To anyone disturbed by the transformations promised by machine intelligence, Liliane Lijn might counter: everything is always in flux. The title of her exhibition at Tate St Ives, Arise Alive, captures the vitality of the machines with which she has worked since the 1960s, and her almost utopian awe at the potential of matter. A column of rotating copper catches the light, sending incandescent stripes up and down its length. Huge cones spin hypnotically, the moving words on their surface creating kinetic concrete poetry: “FEAR … FRIEND … ARISE … ALIVE”. Lijn’s art proposes that change is the condition of our lives and an occasion for wonder.
In Paris in the 1950s, first as an archaeology student, then as an associate of the surrealists, she began to make paintings that look like geological strata and the memory of a dream. At once precise and bombastic, organic and otherworldly, this combination of science and the imagination is the hallmark of her work. It was her experiment with synthetic materials and light in the 1960s that would take her towards the kinetic sculptures at the heart of the exhibition. “Echolights” is a huge Perspex slab into which Lijn injected polymer lenses; the light cast across its surface by a revolving lamp is refracted to create a fluctuating image. It could be a map of the sky or cells magnified under a microscope. Later in the decade, solid objects began to move. In “Liquid Reflections”, four balls cascade around rotating Perspex discs in a dark room, their orbit dramatically spotlit. Droplets of water caught in the discs shimmer and create shadows; the balls move randomly, colliding and turning like miniature planets.
Pieces that look like a scientific experiment have a cosmic or metaphysical grandeur. Lijn’s “Koans” are white rotating cones that also refer to the Zen Buddhist concept of koan, a riddle without an answer. Sliced at points across the middle, with fluorescent light beaming from the cuts, these mammoth pyramids investigate the combination of light, movement, volume and line. More loosely, their lines of snaking light suggest spiritual paths or the endlessness of infinity.
Sometimes the actors in these sculptural dramas are more human. Lijn’s female figures, made with industrial materials and a science-fiction sensibility, record her shift toward feminism. “Feathered Lady” is a totem with a Perspex head, part bird in flight, part satellite, not to be pinned down. “Queen of Hearts” and “Queen of Diamonds” dominate one gallery; their bodies are ziggurats of steel tiles, simultaneously tough and shimmering, there and not quite there.
For all their ambiguity, there is still something heroic about Lijn’s “ladies”. You see it mostly clearly in the installation “Cosmic Drama”, a face-off between “Lady of the Wild Things” and “Woman of War”, towering feathered goddesses whose wings move as if in a ritual. Lijn’s technophilia is fused with feminist thinking in an optimistic vision of women’s future glory. Yet the nostalgic smoky staging and the stilted movement of the figures seal the sense that they are from another, past era. They belong to a particular brand of feminism, emerging from the second wave, in which female power is found in ancient tales and archetypes. Rather than flux, here Lijn appears to believe in the constancy of myths and symbols.
At Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Rebecca Horn’s kinetic sculptures and sculptural performances offer a far less certain view of machines. The first exhibition since her death last September, Cutting Through the Past – like Arise Alive – opened first at Haus der Kunst in Munich. The artists share similar concerns, most obviously movement and metamorphosis, but in Horn’s work transformation is cautious, precarious. Opening the show, “Peacock Machine” is a mechanized set of steel tail feathers, sharp as spikes, slowly opening and closing like a peacock’s train. It has the grace of a bird and the power of a motor, but also the slapstick quality that characterizes much of Horn’s work. (Buster Keaton was a hero of hers.) There is something faintly ludicrous about a machine imitating a peacock, just as there is in Horn’s own imitation of a parrot in the film “Twinkling”. She crouches low, hunched over before the camera, her face in profile and her arm covering one eye to mimic the beaked profile of the bird strutting around her studio. The transformation of human into parrot is fantastical and ambitious: it speaks of the effort of all art to conjure something from nothing. But it is also, knowingly, absurd – and ultimately impossible.
The exhibition points out the limits of human potential at every turn. Hanging from the ceiling, “Inferno” is an austere tangle of hospital beds whose bare bases form a kind of cage. LED lights flash between them, suggesting possibility, but the piece doesn’t escape the vulnerability and the stuckness of being in a human body. Horn was hospitalized for a year in the 1960s, while she was a student at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, and had a debilitating stroke in 2015. The strain of illness informs her imagery, from the wobbly balance of twelve vertical spikes in “Hauchkörper” to the upside-down grand piano of “Concert for Anarchy”, which periodically vomits its keys. Some works are more serene, with greater faith in transcendence. “Mirror of the Lake” is an installation of circular mirrors endlessly reflecting each other; like Lijn, Horn returns often to the circle to suggest eternity. Even here, though, the wonky angles and dizzying reflections are claustrophobic.
Domestic objects and architecture are frequent presences, and obstacles. In the piece “Cutting Through the Past”, several wooden doors are rooted to the spot, unable to open; instead, a threatening spike moves, slicing through the wood as it spins. Movement is allowed and impeded. Transformation is implied, but also, perhaps, the spike is going nowhere, just round and round and round. The same paradox is at the heart of Horn’s well-known performance pieces, more than a dozen of which are presented here on film. A man attempts to walk with a huge fabric horn strapped to his head and chest; he manages with the help of others, but his movement is slow and stilted. A dancer moves a set of feathers on her shoulders by pulling strings, a singular but clumsy choreography of human and bird. In one film, Horn faces the camera and cuts her hair, with unfocused jabs of the scissors, into a wild, jagged bob; she is changed and still imperfect. In another, she makes a drawing using pencils strapped to her face. Prostheses make humans gorgeous and goofy.
The curators note the continued relevance of Horn’s work now, when technology promises more than ever to revolutionize human capacities. They point out that she began these experiments with prostheses before Donna Haraway published her “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985). To my mind, Horn was much less optimistic about the pleasures of hybrid human/machines than Haraway. But they do share a will to mess with the boundaries between things and a modesty about humans and their control of the non-human. For all her augmentations and extensions, most compelling is Horn’s awareness of the brink: of machines that might not work, of bodies that are mortal.
Since her own body was at the heart of much of her early practice, her work is often called feminist. It is feminism of a different kind to Liliane Lijn’s, though: rather than power and archetypes, Rebecca Horn’s subjects are usually particular bodies, vulnerable and awkward. The two artists’ uses of technology mark different trajectories in feminist art’s focus on the body: one an ideal of female potential and transformation, the other a quieter interest in metamorphosis shadowed by failure. These are also different views of humans in the face of technological change: embrace the possibilities as new, improved versions of ourselves, or remain humble about what is imaginable.
Sophie Oliver teaches at the University of Liverpool
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