was working with Isabelle Huppert for Portrait of an Image, I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t know what it looked like” (Roni Horn, 2021).
Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert), 2005-06
Mounted and framed c prints
100 units, each 38.1 x 31.8cm / 15 x 12 1/2 in
Installation view, Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, Switzerland, 2006
Photo: Stefan Altenburger
Lastly, Index Cixous (Cix Pax), in the book format, is a collection of portraits of feminist writer and critic Hélène Cixous, taken by Horn in the Summer of 2013 in Paris. Cixous has extensively written firsthand about the gaze since the Seventies, suggesting that women defined and shaped by the male gaze can act up in two different ways: the first is to remain trapped in themselves, thus perpetuating the passive role that men have determined for them; the second alternative, which Cixous advocates, is to use one’s own body as a tool. By using their bodies as a medium of communication, women are able to express themselves through the medium that should have confined them. Cixous writes from the body, inviting women to “write themselves”: “Il faut que la femme s'écrive”, she wrote in Le Rire de la Méduse, “que la femme écrive de la femme et fasse venir les femmes à l'écriture” (Hélène Cixous, 1975). In the series with Horn, Cixous writes herself with her own body, with her face, which occupies, radiant and amused, all of the pages of the book. Horn, on the other hand, confronts herself with a hyper-conscious subject, a feminist thinker of sexual difference, a position far removed from Horn’s fluidity. What they have in common though, is the desire to generate a new language, even without words. With Cixous, since the subject is writing oneself, she cannot anchor herself to a supporting narrative structure, or to a figure with which she identifies. Similarly, since for Horn the subject is photography, drawing or sculpture, a permanent state of motion is generated. A sense of productive indeterminacy that the artist has interrogated, embraced, accommodated, and continues to do so in a multidisciplinary way. “I’m more of a director than a photographer”*, Horn once declared. Against interpretation. Better, against crystallisation.
*Note 1 "Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing" Trad. eng. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4, Summer, 1976, The University of Chicago Press, pp. 875-893.
*Note 2 Mark Godfrey (Host), Roni Horn, Roni Horn in Conversation, Tate Modern, February 2009.
Recommended reads: Jacques Lacan, Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je, Seuil, Paris 1966 ; Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in Feminism and Film Theory, Routledge, New York 1988, pp. 57-68, originally published on Screen, vol. 16, 1975 ; Hélène Cixous, Le Rire de la Méduse, in L'arc, 1975.
