Roni Horn in “Structures” - Season 3 | “Art in the Twenty-First Century"

RONI HORN:
For me, there's this

very hard balance between oneself

and one's work and the audience.

Some people live in a virtual
in-their-headspace.

I don't.

I like to keep my feet
in the moving water.

My ambitions lie

very much in dialog with my surroundings.

I don't know that there's any one thing
that attracts me to water, you know?

And of course,
if you start to think about water,

it just explodes because it's
so rich and...and,

it's kind of everything and, nothing.

I almost feel like I rediscover water

again and again and again.

So it isn't me going out after water.

I think water's come in after me.

It's really much more,

much more the the the prey
and not the predator in that relationship.

The Thames has,

the interesting fact attached to it
that it is the urban river

with the highest appeal
to foreign suiciders.

One of the points about shooting
the Thames

was, was the fact that its darkness
was quite real,

that people were in fact,
it wasn't just a a visual darkness,

it was a psychological darkness,
and it was an actual darkness.

And people are drawn to it...

for that exit option.

Even in its darkness,
it has this picturesque element.

It's something about the human condition.

It's not the water itself, it's humanity’s

relationship to water,

because that's almost a human need,

that water be a positive force.

Every photograph is wildly different,

uh, even though you can be photographing
the same thing. You know, from one minute

to the next, it's, uh...almost
got the complexity of a of a portrait.

So, here we are.

We're in essentially the second largest
town in Iceland, which is 15,000 people.

and it's called Akureyri. And it has the
largest university outside of Reykjavík.

The weather's often quite poor in this area,
so you can stay inside.

You can move about once you're in there,

it's like a little interior
kind of, uh, metropolis.

And the piece is,

very large, about 80 photographs.

The idea is to lay it out in a way
that is a flow through the building.

But depending on who you are
and how you use the building, it's

a discovery process that could occur over
days, months, or even years.

I like very much the idea

that the scale of the work is unknown...

but pervasive...

not dominating it,
but setting kind of a tone for the space.

[ man lecturing in Icelandic ]

You're bringing the nature

inside the university walls.

And it makes you calm.

You see the students flow down the halls
and with the water.

So for me,
it's really changed the atmosphere.

It's like a very fine
combination of people

flowing around
and the water flowing around.

I think it's really great
to have the water inside the building.

HORN: Of course,

I always thought of Iceland
as a kind of studio for me,

or a quarry.

Maybe a quarry

is a good metaphor, because I always feel
like I'm involved in a process of,

if not hunting,
at least mining of some sort.

For Iceland, it's
not so much about memory,

it's...it's more about that place

and my need to be there.

I had traveled in this area a
number of times and I knew the lighthouse,

so I asked

the municipality if I could live in it.

They eventually said it was okay,
and, uh, I went up there

and sat around and looked at the weather
for a couple months--

a little bit of reading
a little bit of drawing.

It was a psychological clearing,

and then it was also a way to connect
with this island.

There was no ambition.

It was just to be there.

It's just real simple.

That was the whole agenda
for the couple months, was just be there,

and it couldn't have been, in a way,
more simple and more difficult.

“You are the Weather”--

the viewer walks in and you're surrounded
by up to a hundred images,

which are one portrait of
a person who is a multitude.

WOMAN: The original idea was to do this
book on me,

which was not to be on me as a person,

but using my face as a place.

So the situation was just me

going into the water,
and then she started photographing.

And she didn't give me any directions
except for looking

into the lens of the camera.

HORN: It was very much of a wordless interaction
for the two months we spent together.

And, uh, water
became a very important part of the bond

and the image and, the subject.

The viewer relationship

to the portrait is, I think, very erotic,

because there is this eye contact
and this ambiguity.

MODEL: We were spending a lot of time together

that affected the work, because

that created this trust,

which is very important.

HORN: In the case of
You Are the Weather,

I was curious to see
if I could elicit a place from her face,

almost like a landscape--
not...not in a literal sense,

but how close those identities were.

MODEL: And I remember when
I went to the opening,

I was shy to enter that room.

But my son, who was only five years old
at the time, he thought it was fantastic

and I would keep thinking of like,
you know, going into a room,

but only seeing your mom on the wall--

that must be an experience.

And he kept calling me and saying, “Come,
come. Mom, have you seen this room?”

It’s all you, it’s all you!”

[ softly ]:
Oh...

HORN: There's this swimming pool,

actually, in Reykjavik
that I really fell in love with.

The swimming pool itself
is quite beautiful,

but then when I went down to the locker
room, the locker room was amazing.

It just struck
me as not only a kind of a Mobius,

because there are no edges,
there's all surface.

And there's not one interior exterior edge
among this net of lockers,

it's just an endless tiled surface.
And it's got a collection of doors

that are both open and closed,
and it's got these peepholes.

The peepholes are sort of
what really kind of drew me in,

because you just wonder,

"What the hell are those peepholes doing there?"
and nobody seems to know.

It was this incredible

kind of almost voyeuristic delight,
this space.

It was designed by a voyeur
and a chess player, I decided.

I shot it in a way
to kind of bring out more of that sensual

aspect to balance against the antiseptic
quality of the architecture.

I shot them as

almost like visual kind of, uh, traces.

There is a resemblance in the way

you move through the space
versus across a chessboard.

NIECE: Ronnie is my aunt,

and we have a really good relationship.

For a while,
we would send each other postcards

with to animals or to people or to objects

on them, and we would write,
“This is me,” and point to one,

“This is you.”

Each of the pictures in the book are taken
about two seconds or three seconds apart,

so if you were to look at one picture...

and then flip to the other side

and look at the first picture,

it would be the same image,

but a few seconds later.

HORN: So I really just recorded
her in action.

And it looks like she's performing
and all that stuff,

but you know, there's
that period of a girl becoming a woman

where they're trying on all these identities.

It’s very much of a portrait of a girl,

because all of that different dress
and the hair thing

and the...all this stuff with
the face was not orchestrated.

NIECE: It does take place
over about three years,

and just looking at it,
it's somewhat difficult to tell that it's

the same person.

For instance,
this one I have really, really short hair.

And then in this one
I'm wearing some yellow

glasses and I have longer hair.

HORN: “Down by Water”--

it's the interrelationship between the two
faced image, the front-back composition.

It's the drawing of the many elements
interacting together,

and it's the drawing of the viewer
through the space.

And, you know,
this was originally a bank building,

and it's very beautifully proportioned
and very full of itself.

You can see the paneling
and the detailing and everything is...

uh, it's so beautifully designed
and of a piece.

It's really almost impossible to
occupy this space without, uh...

basically redefining it.

The piece flickers
between a three-dimensional experience

and a two-dimensional.

When I was putting this work together,
I knew that I wanted

disparate motifs
coming together in close quarter.

It's viewable from every angle.

That may seem like, "Oh, every
three-dimensional object is,"

but usually the relationship to the space
is somewhat fixed.

And here it is.
And I mean,

as you walk around the grouping of,
you see these images are coming and going.

You're seeing some
and others are dropping out.

All of that has to be in a way, composed.

So this is a work
that has a very particular way

of moving the viewer through space
and through image space,

which is very different
than architectural space.

"The Cabinet Of"

I don't think I would have thought
to do that work there if I hadn't

seen this little room, which is so
claustrophobic, which was a vault.

It's a cabinet inside a cabinet,

and, uh, I love the idea
that it's in the basement

and it's just functioning
in a completely different way

than everything else.

The clown image,
even though it's a photographic

work, has an architectural component
and a psychological component.

You have the reference to something
figurative, but it's also symbolic.

It's using those photographs

in the drawing technique.

I like the idea of taking this

very formal institution
and putting a rubber floor in it.

I thought that is probably the right
balance. It would have, you know,

kept things
from from getting so out of whack

if we'd had that soft rubber floor
in a few hundred years ago.

My relationship to my work
is extremely verbal.

I am probably more
language-based than I am visual,

and I moved through language
to arrive at the visual,

although I think of text
as visual as well.

I never really distinguish

between symbolic visual language versus

descriptive visual photograph.

I don't think of myself as a photographer
or a sculptor.

I just think of myself
in a more broad way.

So that allows me
to draw upon these different forms...

without having to be identified with them.

You use metaphor to make yourself feel
at home in the world.

You use metaphor
to extinguish the unknown.

And for me, the problem is the unknown

is where I want to be.

I don't want it extinguished.

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