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Library Journal Review

This is essentially a catalog of the exhibition of Horn's work held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City's Soho last summer. There are two interviews with Horn, a German artist whose work has been rightly described as simultaneously disturbing and fascinating. Four well-written essays treat various aspects of her work, examining meaning and content as well as installations. Topics like ``The Divine Comedy of Rebecca Horn,'' ``Hybrid Machines,'' ``A Different World,'' and her interiors are discussed in some detail. Sections on performances and films, a filmography, and a biography complete the text; an index would have been helpful. The illustrations provide a sense of Horn's work, although there is a lack of clarity in many, and, on the whole, the quality of the reproductions is not as good as one might have expected. Still, this is an excellent synopsis of Horn's work and career. Recommended for larger art collections.-- Martin Chasin, Adult Inst., Bridgeport, Ct. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

A performance artist, filmmaker, sculptor and poet, Horn explores the themes of human vulnerability and emotional fragility in her disquieting, often beguiling happenings, movies, anthropomorphized machines and fetishistic objects. Wearing fan-like wings, masks, long pull-on fingers or torso-enveloping feathers, her performers probe the possibilities of human flesh and the imagination. One site-specific installation, Concert in Reverse --set in a medieval German tower that was used by the Nazis to torture and execute Russian and Polish prisoners--sought to counteract the erasure of history. Horn's film, La Ferdinanda , set in a Medici villa owned by nouveau-riche industrialists, is a study of counterfeit existences. In this catalogue of an exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, Celant, a Guggenheim curator, and a team of scholars unravel the multiple meanings and mythic symbols in this German artist's restlessly experimental work. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

The Guggenheim Museum spared no expense or effort in its lavish 1993 celebration of Rebecca Horn's work. The same can be said of this book, which prefaces its 250 full-color reproductions with interviews and essays and concludes with bibliography, filmography, and biography. This combination of text and image brings the variety of Horn's objects, installations, and films into clear focus and defines the "signs and secret language" that inform her work as a whole. Two interviews from 1993 give Horn an opportunity to define her themes and influences, topics that are pursued at greater length in the four critical essays. Although these essays specifically address Horn's iconography, their collective effect is to chart the development of performance art and the female artist's unique way of manipulating tradition. Horn's feminine interpretation of the body, of machines, and of space is a "playful subversion" of Surrealism, and, in work like Buster's Bedroom, she pays tribute to Buster Keaton while placing his themes of immobility, the mask, and liberation in a female context. A successful portrait of the artist and an informative book about performance art, this book is an important addition to contemporary art collections. Advanced undergraduate; graduate; faculty; general. S. Vander Closter; Rhode Island School of Design