Island Zombie

 

Last year Princeton published this collection of Roni Horn's Iceland writings. The cover image beneath the yellow titles is one of 23 visual editorials she published in 2002 for the weekly culture supplement of Iceland's national daily newspaper (you can see the pinkish paper and newsprint showing through from the next page). It is an interesting choice for a cover as you might expect them to have used one of Roni Horn's photographs, but then this is a collection of her writings. Reading them with few of the familiar images of rocks, pools, icebergs and horizons puts more emphasis on the quality of her words. As a collection of brief reflections they reminded me of other kinds of poetic place writing I've enjoyed, like the Paul Claudel I highlighted here in May. 

The section of Island Zombie covering her newspaper contributions includes some poignant longer pieces written twenty years ago, at a point when Iceland still had a choice over whether to preserve its landscape from development. The book also has a speech ('My Oz') and samples from her 'Weather Reports You' project in which Icelanders relay terrifying stories of high winds, treacherous seas and blizzards. But the bulk of the book is given over to writings that formed part of Horn's art practice, spanning her years in Iceland, beginning with the texts already published in To Place IV: Pooling Waters (1990-91) and adding others written during the last thirty years.

Some landscapes...

• On a foggy day in 1979 at Bakkafjörður, she discovered a white stone among the dark rocks on the bank of a stream. The white was almost transparent and it looked as if something dark lay within, a mystery. Writing in 2018 she rolls the stone in the palm of her hand, 'whole, complete, not a fragment of something else.' Over the course of her lifetime, handling the stone, she herself has been a mildly erosive force and feels 'the softness and smoothness of this white rock intensifying over years of intimacy.'  
  

• At Dyrhólaey, where she lived for a time in the lighthouse, the cliffs form a city of birds. Approaching the edge, all is quiet but for the sound of the wind, until she reaches a point where suddenly the cacophony of bird sounds emerges, a noise that 'is part of the landscape here, like the bluff itself. It doesn't go away. When I arrive, I become the audience for this geologically scaled performance.' 
  

• Standing on the mountain Kerlingarfjöll one warm evening she finds the atmosphere focuses the view like a lens, with everything visible through the thin air. 'Looking around I can see the ocean way out there, in all directions,' she says, reminding me of a magical flight of fantasy in Virginia Woolf's Orlando. She can see each pebble and flower, each lava field and river, simultaneously and without hierarchy. The way the landscape is taking shape is visible in its boiling water, lava fields and tectonic plates and all of this 'takes you one step deeper, beyond appearance, beyond the simple visibility of things.'

Becoming a landscape

I have been asked by another Roni Horn enthusiast whether I'm going to post about the Tate's 'Roni Horn a.k.a. Roni Horn' exhibition... Well, here goes, although as I start to write this I can't help recalling that the subject of landscape barely featured at the discussion of her work at Tate Modern, and wondering if I've therefore already given her disproportionate attention here (with The dark river, Thicket No. 1, Hot Pot at Strútur, To Place: Verne's Journey and Frequently the woods are pink). And yet I think my earlier posts have so far only touched on a few aspects of what seems a fundamental connection.

The two-volume exhibition catalogue has a Subject Index which includes entries on 'desert', 'rocks', 'island', 'trees', 'water', 'weather'. These were written by Roni Horn and other commentators like Tacita Dean and Hélène Cixous (some previously unpublished). There's one entry for 'landscape': 'The point at which something becomes too complex to be itself only. This is the place where a thing becomes a landscape'. So for Roni Horn, landscape is more than just a view. This is a quotation from notes accompanying a set of photographs, Becoming a Landscape (1999), which connects close-up portraits with shots of geothermic pools in Iceland. I'm intrigued by the way she blurs landscape with other forms like 'portraiture', as in You are the Weather about which she has said "I did have a very specific idea that I wanted to see if I could elicit a place from her face—almost like a landscape."

In connection with You are the Weather, Roni Horn has made a collection of 'adjectives that apply to humanity and the weather equally'. Bad, balmy, beautiful, bitter, breezy, bright, brisk, brutal etc etc. These words were embedded in the floor for an exhibition in Munich (1996) and the same thing has been done this year at Tate Modern (in the room which showcases her artist books). They are also selling Roni Horn T-shirts with some of these adjectives on them: balmy, moist, dull. Hm... not sure what I think of these... but I do love the exhibition and would highly recommend it.

Frequently the woods are pink

There was much excitement in our house when we heard that Tate Modern is going to do a Roni Horn exhibition this year. I have tickets for the talk on 25 February so should be able to report on any interesting landscape-related discussion. One of the first series of hers that caught my imagination was the 'Key and Cue' works, like I'm Nobody! Who Are You? (1994). These each use just the first line from one of Emily Dickinson's 1,775 short poems. Some other examples from the series which have a landscape connection are:

THE MOUNTAINS - GROW UNNOTICED

AIR HAS NO RESIDENCE, NO NEIGHBOR.

TO MAKE A PRAIRIE IT TAKES A CLOVER AND ONE BEE

FREQUENTLY THE WOODS ARE PINK -

These fragments have a sense of containment but retain a quality of openness and complexity. When you read the whole Emily Dickinson poem it can seem a slight anticlimax...

FREQUENTLY the woods are pink,
Frequently are brown;
Frequently the hills undress
Behind my native town.

Oft a head is crested
I was wont to see,
And as oft a cranny
Where it used to be.

And the earth, they tell me,
On its axis turned,—
Wonderful rotation
By but twelve performed!

But I wouldn't say this about many of them - few of us would prefer the fragment to this famous poem...

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, -
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

To end, here are a few more Emily Dickinson first lines, which I've extracted from the index to her collected poems, each suggestive of a landscape:

THE MOUNTAINS STOOD IN HAZE
THE CLOUDS THEIR BACKS TOGETHER LAID
A LANE OF YELLOW LED THE EYE,
A FIELD OF STUBBLE LYING SERE,
A WILD BLUE SKY ABREAST OF WINDS
FOUR TREES UPON A SOLITARY ACRE
THE HILLS IN PURPLE SYLLABLES
HOW THE OLD MOUNTAINS DRIP WITH SUNSET
MY GARDEN LIKE THE BEACH

To Place: Verne's Journey

In a 1995 interview with Claudia Spinelli, Roni Horn discusses her book To Place: Verne’s Journey (1995), with its photographs of the Icelandic landscape described by Jules Verne in Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864). She says she wanted to reveal Verne’s fictional narrative “as the reality it is. Up to that point I was working with an intuition about the paradox of fiction. In the book the opening shot is an aerial photograph of the glacier which covers the entrance to the center of the earth. I zoomed in on the ice and cut to ground-level. At ground level you see all of these extraordinary geologic events. Now these are all things that just happen as a part of the mundane in Iceland. Verne's fiction is not a fiction at all. What he described, the entrance, the journey and I estimate the center of the earth as well, actually exists. But he was never in Iceland. So for him it was pure fiction.”

Journey to the Centre of the Earth (like the science fiction that followed it) is a blend of realism and fantasy. Verne’s descriptions of the geology of Iceland create the conditions for suspension of belief as Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel begin their descent. In the OUP translation of Verne’s novel, they arrive in Iceland on page 47 and begin their descent into Snaefells on page 86, so almost a fifth of the book involves their journey through the ‘real’ landscape of lava flows and mountains. Eventually, when they reach the peak of Snaefells after an arduous climb, Axel looks down at the island spread out below him, with its deep valleys, endless glaciers and over to the west, the vast ocean. At the site of all this he ‘plunged into that high-blown ecstasy produced by lofty peaks’, his ‘dazzled eyes bathed in the clear irradiation of the sun’s rays...’ (trans. William Butcher)

In her survey of Roni Horn’s art in the Phaidon book I’ve talked about here before, Louise Neri quotes William Butcher’s introduction to Journey to the Centre of the Earth, where he describes Verne’s worldview in terms that fit Horn’s art practice: ‘An anthropomorphization of the Earth and a mechanization of the human, with the biological often acting as a go-between; an attempt at sensual “totalization” of the world; a constant scepticism; the undermining by juxtaposition, humour, and irony of any dogmatic view of existence; a metaphorization of everyday objects and ideas, which are often re-metaphorized or even de-metaphorized; a distinctive rhythm, made up of repetitions, silences, minor and major keys, counterpoint, and slow movements leading to explosive crescendos; and an innovative narrative technique, whether in the use of tense, person, point of view, voice or structure.’

Hot Pot at Strútur

The new issue of Tate etc. includes a piece by Roni Horn. Few artists write as well and I think we can assume she didn't come up with the silly title for the article! She discusses her footnoted photographs of the River Thames, which I've mentioned here before and which I think must be one of the best contemporary art works about London. She also talks about Iceland and relates her experiences to The Swimmer, played by Burt Lancaster in the film of John Cheever's story. On a simple level, the way the character experiences his environment is bound to be inspiring for landscape artists, and was the basis for the Roger Deakin book Waterlog. But Roni Horn also talks about the vulnerability of the swimmer and the way the Icelandic landscape offers a mixture of bleak emptiness and sheltering protection.

"I first went to Iceland in 1975. I travelled with a tent, hitchhiking and walking, then on a motorcycle, but still with a tent. So I was outside most of the time, and I often found myself heading for the hot springs. They became a kind of shelter. They took the form of hot pots or swimming pools. Sometimes they are located in remote places, so I found myself pool-hopping to these exquisite faraway places and spending a lot of time in the middle of nowhere, outside, in hot water. It struck me at the time as a great combination. When I look back, I am reminded of Burt Lancaster in the film called The Swimmer. He is divorced and having had the time of his life for years, he now wants to go home; he's alone. And so he is swimming home, pool-hopping home, and home is somewhere in suburban Connecticut. And you watch him going from one backyard to the next. He was in a swimsuit throughout the whole film and you felt his sensitivity to everything, and his vulnerability. So here I am, looking for shelter. and those pools were a great form of shelter. I was in these amazing settings, way out there in the thick of it, so to speak, alone but protected. Sometimes in the middle of a desert. For me, a desert is confrontational in a way, because it's so dogmatic. But here it was a totally sensual experience. And that happened a lot in Iceland, where you were in places that you would normally associate with difficult, aggressive things and they became alluring and attractive, comforting really."

The cover of the excellent Phaidon book on Roni Horn, showing the Hot Pot at Strútur (1991)

Thicket No. 1

Tate Modern’s re-hang includes their Roni Horn piece, Thicket No. 1 (1989-90), an aluminium slab which incorporates a line from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace: ‘To see a landscape as it is when I’m not there’. What you first see is a minimalist object with some black bar-code markings on two sides. Inspection of these reveals the text on the sides of the slab, text which was there all along but not visible, like a landscape when you are not there. As Roni Horn has said in an interview with Jan Howard in 1994, “Thicket No. 1 gives the viewer an inkling of not being present. The contradiction lies in the instinctive weighing of that inkling against the reality, the certainty, of one’s physical presence in that same moment.”

Roni Horn also used this quotation in her book To Place – Book I: Bluff Life (1990) which featured drawings made at Dyrhólaey in Iceland. There she was trying “to be present and to be a part of a place without changing it” whilst knowing that “such a desire can only be thwarted”. It may be literally impossible, but somehow to see a landscape as it is when we are not there seems a valid motivation for landscape art in a world where our presence is increasingly felt everywhere.

[Incidentally, Thicket No. 1 was presented to Tate Modern by art collector Janet Wolfson de Botton, wife of the late Gilbert de Botton, the wealthy chairman of Global Asset Management, whose hobbies apparently included an attempt to ‘recreate the private library of the French philosopher Montaigne, tracking down and acquiring the books that were dispersed after his death in 1592’ (Paul Lewis in The New York Times, August 30, 2000, as mentioned here).]

The dark river

Roni Horn, Still Water (The River Thames for Example), 1999
low-resolution photograph taken at MOMA, New York

There is a brief clip of Roni Horn talking about her river Thames photographs on the PBS site. In the full interview she discusses the paradoxical nature of water, to which her art often seems to be drawn. Water is mutable, depending on its surroundings, and yet always basically the same. Fixing an image of the constantly changing surface of the Thames is like making a portrait. It has hidden forces – strong tides – and dark undercurrents: she notes its popularity with suicides. Ultimately the river can embrace many presences and yet still retain its essential nature as simple water.

Postscript: it is now possible to embed a video clip from the Whitney Museum