For a period of 12 months during 1968 and 1969, Rebecca Horn was isolated in hospital with lung poisoning contracted from working with fibreglass while she was a student at Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg.1 It was from her sanatorium bed that she first began to sketch and sew her ‘body-sculptures’; prosthetic extensions to be strapped onto the wearer, reminiscent of the medical apparatus Horn needed to breathe. After she had recovered, Horn and her collaborators brought movement to these wearable sculptures in highly choreographed performances for the camera, collected and exhibited in reels titled Performances 1 (1972), Performances 2 (1973), and Berlin–Exercises in Nine Parts: Dreaming underwater of things afar (1974-5). Horn recalled the transformative potential of her illness: “with lung fever you dream differently, dreams filled with erotically charged images. You crave to grow out of your own body and merge with the other person’s body, to seek refuge in it.”2 Instead of confining Horn in her sickness, lung fever opened out her body, enabling an escape route through herself and into another’s flesh. Horn would return to this moment of creative expansion in her later film work, tracing a radical network of relations between humans, animals and objects. Like lung fever, the cinematic apparatus afforded her the opportunity to dream differently, towards an expansive feminist erotics conducted through images of intimacy and interaction.
In 1975, the same year Laura Mulvey defined mainstream cinema according to a logic of scopophilic possession, Horn described a different form of cinematic desire in what she would pronounce her ‘first’ film, whose full title is Berlin–Exercises in Nine Parts: Dreaming under water of things afar [sic].3 Straddling her earlier performative work and her later feature films, Berlin–Exercises marked Horn’s first venture into what could loosely be called narrative form. Although the nine ‘exercises’ appear similar to Horn’s other filmed performances, the extradiegetic sounds, temporalising shots of the studio setting, and concluding dream sequence all hint at a submerged subjectivity. Desire threads its way through the numerous odd couplings that come together and fall apart over the course of the single day that temporally frames the narrative arc of Berlin–Exercises’ nine short films. As the on-screen bodies of Horn and her fellow performers move between attachment and separation, an alternative erotics circulates through the images. Such unstable attachments mark the female body as mutable, denying the signification of her body into a fetish object under the phallocentric gaze.
Erotic action is introduced in the first performance in Berlin–Exercises, titled ‘Two hands scratching both walls’.4 Framed by the doorway, a female performer (Horn) slowly outstretches her arms to reveal long thin white cones attached to each finger, elongated versions of the prosthetics used in her 1972 performance film ‘Finger Gloves’. These attachments are carefully extended to reach the perimeter of the studio, a motion that registers Horn’s desire to make contact with the world outside her body. The prosthetic spines scrape along the walls as Horn walks steadily back and forth, gracefully crossing and uncrossing the unwieldy fingers to complete each turn without causing damage to her delicate appendages. An amplified scratching noise, rough and painful, accompanies the image and registers the unseen contact between the tips on the fingers and the studio walls. Sound becomes something felt, a phenomenon musicologist Anahid Kassabian describes as “haptic sound”, a noise in which we hear “a range of engagements between and across human bodies and [music] technologies”.5 The altered sound of Berlin–Exercises activates a sense of contact which is dislocated from a single site of touch to become something mobile. Here, it moves across the walls of the studio to the screen of the film, confusing the discreteness of bodies as we, the spectators, also feel the spines as if they were scraping across our skin.
As sound waves flow from their source on-screen to the listening receiver, the affective capacity of the auditory is made material, as in the listener’s body the sound quite literally ‘moves’ through the vibration of the inner ear. The affect of sound is linked to its permeating capacities, its ability to enter into the body of the listener through the ear. Sound confuses the separateness of bodies and things. Through their emitted sound, the maker of the noise ‘enters’ into the body of the recipient. This entry realises the eroticism that is latent within the haptic. For queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman, the erotic is defined by the similarly confusing encounters of conjoining bodies, a mode of relation that asks, “Will this part fit into that one?”6 Horn explores ways of ‘fitting into’ objects and spaces throughout this first performance in Berlin–Exercises, reinforcing its sense of erotic play. Horn’s fingers are carefully fitted into individual prosthetic extensions designed to encase each digit. The position of the camera – at the room’s entrance, parallel to the far wall – centres Horn within the frame so that her body, newly extended, may be seen to fill and ‘fit into’ both the screen and studio space.
Sounds and images of communion accompany the fourth performance of Berlin Exercises, titled ‘Keeping those legs from fucking-around’.7 Standing side by side with their legs braced with magnets, Horn and her fellow performer, the German actor Otto Sander, attempt to maintain magnetic attraction as they move together across the studio floor. The pair carefully line up every magnet with its counterpart; each click indexing a successful, if only momentary, union. This union is only possible with extreme closeness, as Horn and Sander press firmly against the whole length of the other’s leg and hip, their hands clinging tightly to each other’s backs to maintain stability. Such intensive intimacy makes clear Horn and Sander’s co-dependent state, as both rely upon their partner’s capacity to hold their weight and to bear their leaning body. However, these gestures are also coloured by a certain violence. Sander is taller and heavier and therefore able to exert more pressure. This means Horn is forced to bend sideways to bear the force of his body. Her precarious position brings her close to falling. The repetitive, hard smacks of the magnets provide a soundtrack to the brutality of force as it is accrued, the volume of each clack increasing on impact.
The camera zooms in close on Horn and Sander standing in the centre of the studio, enlarging our view of the strips of magnets as they lock together and pull away. Their harsh force is interrupted by moments of gentle pressure as, standing stationary, Horn and Sander begin to slowly move their legs towards each other, causing the magnets to softly tap against their opposite. The proximity of the camera enables us to see the magnets straining against their white strapping as they cling together, maintaining their metallic kiss against the movement of Horn and Sander’s legs. As the camera slides up the edge of the magnetic straps, wavering strands of long auburn hair descend into shot, and the image bristles with tactility. According to Marks, the haptic is defined by its eroticism. This erotic capacity arises from the image’s call to our sense of touch rather than sight. For Marks, looking at an image generates an awareness that it is separate from us, and the desire to touch an image involves a loss of this double sense of separation. Instead we are overwhelmed by a double sense that the image and its contents are right up close to us, pushing against our skin. We are therefore swallowed up by the image, surrendering our individuality in exchange for swimming in a sea of bodily sensations.8
This loss of the singular self marks a vulnerable transformation. Marks states that as the self “rushes up to the surface to interact with another” in haptic entanglement, “we become amoebalike […] changing as the surface to which we cling changes.”9 The desire to touch an image jeopardises the myth of the self as independent, as in our desire to touch it (and have it touch us) we want to go beyond the boundaries of our singular body to relate to something outside of ourselves. It is in this desire that we are made vulnerable, for wanting to touch and be touched by something means we must open ourselves up to the possibility that we may come into contact with others in ways we do not want, ways that are potentially threatening. Letting go of our independent self in our desire for another comes with a risk: that we might be changed by this other in undesired ways. In both the harsh clash and gentle tap of the magnets, Horn’s attachment to Sander literalises the vulnerability that results from erotically haptic relations. Joined to him along his leg, she has lost her own separate self, and must change her gait and stature in relation to his weight. The closeness of the camera to the magnets also draws us as spectators into this erotic embrace, challenging our own separateness from the image as we register desire in our bodies via the relationship of bodies on-screen.
These sensuous relationships are visually emphasised through the interplay between the horizontal and vertical axes in Berlin–Exercises. Bound by the rectangular studio where all nine exercises take place, the shape is repeated in the room’s double-width doorway, its large windows, and in the full-height mirrors leant against the rear wall. The performing bodies in Berlin–Exercises move within the grid of the studio. The fixed parameters of the room structure not only the relationships between the performers, but also to us as viewers. We look through a camera whose parallel position within the room accentuates the rectangular motif. At times the lines of these relationships are made overtly visible, as in the long horizontal fingers of ‘Two hands scratching both walls’, and in the white bands of magnets in ‘Keeping those legs from fucking-around’. The space of the studio intensifies these relationships, as the repetitive rectangles force bodies together in the relatively small space. This tension between the container of the room and the expansiveness of the haptic recalls the struggle of Horn’s dreams to ‘grow out of’ the constraints of her sickness. For although Horn wanted to expand beyond her own body, she also wanted to be contained, or to ‘seek refuge’, within the body of another. Such a contradiction also recalls how, by definition, a relationship requires both beings to be ‘held together’. To be in relation is not to be free-floating but – as the magnets along Horn and Sander’s legs make clear – to be attached.
The feminist potential of eroticism in Berlin–Exercises surfaces in the odd axes of these relations. As the exercise’s title itself indicates, in ‘Keeping those legs from fucking-around’ the multiple horizontal axes of relation spread through the leaning bodies of the performers, and the pressing faces of the magnets serve to dislodge the primacy of heterosexual copulation. Instead of penetrative ‘fucking’, erotic partners are placed alongside each other in their gestures of physical intimacy. The horizontal relation conducted through the magnets ensures no body is on top of another, displacing the hierarchical relation commonly associated with heterosexual sexual relations via the missionary position. These horizontal facings are carried over into the film’s epilogue, in which white captions spell out lines from Paul Éluard and André Breton’s poem The Immaculate Conception: “When a woman and her lover lying down – face to face / and she coils (wraps) her legs around the legs of the man – / with the window opened wide – that is the O A S I S.”10 Horn’s use of this quote, from a section of the poem regarding “reciprocal love, the only kind that should concern us here”11 marks her attempt to dream a feminist erotics reorientated away from phallocentrism. Reciprocal, heterosexual love is framed by Breton and Éluard as the resolution of opposites. This is achieved by intimacy, which overcomes the sexual difference of the partners by making man and woman one and the same. As Breton and Éluard say, “the thing is to form a single block from the two [lovers]”.12 In their text, this ‘block’ is achieved through the woman’s ‘coiling’ embrace, which welds man to woman in Edenic passion. The condition of conjoining is not based upon penetration, as the erotic zone is relocated from the genital areas to the legs.
However, conspicuously, this coiling embrace is not pictured in Berlin–Exercises. The text appears over a shot of the empty studio, although the poem resonates clearly through the film image, with the right-hand window, which is left ajar, and the reflection of the open door in the large mirror. Instead of total unification, we witness an uneasy negotiation between Horn and Sander’s conjoined body as it moves with difficulty across the studio floor. The strange nature of the gait is emphasised by camera positioning that takes in Horn and Sander only from their waists down, cutting their faces out of frame. The conjoined creature of Berlin–Exercises is marred by effort and fragility, always at risk of falling apart or falling over. As the camera zooms out from its close-up on the magnets, Horn is revealed: bent horizontally from the waist, held in balance by Sander. Horn’s horizontality at this moment registers her spatial ‘inferiority’ in contrast to the erect body of Sander beside her. To engage in heterosexual relations is, Horn’s posture suggests, to be faced with the problem of unequal power relations under patriarchal domination. For while Horn dreams of an expansive haptic erotics which may take her from her body into those of others, this does not mean that the specifics of her (sick, female) body are lost. The feminist erotics in Berlin–Exercises recognises the sociohistorical inequality of relations between genders while simultaneously imagining a way in which future relations might be conducted differently.
When Horn and Sander next appear for the final exercise, ‘Cutting one’s hair with two pairs of scissors simultaneously’, their coupling is conducted via the film’s edit. Sander is shown leaning nonchalantly over the back of a chair, reciting a zoological text on the ‘combat dances’ of male snakes. Spliced through this material runs footage of Horn, who unevenly cuts her hair with two pairs of scissors throughout the course of his speech. Sander’s voice and accompanying English subtitles continue over the snips of the scissors, and vice versa, marking the contemporaneousness of the two activities. The male ‘combat dance’ is characterised by coupling, as Sander describes: “At the moment of bodily contact [the snakes] start to coil together. The reciprocal probing, the breaking asunder to strike with heads and necks is typical for the aggressive ritual ‘dance’ of the males”. As Sander describes this “moment of bodily contact” to the camera, he holds up both his index fingers to touch them together in an embodied evocation of the snakes.
It is not only fingers which are mimetically recalled by the snakes’ ‘dancing’ bodies. Sander describes how, “at a distance of about half a meter both [snakes] nearly simultaneously stiffly erect their upper bodies” before engaging in combative contact. Physical violence is aligned with phallic masculinity in semiotic slippages across similar forms. When the film returns to Horn, the snakes’ aggression is paralleled in the violent snipping of the scissor blades. As the two scissors repeatedly open and close, moving rapidly across Horn’s hair towards the centre of the frame, their sharp points glint against the pale flesh of her neck. The proximity to human skin makes clear their threat. Snipping scissors are especially dangerous in the vicinity of erect appendages.
As the camera follows the scissors’ movement upwards, it takes in Horn’s face and her direct stare into the lens. As she finishes the haircut and brings the scissors up against her face, she gives a small self-knowing smile between the blades. Her expression conveys a conscious defiance in the deployment of a violent transformative power over her own image and appearance. Horn’s hair raises both the spectre and reality of castration.13 The castrating motion of the scissors stages a destructive act for the purposes of creative endeavour. The scene is a spectacle of wastefulness, where the months taken for Horn’s hair to grow is squandered in a matter of seconds. This waste is made more painful due to the endurance required by both Horn and the viewer to witness the event. The proximity and steadiness of the camera leads to lengthy observation of the scissors’ movements. The blades hack away at resistant strands, which require several attempts to sever. Viewing is prolonged due to the small size of the increments, with mere centimetres of hair being removed with each snip. This footage of cutting is made doubly uneconomical through the irreproducibility of the act once the hair is removed. The common strategy within film of using multiple takes to secure a shot is subverted, rendered impossible through this act.
This emphasis on the destruction wrought by the scissors seems to cut across the attempts at unification staged by the magnets in ‘Keeping those legs from fucking-around’. The slicing of hair from head also seems discordant in relation to Horn’s lung fever-driven desires to “grow out of [her] own body and merge with the other person’s”. This leaves unresolved the dialectic of difference overcome by Breton and Éluard in The Immaculate Conception’s vision of reciprocal love. However, within Berlin–Exercises, cutting also becomes a way to merge with another. The strictures of binary opposites fail to contain the shifting images of Horn’s film. For it is the physical act of cutting and splicing the filmstrip in the editing process that enables the joining of images and the cinematic transformation of bodies. Such conjoining through cutting is most evident in the exercise entitled ‘Twinkling’. The camera cuts between Horn and a male cockatoo, drawing direct visual parallels between the two figures. Clothed in a white t-shirt and crouched in a corner with one eye covered, Horn makes insistent clucking noises, joining herself with the cockatoo, which is also framed, in another shot, to reveal a single eye on the side of its head. Cutting as a process of film editing generates a relation of intimacy between the two bodies, visually merging Horn and male bird in a realisation of the illness dream.
In Berlin–Exercises, Horn occupies various positions of intimacy and severance, positions enacted through the deployment of prosthetic instruments and ‘body-sculptures’, including that of the camera itself. Her shapeshifting body keeps at play a tension of difference, revealing the fragile crossings necessary to navigate the unevenness of the various heterosexual couplings (man or bird) she performs. Such difference also disrupts the sameness of the phallocentric sexual act, which through its penetrative logic defines pleasure around erection and ejaculation. Through the haptic image, sites of erotic arousal are spread across the flesh to demarcate new expansive zones of sexual pleasure which promise to realise, if only in film, Horn’s desire to move beyond the imprisoning boundaries of her sick, subjugated body. Yet, the physicality and exertion visible in the on-screen relationships serve to remind us of the ways in which the female body is situated within a nexus of socially and historically contingent power differentials. As in her period of illness, Horn’s body remains vulnerable even as she dreams of an alternative body of safety, of ‘refuge’ from the difficulty of illness and domination.
1. “As a result of inhaling the toxic fibreglass, Horn spent a year in the sanatorium, followed by two more years in isolation as a precautionary measure to prevent her from contracting further illnesses due to a weakened respiratory system.” Sarah Kent, Joy Sleeman, Peg Rawes and Anna Dezeuze, ‘Drawing the Line: a Round Table on Rebecca Horn’, Papers of Surrealism, 2007, Issue 5, pp. 1-10, pp. 2-3. 2. Rebecca Horn, ‘A smile: the cage is too small for my body: Rebecca Horn in conversation with Joachim Sartorius’, Rebecca Horn: Bodylandscapes Drawings, Sculptures, Installations 1964-2004, London: Hatje Cantz, 2005, p.190., 189-192. 3. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen, 1975, Vol.16, Issue 3, p.6-18. 4. ‘Two hands scratching both walls’ is the title which appears in Berlin–Exercises, however the exercise has also been subsequently labelled under various names. Horn’s website refers to it as ‘Touching the walls with both hands simultaneously,’ while Media Kunst Netz gives the title as ‘Scratching Both Walls at Once.’ 5. Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013, p. xxi. Italicisation is author’s own. 6. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, p. 14. 7. Again, this title is the one which appears in Berlin–Exercises, however the exercise is titled ‘Keeping hold of those unfaithful legs’ on Horn’s website, and ‘Keeping Those Legs From Touching Each Other’ on Media Kunst Network. 8. Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp.12-13. 9. Ibid, p. xvi. 10. This translation differs slightly from that of the first English translation of Breton and Éluard’s work, which reads: “When the man and his mistress lie on one side, looking at each other, and she twines her legs round the man’s legs, with the window wide open, it is the oasis.” Paul Éluard and André Breton (tr. Jon Graham), The Immaculate Conception, London: Atlas, 1990, p. 103. 11. Ibid., p. 101. 12. Ibid., p. 102. 13. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol XXI, London: Vintage, 2001, p. 147-57.
Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell is a writer and artist based in Cambridge. She is currently completing a PhD on subjection in queer-feminist artist moving image.
