Roni Horn’s Nine Liquid Incidents 2010-2012
As part of the 19th Biennale of Sydney at the M.C.A.
Amanda Saker
Limits of Control
Nine blue beasts cling to the polished concrete floor as if they were formed there eons ago. Like desert mirages the solid cast-glass basins bow and warp, shifting with the light: glossy and tempting, unyieldingly dense. All-knowing they cheekily wink up at us, glimmering in the skipping streaks that unveil a settling of dust. The room heats and cools me, as if a splintering icy rain had chiseled the perfectly frosted molten pools at my feet - warm glue syringed upon a doll’s porcelain cheeks. The serene non-place leaves me in a limbo lampoon as I grapple with the oxymoronic overload.
Pulled in by Roni Horn’s fictitious objects, we meet with unexpected realities, challenged to ‘resolve the juxtaposition between their solid form and aqueous appearance,’ as critic Nicholas Forrest so neatly puts it. Malleable and brittle, wistful but there, uncannily naturalistic and contrived at once. The severe materiality and flighty intangibility of Horn’s installation provides a delightful sensory mouthful. Incidents, does not simply tickle the guise of pure form; it falls much deeper into a language of the cube, the surreal, and the unconscious. We enter into a discourse not dissimilar to that of Duchamp’s Fountain: the neutrality of the artwork and of water itself undeniably implies a merging of genders - a certain androgyny in a sterile space where we try to find ourselves.
This visual punnery leaves us in a state of otherworldliness. We find ourselves dancing with Horn’s elegant tricksters, dipping our brims in their pseudo-waters. Each cast’s overhanging lip whimpers and wavers and I find myself yearning for that which I cannot have. Drawn to the giver of life and the uncontainable flood to come. I blow at the glazed rim: tip, please tip, and then drip on the perfectly waxed floor. It is the materiality of Horn’s work that excites this Cartesian doubt, twisting our experiential realities as we try to stabilise the epistemological shudder. A tactile experience versus a visceral one where the phenomenological and the ethereal collide and cascade, spraying across the room - each particle clinging more desperately to the other.
Fantastically familiar, the strategically placed ‘natural phenomena’, destabilise our supposed relationship to it, our control over it. This re-injection of nature into the gallery space, simultaneously denies us of the very real it suggests. Incidents invites us to examine not only our own identities, but that of the natural world of which we so insistently separate ourselves. We must see beyond the glass, as it were, to the infinite trajectory of the unknown: to understand more clearly the uncontainable. Horn’s flossy hulks entice us into a yawning well where a lack leaves us longing for the living. The unexpected spectacle of the natural world brings us closer to our dreams than reality.
Roni Horn, Nine Liquid Incidents, 2010-12, solid cast glass sculptures, Installation view of the 19th Biennale of Sydney, 2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia/ Photo: Amanda Saker
