Unicorn

Rebecca Horn is a big inspiration for performace art. Because of a past, near death illness, her eyes were opened to the world of body performance. She was determined to leave to world of lonliness and communicate through bodily forms (Cork). Her fear of physical protection began to insipire her work, but she later became open to the world of healing and the human wellbeing (Cork). In her first performances, she explores the difference between body and space. She attached objects to a human body and revolved mostly between the body and the enviorment that body may have been in at the time. Later, she replaces the human body with sculptures and brings them to life. But I believe some of her best work is when she worked with the human body. The work and films she made before the sculptures really made you think of what she might have been thinking of while creating it. Like this photo above, what did it make you think of when first looking at it? All of her body attatchments I believe have a strong meaning behind it, and it's up to us as the veiwer to believe the video as what we want it to be.

Horn liked to play with a lot of diferent types of body extentions, one as the picture above displays. This was a video performace, Unicorn 1970, of a young female fellow student that appeared naked. She would walk all day "like a phantom" (Cork) through a forest. Horn stated that "two hunters passed by on bicycles and literally fell off in disbelief”. Some people believed she had an obssession with healing, and that these wraps that held the unicorn "hat" to the participants body, what a form of a bandage (Hughes). It gave a veiw that women are victims, and "a display of wounds is all you need to make a peice of art" (Hughes). Her desire for these body performances came about from her isolation from fumes she had worked with before the 70s. This made her have a strive for communication through the body, furthermore, why she had made the body attachments like the one above (Hughes).

I can, in a way image this peice of being a symbol of healing. A woman, naked walking through a field with absolutley no expression on her face reminds me of someone that may be hurting. In a way, the wraps go to show that she's trying to be healed, and unicorn hat, well, I see it being a way for her to keep herself protected from someone above her. When I say someone abover her, I see it being maybe a man figure in her life, or a bad relationship where the man feels superior to a women, therefore, above her. I really love this peice because it lets you interpret it however you wish. This obviously shows her creative mind, and that maybe she had had obsticles of her own, in which she would have liked to be protected.

Hughes, Robert. "Art: Mechanics Illustrated." Time Magazine. 13 Sept. 1993. Web. 17 Nov. 2009. <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979201,00.html>.

Cork, Richard. "Rebecca Horn invades our senses." Times Online. 21 May 2005. Web. 17 Nov. 2009. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/article524661.ece>.