Sabine Hornig
The Destroyed Room (2006)
"The recorded image inverts our relation to the world, as if the hallucinatory alphabet of sensations materialised and anticipated its formation. That is exactly how this continual exchange between individuals, bodies, and things happens, through shifts into other dimensions (like language, physics, cinema, architecture, the work's space of perception, even the one where the viewer stands)" (CPIF 2007).
Confronting the complex interplay of surface and depth,
reflected and concrete forms, and impossible perspectives and configurations of
objects and spaces in the work of German artist Sabine Hornig (1964–),
requires a similar process of conceptual layering and stacking. Visually and
conceptually, the viewer of these works is always standing at an unstable
intersection between the exterior and interior; the concrete and the ephemeral;
the public and the private; construction and destruction; past, present and
future; and the flat surfaces and the multi-dimensional, multi-perspectival
depths framed within them.
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Sabine Hornig, The Destroyed Room, 2006, 100 x 159
cm (plexi), © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2011. (Accessed: http://mobile.arttattler.com/archivesabinehornig.html)
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The particular work by Hornig that I have chosen to focus on
is The Destroyed Room, a multi-layered, complex photographic image in which the
gutted interior of a shop front is framed through a large floor-to-ceiling
glass window, upon and through which multiple layers of reflected images and
interior perspectives compete for the viewer’s attention, and are further
obscured in places by layers of dust and/or condensation or frost. Visually and
conceptually, The Destroyed Room is a very dense image, but there are two aspects
in particular that strike me about it. The first aspect that interests me about
this work is primarily visual, and relates to Hornig’s technical skill in capturing
unusual and destabilizing optical effects. The second aspect relates more to
Hornig’s thematic concerns, and the possible questions she may be raising about
social, cultural, economic and political issues in contemporary,
post-unification Germany, and the everyday objects that construct, deconstruct
and reflect (sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively) on these concerns.
The Destroyed Room is part of the “Windows” series that
Hornig began in 2001 and that consists of 50 photographs enlarged to scale in
which she “re-examines the subtle relationship between picture and space, image
and reality, in the context of vacated shopfront windows in the Mitte district
of Berlin” (Art Tattler International 2011). In this series Hornig presents
windows as pictures, as framing devices that combine and unite multiple
perspectives on a two-dimensional surface. In The Destroyed Room, the viewer is
presented with the view into the gutted interior of the shop, the reflection of
the scene outside on the glass window (a city street empty of cars and a strip
of urban parkland covered in snow and populated by leafless, wintry trees but
devoid of people, despite the backdrop of buildings), and the glass window
itself, with its murky layers of dust and/or condensation. “In a precise,
exacting visual language, Hornig unites this multi-layered fabric composed of
surface views, deeper views and reflections, of before and after, and uses the
example of the urban sphere and how we perceive it to generate new ideas
relating to tensions between pictorial and real space that challenge the
viewer’s prying gaze” (Art Tattler International 2011).
Although the reproduced image is fixed (according to Hornig’s
view and perspective on taking the photograph), it is clear to the viewer that
at the time the scene afforded her multiple layered perspectives to choose from
(in Hornig’s installation works, the viewer is able to experience such multiple
possibilities). In addition, even with the fixed reproduced image, Hornig
allows for the viewer to participate and add an element of improvisation by
mounting the photograph behind plexiglass, thus reflecting and incorporating
the immediate surroundings of the gallery space and the viewer’s reflection. In
the reproduced image, there are hints and suggestions of ephemeral human faces hovering
in the murky layers of the image, possibly the faces of bystanders who are not
otherwise apparent, or possibly Hornig’s own face, but equally possibly
figments of the viewer’s imagination. As Dominic Eichler comments, Hornig’s
work makes use of “visual puns that rely on double-takes: moments when you
sense that everything is not in the place you might expect it to be” (Eichler
2001). Hornig transgresses optical boundaries, and in doing so challenges
conceptual boundaries, mediating these physical and intellectual spaces through
doors and windows, which are essentially fluid boundaries between public and
private spaces. Eichler (2001) continues: “The complementary yet antagonistic
relationship between image and space is central to Hornig’s work. She likes
role reversal: creating spaces that flatten out and images that protrude into
space. To make matters more perplexing, her pieces also involve image and space
in flexible analogies with other abstract pairs: exterior and interior, public
and private”.
The title of this particular image, The Destroyed Room, foregrounds
the tension between destruction and rebuilding. The room has been gutted in
preparation for renovations, it seems, and objects related to building and
construction (a ladder, beams, light fittings, wiring, piping) are arranged
quite neatly near a pile of rubble and sand. The interior has been stripped and
destroyed in preparation for rebuilding, but the scene is eerily still and
deserted, and it is a sense of destruction and annihilation that is captured
and framed by the floor-to-ceiling glass window, rather than construction. This
aesthetic of destruction and reconstruction is central to Germany’s 20th-century
national narrative, and can be traced from the First World War, to the
annihilation of their largest cities during the Allied bombing raids of the
Second World War, and through to the systemic decay of East Germany under
Soviet rule. Although there is a promise of reconstruction, and the attendant
hope and freshness that goes with it, what Hornig has captured here is stasis,
and a sense of arrested decay and desolation. This feeling is reinforced,
perhaps, by the barren urban winter landscape reflected on the glass, a scene
that features leafless wintry trees in the snow and that is devoid of people
despite the built-up urban backdrop. In the context of such barrenness, the ephemeral, possibly spectral, elements of the image
that I have alluded to could suggest an afterlife of some sort, the nature of which is still indeterminate: the ghostings and afterlives of the images as captured in the reflections and distortions and obscured elements; or the ghostings and echoes of certain ideas and attitudes and orientations, some (rebuilding, possibly) nurtured by and some (destruction, possibly) suppressed by Germany's cultural and political history.
“I reduce the form of the architectural elements, with the result that these no longer directly relate to a specific location. Instead they attach themselves to memories: the recollections of commonly encountered places and particular situations, such as standing in front of a wall or a closed door and being able to vaguely make out something through it”.
It is Hornig's creation of literal and figurative doors and windows into multiple interpretive possibilities that I find fascinating.
Art Tattler
International. 2011. “Photographs of Vacant Shopfronts, Enlarged to Scale.”
Available online at http://mobile.arttattler.com/archivesabinehornig.html
Accessed: 13 August 2012.
CPIF. (Centre
Photographique d’Ile-de-France). 2007. “L’Île de Morel.” Available online
at http://www.cpif.net/index.php?rub=6&ssRub=1&docId=101607
Accessed 13 August 2012.
Eichler,
Dominic. 2001. “Space Invader.” Frieze 62 (October 2001) Available online at http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/space_invader/
Accessed: 13 August 2012.08.14
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