Returning the gaze: Roni Horn and You Are The Weather

Gregg Evans Returning the Gaze: Roni Horn and You Are The Weather.

5/14/2011 In his book “What Do Pictures Want?”, W.J.T Mitchell, referring to the distinction between image and photographic object, states that “The longer one thinks about this topic (especially in the English language), the clearer it becomes that there is a vernacular distinction between images and pictures, images and concrete works of art, that comes to the surface in ordinary ways of speaking about graphic, iconic forms of representation. As Wittgenstein puts it, 'An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it'.”1 It is this push and pull between the perception of the image confronting the viewer, and our preconceived notions about how photographic objects function that is at the heart of Roni Horn's 1994-95 photographic installation You Are The Weather. The piece, which comprises up to 100 color as well as black and white photographs taken by Horn of a single woman bathing in various Icelandic hot springs over a period of two months, toys with the viewers experience of subject, simultaneously shifting the attention from the images surrounding the viewer back to the viewer themselves. This subtle shift in bodily perception runs throughout many of Horn's works, and it seems fitting that, when originally installed (in a weather station, no less) they were experienced alongside the installation of a black rubber floor inscribed with large yellow words that simultaneously described both human emotion and weather conditions. By utilizing photographic images as part of a sculptural installation, Horn blurs the line between subject and object – mimicking both the experience of the subject being photographed, as well as the experience of photographing that subject. Just as Horn points out the use of words that describe both human emotion and weather conditions, so too does she point to the phenomenon of being gazed at by images surrounding the viewer, regardless of their obvious inanimate material.

1 Mitchell, W.J.T., What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, P. 84, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2005.

You are the Weather Installation View, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 1996

I first experienced You are the Weather sometime during the winter of 2010, when The Whitney was holding a retrospective of the artist's work titled “Roni Horn AKA Roni Horn”. The piece, as previously stated, consists of 100 color and black and white photographs of a single woman, sitting in water within the Icelandic landscape. Horn cropped each image in almost the same, vaguely mechanical, manner – allowing for just enough of the outside environment to ground her within the landscape, but keeping the focus of each image decidedly on the details of the woman's face as she rose out of the water. Horn's palette, utilizing highly saturated skin tones and vibrant blue water to contrast the soft light of the winter landscape and ephemeral clouds of steam, has a vaguely commercial feeling to it, simultaneously referencing contemporary portraiture as well as images more commonly associated with fashion and beauty spreads. Horn gave her subject very little instruction while photographing her, only insisting that she look directly into the camera's lens, allowing her subject's expression to change alongside minute shifts in mood or weather. Looking at them installed – the images positioned along a single horizontal line which encompasses all four walls of the room in which they are hung – one gets a sense that, surrounded by the gaze of the woman in the photograph, the changes in her expression are a result of being looked at. In many ways, one begins to feel as if the changing mood of the woman you are viewing is in fact a direct result of your presence in the room. 2 Unlike in many previous depictions of female figures in public where the woman being pictured is dealt with as an object and establishes a “hierarchical relationship with the viewer” (Mary Cassatt's 2 Schorr, Collier, Weather Girls: An Interview With Roni Horn, Frieze Magazine, London, England, 02/01/1997.

painting In the Loge being an obvious, though terribly dated, example), You Are The Weather was described by Horn as attempting to “establish an equivalence between my position as photographer, the position of the subject, and that of the eventual viewer” 3.

Image from Some Thames (2000)

Horn's work, which oscillates between minimalist sculpture, collage and photography, often revolves around notions of fluidity, atmospheric conditions, and landscapes attributed with the qualities of human emotion. It seems to go along with the title of the retrospective – many of her works, both sculptural and photographic, appear as multiples, either in the form of pairs of the same sculpture placed in corresponding positions across adjacent rooms, or photographic “multiples” in which multiple images are cropped in an extremely similar manner. While Horn often uses photography in a somewhat sculptural manner – purposely placing large images in a narrow corridor so one cannot properly take in the grid in front of them, for example, the installation of You are the Weather made me reevaluate the function of the photographs in front of me in ways that other photographic pieces of hers did not immediately do. Unlike one's experience of Horn's photographs of the river Thames, which present the viewer with shadowy, undulating images of water at various points along it's path juxtaposed by the use of text running underneath each image that bear somewhat emotional descriptions of water, You are the Weather questions the viewers physical relationship to the images that (literally) surround them. I remember entering the room and feeling as if I was positioned somewhere between a sculptural installation and a series of photographs viewed over time. The 3 Schorr, Collier, Weather Girls: An Interview With Roni Horn, Frieze Magazine, London, England, 02/01/1997.

sequence of the images reinforced the serial nature of the manner in which they were made, while the manner in which they were installed emphasized both your experience of time while viewing the piece as a whole, and the sense that while one could never view the entirety of the piece that surrounded you, the subject of the photographs that wrapped around the room were always gazing out at you. In a sense, Horn's installation and serial technique simultaneously remind the viewer of the inanimate qualities of the photograph itself, while pushing against that experience by surrounding the viewer with the mediated gaze of it's subject. One becomes aware that, just as the success of each image within the piece lies in it's placement within the whole, the piece itself is entirely dependent on your experience of it. The work depends on your physical relation to it, and your experience of it depends on it's “unknown, but pervasive scale”4.

Some Thames Installation View, University of Akureyri, Akureyri, Iceland

You are the Weather Installation View, Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik

Horn talks about her work in terms of this kind of scale when discussing the installation of Some Thames, a series of over 80 photographs installed along the halls of the University of Akureyri in Akureyri, Iceland. In a way, this idea that the scale of the piece cannot be experienced at once in it's entirety; that the piece itself must be experienced as if along a path or as part of a journey – one that in many ways echoes both the position of the photographer and the subject itself, could also describe one's experience of You are the Weather. In a 1997 interview with the artist Collier Schorr, Horn discusses the scale of the piece and importance of the role of the viewer within it using similar terms. “The 4 Art 21,”Structures”, You are the Weather, Public Broadcasting Service, Premiered 09/30/2005.

photographs have an erotic edge, but no matter how much time you spend with her [the subject of the images] you will never get any closer to her. She changes and she expresses different personalities - if you isolate out the different sequences, she looks first like a hockey player, then a pouty sexy standard; she’s a multitude of things. Those changes, that range of emotion - she looks like she’s irritated, like she’s angry - were in fact provoked by the weather. It’s the sun in her eyes, it’s snowing, it’s windy.

When you are in the room with her it’s as though you’ve provoked those responses, you become the weather. For me, this work is deeply erotic in a genderless way.” 5 This fluid definition of gender

Installation View, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 1996

norms seems vital to much of Horn's work, though odd to think about in terms of minimalist sculpture.

One generally does not think of mounted photographs, solid copper cones, or glass columns filled with water as having any tangible relationship to gender. Rather than in the work of a photographer like Schorr, who's images question and undermine gender definitions by picturing men in tropes commonly associated with notions of femininity, Horn's images allude to a genderless existence through the very notion of fluidity itself. The photographs are at the same time image and photographic object – we read them directly as photographs taken in sequence, over time, but the repetition in framing and serial nature of they're subjects depiction reinforce both the mechanical nature of the camera with which they were taken, as well as the inherently mechanical nature by which the physical prints were produced.

Rather than describing a narrative experience of bathing in a hot spring, an experience of traveling through Iceland, or the experience of Horn and her subject's interactions, You are the Weather bears the marks of each step of it's conception.

5 Schorr, Collier, Weather Girls: An Interview With Roni Horn, Frieze Magazine, London, England, 02/01/1997.

Edweard Muybridge, Galloping Horse, 1878

In the same way that Eadward Muybridge's images directly reveal the means of they're creation within the images themselves, much of Horn's work, particularly within photographic pieces such as You are the Weather, exists in a state that is at once material and experience. Just as Horn describes the installation as “deeply erotic in a genderless way” 6, the piece itself is never just read as individual photographs. The notion that the work floats between the depiction of a specific experience (the subtle changes of expression read over time on the subject's face) and the experience of an art object (the repetition of the photographs as object, mounted without frames, the experience of the photograph as an installation rather than as individual images) seems a fitting metaphor for the application of Horn's ideas about gender – the work floats between imagery and object hood, masculinity and femininity, receiving, yet simultaneously returning the viewer's gaze. In that sense, the use of the term genderless to describe Horn's installation is an important description of the piece – Horn is not necesarilly working against depictions of gender, just as she is not working against traditional photographic practice; instead Horn's artistic vocabulary exists in a kind of grey area between two opposing definitions of both photography and sculpture, as well as photography and gender. To put it more simply, by toying with our preconceived notions of photographic experience, You Are the Weather opens up photography to more fluid interpretations, inverting traditional notions of viewership and allowing it's audience to function as viewer and subject at once.

6 Schorr, Collier, Weather Girls: An Interview With Roni Horn, Frieze Magazine, London, England, 02/01/1997.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (Film Still #30), 1979

Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho, 1993

This sense of working within an expanded definition of both photographic depiction and sculptural / architectural space is one that is immediately reminiscent of George Baker's discussion of the changing boundaries of photographic thinking in Photography's Expanded Field. While Baker's essay could not have had any influence on Horn's work (it was published roughly ten years after You Are The Weather was produced), it seems fitting that Horn's artistic beginnings as a sculptor, and her sculptural approach to the photographic object would have much in common with Baker's notions of photography's expanding definitions and grey areas. Baker's essay, which argues that broadening definitions of photography allow for the production or inclusion of work that would be described as photographic rather than simply described as a photograph, revolves around the notion of the expanded field of photographic practice, and opens up photography to the larger discourse of contemporary art in general. 7 By blurring the boundaries of photographic definitions determined both before and after post-modernism, Baker describes a definition of photography that is at once in crisis in it's traditional sense, yet open to new, sometimes confusing, possibilities. Baker points to the intersection of Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, whose images “would not call themselves photographs”, and the “still films” of James Coleman or Douglas Gordon, whose immensely slowed down films essentially reduce moving images to durational photographs. Baker argues that the two methods expand the definitions of narrative and non-narrative photographs, as well as static and non7 Baker, George, Photography's Expanded Field, Fall 2005, No. 114, Pages 120-140 Posted Online March 13, 2006.

static imagery in film. The open similarities and differences between the two practices push against the boundaries of photography itself, allowing us to view Sherman's photographs as an extension of film and Coleman's films as an extension of photography, creating a middle ground between both practices.

In doing so, Baker argues, we not only expand the ways in which we talk about photography, but also expand the ways in which we think about the photograph itself. By doing so, not only does the medium move forward, allowing for further growth and longevity, but the ways in which artists use the medium itself changes, opening new avenues of practice and discourse within both photographic practice and practices otherwise thought of as outside the medium.

Roni Horn, You are the Weather Installation View, Tate Modern, London, England

Andreas Gursky Installation View, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany

You are the Weather directly relates to this discourse, though it predates it, contrasting the obvious materiality of the unframed, mounted photographic objects with the physical experience of the work itself. While many photographs may function in similar ways (Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky's massive mural prints forcing the viewer to experience the imagery across time, as well as across a room, for example), Horn's use of scale to mimic an experience of intimacy with her subject greatly differs from one's experience of a Wall or Gursky photograph. The narrative manner of Horn's sequencing, in conjunction with the overtly serial manner of her technique, allow the viewer to have an experience of the photograph and it's subject on an almost one to one scale. Printed at roughly 8 x 10� each, and framed at close proximity to the subjects face, the images roughly approximate what they're subject would look like at a close distance to the viewer. Looking at each image of the same woman gazing out at the viewer, one is able to peer over her expression and other surface details almost as if

one was staring at the woman herself – though without the social connotations of staring at a stranger in public. Unlike in a Jeff Wall or Andreas Gursky photograph, where the viewer is forced to experience the image from a fixed distance, separating the viewer from the subject in front of them, You are the Weather offers the viewer a disembodied sense of intimacy. In that sense, the piece plays with Horn's sculptural training, enveloping the viewer and forcing them to experience the work with an awareness of the duality of perceived intimacy and contrast of it's obvious inanimate makeup. This is not to say that one believes the photographs in front of them are literally staring back at them, more so that Horn's manner of installation gives the piece itself a sense of aura previously associated with one's experience of sculpture or painting; the piece necessitating the physical participation with it in order for it to have been experienced.

To bring bring this back to the Expanded Field, You are the Weather is simultaneously experienced sculpturally and photographically. One's experience of Horn's images is always mediated by our common perception of our relationship to photographs, yet that experience cannot be removed from that of the object across a three dimensional space. If one were to describe You are the Weather as a portrait of a woman and the photographer making it, one's experience of that portrait would not rest on a single image, but on it's ability to engulf and surround the viewer. If the viewer has been made accustomed to approaching a portrait with a defined sense of who is the subject of the piece, by returning the viewer's gaze Horn's subject acknowledges and skews those definitions. In that sense, You are the Weather is a piece that automatically involves the viewer, that is performed by their presence and is completed by the interaction between the photographs, they're architectural surroundings, and the viewer themselves. Paraphrasing Rosalind Krauss' essay Sculpture's Expanded Field, George Baker states “[Photography] is no longer the privileged middle term between two things it isn't. [Photography] is rather only one term on the periphery of a field in which there are other,

differently structured possibilities.” 8 In the same way, Horn's photographs here function not simply as photographs, nor simply as sculpture, but something between both – they are at once photograph, sculpture and part of they're surrounding architecture. They are part of the environment they inhabit and apart from it. They are at once separate from the viewer and completed by the viewer's experience of them. In short, You are the Weather not only invites the viewer to question they're relationship to the photograph in front of them, it asks the viewer to question their notions surrounding the photographic object and depiction in the first place. Put another way, You are the Weather begs the question “What is a photograph, and in what ways can the usage of photographs be better described as Photographic?”

You are the Weather, SCALO Publishing, 1997

This play with the hierarchical relationship of portraiture changes somewhat when one experiences the piece as a book. You are the Weather, the book, lays out a number of the sequences of images used in Horn's installation in full color as well as black and white reproductions of the piece, each image of it's subject printed full bleed to the edges. While the repetition of her subject's expression and her direct gaze does produce a similarly unnerving sensation that one is causing her change in emotion, the ability to hold the book in your hands seems to undermine the nature of the one to one relationship. Whereas in the installation the viewer most often approaches the subject face to face, at eye level, the book offers the viewer a more personal, possessive relationship with it's subject.

8 Baker, George, Photography's Expanded Field, Fall 2005, No. 114, Pages 120-140 Posted Online March 13, 2006.

Instead of the piece enveloping the viewer in the same way an installation envelops them, the experience with the book allows for the viewer to hold her image in they're hands, casually flipping through the pages, controlling the speed and duration with which they confront her gaze. While it could be argued that one also has that experience within a gallery context by simply walking through the exhibition faster than usual, walking across the room rather than viewing the piece in sequence, or simply walking out of the room entirely, the serial nature and uniformity of the installation tends to guide the viewers experience of the piece itself. One can almost pull a narrative out of the sequencing when viewed in book form – Horn's subject beginning in bright sunlight, then gradually fading into the steam that envelops her over the course of it's pages. This, in some ways, is reinforced by the brief introduction of text at the beginning of the book's sequence, Horn explaining, though minimally so, the process of making the images. Horn introduces the book with a few, relatively non-descriptive sentences: “These photographs were taken in July and August of 1994. For a six-week period I traveled with Margret throughout Iceland. Using the naturally heated Waters that are commonplace there, we went from pool to pool. We worked daily, mostly outside, and regardless of the changeable, often unpredictable climate that frequents the island.” 9 Even in such minimal detail, Horn's description of the work takes the piece out of it's original sculptural context, and implies a direct narrative between photographer and subject that is allowed to remain a mystery within the context of the white cube.

That is not to say that the piece no longer works within the context of the book, more so that the inherent narrative structure of books changes one's perception of the work when viewed in this way.

Rather than encouraging a dialogue between the viewer, the objects that surround them, and the architectural space they inhabit, You are the Weather, the book, allows for more of a sense of the relationship between photographer and subject, played out across it's pages. If, as is often said of photography, photographs reveal more about the photographer than their subject, then the work in book form arguably reveals more of a sense of Horn's desire for this woman and the landscape she inhabits.

9 Horn, Roni, You are the Weather, SCALO Publishing, 1997.

Roni Horn, Dead Owl, 1998

You are the Weather Installation View, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Writing about Horn's 1998 photograph Dead Owl, curator Matthew Higgs writes that “Horn's pairing of two seemingly identical images creates a sense of deja vu, a visual echo, a stereo-optical effect in which an image is both repeated and reiterated, effectively making its point twice.” 10 This seems to underscore much of the ideas behind Horn's work, in particular with You are the Weather.

Horn, by showing the viewer a sequence of images which vary only slightly from one to the next, toys with the firm ground on which our sense perception stands. Horn makes it just as likely that one is seeing the “same image twice” as they are images taken in rapid succession; just as likely that they have angered or upset an inanimate photograph as they are witnessing photographs taken around subtle shifts in the weather. It is this play between common knowledge and immediate perception that underscore our strange relationship to photographic imagery – our desire to say “Here I am in Paris”, while always realizing that “me” in “Paris” is never anything but an impression of a real life event.

Horn's bather is neither fully real by way of the photograph, nor fully not real - she exists in real life, as does the photographic impression of her, and this acknowledgment of duplication is where the power of Horn's work truly lies.

10 Higgs, Matthew, Dead Owl, 43, Roni Horn AKA Roni Horn, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Steidl, Gottingen, Germany, 2009.