Rebecca Horn

A performance artist, filmmaker, sculptor and poet, Horn explores the themes of human vulnerability and emotional fragility in her disquieting, often beguiling happenings, movies, anthropomorphized machines and fetishistic objects. Wearing fan-like wings, masks, long pull-on fingers or torso-enveloping feathers, her performers probe the possibilities of human flesh and the imagination. One site-specific installation, Concert in Reverse --set in a medieval German tower that was used by the Nazis to torture and execute Russian and Polish prisoners--sought to counteract the erasure of history. Horn's film, La Ferdinanda , set in a Medici villa owned by nouveau-riche industrialists, is a study of counterfeit existences. In this catalogue of an exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, Celant, a Guggenheim curator, and a team of scholars unravel the multiple meanings and mythic symbols in this German artist's restlessly experimental work. (Nov.)