Mythology and Deconstruction of Art and Body.

The german artist Rebecca Horn honoured with Alexej von Jawlensky Prize of Wiesbaden.

Since the 18th of March the german artist Rebecca Horn, specialized on Installation and Performance, miracles and irritates the visitors of the Museum Wiesbaden. Her "Jupiter im Octogon"-Installation was developed for this exhibition, but to stay in this interesting german art hall, that has a long tradition of good eyes for good artists. Now in 2007 Rebecca Horn got the Jawlensky prize of the regional capital Wiesbaden, a 20.000 Euro worth prize.

Rebecca Horn is not just an artist, who represents a well known chapter of art styles and has a special worth for connoisseurs and collectors. She is the one performance and installation artist in germany, who represents in a completely individual way the american fluxus movement in germany since the USA started it. Her peacock-machines and peacock eggs, naked hikings as unicorn, films and new machine-sculptures like the "Sonnenseufzer" of 2006 discuss mythologies of body and machine, subversive poetry of mechanical and theatrical, subjective and artificial, conventional, physicalistic and sensualistic movements. Body feelings become figures in her art, effect on the body again in performances, show gravitational and other kinds of physical power in various emotional and aesthetic tensions. They link the objectual to the sensuous world in moved sculptures in a way, that other real and symbolic roles for body, mind, machine, human and other beings, subjects and objects become visible.

Rebecca Horn, who lived in Soho (New York) for centuries, is in a positive sense "un-american". At first, she continues ideas of the french tradition, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Tinguely. Furthermore, she is an Anti-Danto. The art-theory of Arthur Danto's "Transfiguration of the Commonplace" , that claims art to be the how to make something special out of dull objects, is disproved by her.

Danto starts with Pop-Art and thinks, this art transfigures really simple objects to heaven. This art's objects are, in this theory, really low and as such not to honor in art or, worse, as art. But who manages exactly that, can be judged as an artist. On the other hand, there is fluxus. This performance tradition was powered by the idea, an object loses its dignity just when it becomes art and is degraded to a fetishized visual and moneyjudged object in a museum. You may even refer to language philosophy streams of thought, that pull off the "museum theory" of language (language as a well ordered collection of words to label and "price tag" objects) and analyse in actual communication far more interesting relationships.

Such a discurs, that has long roots in german philosophy and critizises representation, mise en scene and figuration for the way they make differences between subject, object and their hierarchies, shouldn't be undervalued for Rebecca Horn's work. She is of course far too poetical, technical and suggestive to be political. Her peacock machine, other peacock objects and installations are highly decorative and transfigure their environment into luxurious wellness; her body-extensions are surely not without therapeutical, soulsmoothing effects.

It is, such, not necessary to details of the discours-theory to look at and get an intelligible concept of her art. Even the feminist approach is not a "must". But the critical, sometimes feminist content of her art keeps its presence. And irritates. Meanwhile, it grows out of its very own, well rooted pours.

For the development of german art Rebecca Horn is as important as Jospeh Beuys. As such, the Alexej Jawlensky Prize 2007 is of course not the first prize she has got untill now. But it is a very excellent one because of its great tradition. Part of this is the Jawlensky prize for Agnes Martin, the american artist who represented a very sophisticated New York School abstraction, and is still well known.

Rebecca Horn's art can be visited in the Kunstmuseum Wiesbaden untill october 2007. It's a must.