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Thursday, May 26, 2016

Roni Horn at Museum de Pont

Roni Horn at Museum de Pont
(link)

"She has linked her use of doubled forms or images and the ambiguity of many of her pieces to androgyny. Consequently, her work has been seen as an indirect form of identity art."1

"If androgyny ultimately expands the possibilities of identity beyond its stable, gendered binary, Horn's paired works propose the untenability of the fixed binaries on which minimalism historically staked its own critique."2

"For Horn, the terrain of likeness - that which is similar, the same yet different, akin, or simply close - encompasses a panorama of experience. Her work dwells of differences of degree that, she suggests, constitute as profound a representational problem as the starker discrepancies that conventionally give us our social and sexual selves. "3


The androgynous minimalism of Horn's pointed critique of Judd's specific object: instead of the remarkable unit4 Horns work arrests flows in their state of transition, glass as a "supercooled liquid"5, androgyny the flow between genders stabilized, like taking a photo of river to supercool its movement, frozen transition, a gender like glass.


1. Mignon Nixon Roni Horn Artforum 2009
2. Roberta Smith, NYTimes, 2009
3. Zachary Rottman, UCLA M.A. Dissertation, 2014
4. unit is also slang for penis.
5. Roni Horn, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest Brooklyn Rail 2013



See too: Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Tony Conrad's Glass