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| Roni Horn, You are the Weather, 2002. |
The following article was published in Blown magazine (Issue 1. November 2009).
TO SEE A LANDSCAPE AS IT IS WHEN I AM NOT THERE – Roni Horn’s Iceland.
by Richard Page
This far north nothing obstructs the view. The ocean opens up an enormous, unbroken expanse of horizon up here, big enough that there won’t be any problem seeing an arc of the world. And I want to see the shape of things from among the things themselves.[i]
North
The idea of North, or ‘northness’, as something original or primal is fuelled by stories of a preserved past being re-found ‘frozen in time’; long-lost expeditionary ships trapped in ice floes; global warming releases a prehistoric past frozen into a mountain-side; microscopic cells of ‘life’ from Mars identified in meteorites fallen to Earth long ago. The idea of an unknowable origin seems to resurface in the Arctic North. There is an insistent attraction that pulls at the imagination, a fascination with its light and darkness. Traditions of landscape have always been pulled towards the idea of a point of origin; spaces that point towards an emptiness once occupied by the maternal body of Mother Nature.[ii] Iceland is not actually that far north, but its remoteness seems to pull it towards a polar north of the imagination.[iii] However, it is also part of Europe and the very fluctuations of current economic culture. It is both ‘then and there’ and ‘here and now’; its alien landscape, volcanic fractures and irrational weather fluctuations seem to erupt something primal to the surface of the present and everyday.
To Place
Roni Horn’s ongoing encyclopaedic investigation of Iceland, the book-works To Place, are a document of her ‘search for the centre of the world’.[iv] In the volume, To Place V: Verne’s Journey (1995), Horn retraces the steps of Jules Verne’s 1864 Journey to the Centre of the Earth, in which the mouth of Iceland’s Snæfellsjökull volcano is the location of a rupture in the Earth’s surface that leads directly to the core and prehistoric past of the planet. This abysmal void typifies Horn’s ongoing fascination with the country that has sustained her erotic relationship with it since 1975. Her own journey to the centre is an appropriately circular one and constantly loops back on itself in uncanny repetitions and doublings.[v]
Her nine volumes (so far) of To Place avoid the nostalgic and picturesque renderings of the landscape as something exotic or alien. Rather, they all echo a historical, cultural, natural and political psychogeography of Iceland. In To Place VII: Arctic Circles (1998), Horn travelled to the northernmost part of the island, depicting various passages of cyclical time on a geological, human and everyday scale; from bird migrations to daily TV soaps. There is no clear beginning or end, no focal point, rather the fragmented narratives interweave and deny the viewers the possibility of situating themselves at some central point of universal meaning. The traditional ideology of landscape as a sweeping panorama that embodies a unity and composure, is overthrown by an altogether different horizon.
The title, To Place, shifts the notion of Iceland as a fixed place on the map, towards a definition that embraces the idea of place as an act, as Horn says, ‘a verb, never a noun’. In To Place, landscape is a reflexive practice; in looking at a landscape ‘the view is not separate from the viewer’, one becomes the landscape.[vi] Horn’s use of photography is integral to the realisation of this effect, the repetition and reversal of images point towards the activity of photography in establishing meaning and identity. The Iceland photographed in To Place continually shifts, changes and returns; geological forms and the weather testify to the place’s unknowability. To Place VI: Haraldsdóttir (1996), a repetitive sequence of photographs taken in a variety of Iceland’s outdoor pools over a six week period, show the reddish face of an anonymous girl marked by the weather and climate itself; ‘place’ here is ingrained in her very expression that meets the gaze of the viewer.
Horn describes herself as ‘drawn to the ice’, as it is something certain and fixed.[vii] To grasp it however, to extract it as she has done in Library of Water (2007), is to witness it melt away. We come close to Horn’s impossible project in her ongoing attempts to categorise the experiential (in libraries, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, footnotes and indexes). Here, the writing, drawing and photographing in To Place, is inseparable from the exploration itself; what is recorded and preserved is the very trace of encountering the landscape. ‘Place’, in this kind of reflexive practice is located in the oblique process of transcription itself.
Horizon
Arctic Circles, according to Horn, present ‘photographs gathered around a reading of the Northern Horizon as a collection of cyclical and circular events’.[viii] The horizon is a space of the imagination, not a real location, but an illusory place where deceptive atmospheric conditions conjure up all manner of beguiling mirages. It is a place that is always ‘over there’, an elsewhere that most acutely posits our being ‘here and now’. The horizon embodies a fantasy future into which we project desires of an unreachable place that lies just beyond it. Elsewhere, Horn has said, ‘to those who know Journey to the Centre of the Earth, will know how it all ends; you’re at the centre of the Earth and there is no horizon, just one fucking vast maelstrom’.[ix]
Horn continuously circles this enigmatic island in her efforts to move towards its ‘centre’. Its gravitational pull acts to maintain a certain orbit, from which Horn strikes a dialogue with the landscape; her proximity to it must acknowledge the distance on which one’s identification is founded. Photography too, has always had a special relationship with the framing of an absence that can mark the photograph with a melancholic weight; something ungraspable around which desire can encircle. Roni Horn has returned many times to Iceland for over 30 years, but her journey will always be one of circumnavigation, returning to a place that is repeated but never the same; a destination that can never be reached.
Roni Horn aka Roni Horn was at the Tate Modern, London from 25th February to 25th May 2009.
Go to www.libraryofwater.is for more information on her work.
Endnotes
[i] Roni Horn, ‘I Can’t See the Arctic Circle from Here, 1992’ in Roni Horn (London: Phaidon, 2000). p. 94.
[ii] See the catalogue essays by Jennifer Blessing and Rebecca Solnit in Blessing (ed). True North (Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim, 2008).
[iii] Iceland is not inside the Arctic Circle and it is only 500 miles from the UK. See Roni Horn in conversation with Franziska Baetcke in Roni Horn (London: Phaidon, 2000). p. 141.
[iv] Roni Horn, ‘When Dickinson shuts her eyes, I go to Iceland’ in Roni Horn (London: Phaidon, 2000). p. 96.
[v] For example, her Dead Owl photograph, part of an ongoing series of Pairs, juxtapositions of identical objects and photographs, but the same image has been used several times in other pieces of work.
[vii] Roni Horn, ‘Keynote speech, Frieze Art Fair, 2007’ (http://www.friezeartfair.com/casts/2007/organising_water.mp3)
[viii] Roni Horn quoted in Carla Schulz-Hoffman, ‘A Language of Perception’ in Roni Horn - PI (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2000). p. 103.
[ix] Roni Horn, ‘Keynote speech, Frieze Art Fair, 2007’ (http://www.friezeartfair.com/casts/2007/organising_water.mp3)