Mechanics Illustrated

By ROBERT HUGHES

The work of the German artist Rebecca Horn, on view at New York City's Guggenheim Museum through Oct. 1, has something in common with recent American feminist art, but not much. You could call hers a European sensibility, meaning that it is open to nuance and, whatever its references to the politics of the suffering body, to humor. It is oblique, magical and ironic, and has none of the in-your-face tone of complaint (men are colonizing thugs, women are victims, and a display of wounds is all you need to make a piece of art) that renders the work of so many of her transatlantic sisters so monotonous.

Its one point of similarity with feminist art is that it is grounded in trauma. When Horn was a sculpture student in Hamburg in the late '60s, she worked with fiber glass and, unaware that the stuff is poisonous, neglected to use a mask. She ended up confined to a sanatorium for a year, isolated, with severely damaged lungs. When eventually she got back to work, Horn found herself thinking in terms of images of confinement -- cocoons, swaddling, bondage, prostheses. "When you are very isolated or alone," she remarks to the show's curator, Germano Celant, in a catalog interview, "you have this . tremendous longing for communication, and also this strong desire to communicate through the body." Hence her body-art and performance pieces through the '70s and '80s, in which bodies (her own or others') got fitted out with bandage-like wraps -- symbols of Horn's obsession with healing -- or with peculiar extensions like a unicorn horn, or fingers several feet long, or enveloping soft forms like The Feathered Prison Fan, 1978.

This kind of work is extremely romantic, in a Surrealist way; it repeats, with twists, the old Surrealist vision of women as sorceresses or passive, quasi-mechanical objects of desire. It is no surprise to learn of her enthusiasm for the films of Luis Bunuel -- or, given the yearning and farcical behavior of some of her later sculptures, for those of Buster Keaton. Keaton, Horn points out, "has to invent the apparatus to achieve what he wants, and becomes completely obsessed by his mad world of imaginary things."

Some of Horn's films, and videos of her performances, can be watched at the Guggenheim, but the main body of the show is sculpture: mechanized objects that pump liquids around, or reduce lumps of carbon to black dust with tiny pecking hammers, or swivel suspended binoculars in an anxious parody of disembodied inspection, or flap small wings. Some devices, slender granddaughters of Jean Tinguely's painting machines of the '50s, splatter paint around on the walls or (with more fetishistic suggestion) on women's shoes. No doubt to spare the clothes of the museum audience, these stay switched off, leaving dried Abstract Expressionist trickles as mementos. Peacock Machine, 1982, was originally seen spreading its tail in a formal- garden gazebo -- a charming conceit.

It is doubtful whether Horn designed her mechanized sculpture to withstand the wear and tear of continuous running in a museum. At any given time, quite a few of the pieces are not working, and since even the ones that are have lengthy delays between cycles, the viewer spends a lot of time wondering when, if at all, something is going to happen. Then a cam turns, and neat little linkages make a crescent of feathers coquettishly unfurl or propel a row of knives, with sinister sexual intent, into a corresponding row of shaving brushes.

Some things go slowly, like the piece titled Paradiso, 1993, hung from the Guggenheim dome: two enormous breastlike funnels drip a white liquid into the ornamental pool far below, drawing an imaginary line and suggesting grace | coming, rather parsimoniously, from heaven. Others go fast, like Untitled (Amerika), 1990, Horn's image of nomadic life and rootlessness: a beat-up suitcase with a thermometer inside flaps agitatedly along a line slung across the open well of the building.

The largest work in the show, River of the Moon, 1992, consists of a tangle of thick lead pipes connected to what seems to be a pumping station. These entrails snake up the museum ramp, apparently disappearing into the walls or the floor and re-emerging; they are connected to black boxes through whose glass tops a puddle of mercury can be seen welling up and vanishing as the pump switches on and off. It is obviously meant as a metaphor for the circulation of fluids inside the human body, with lunar input. But it is a ponderous affair and mechanically unconvincing too.

Happily, most of Horn's eccentric machines aren't so overblown as this. The image of sex-as-mechanism is one of the oldest tropes in modern art. A century has passed since Joris-Karl Huysmans, the "decadent" novelist, invited the reader to see the workings of an engine as "steel Romeos inside cast-iron Juliets"; the idea of a "desiring machine" has been explored by a lot of art since then, from early Picabia and Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), through the Surrealists in the '30s, and so down to our own day.

Horn's sculptures can't be written off as a mere footnote to this train of imagery; the best of them have a comic grace and a needling mysteriousness that are entirely their own. Yet it is hard to shake the feeling that, like all kinetic art, they are limited by their programs, so that once you have seen them shake their stuff they cannot renew themselves, as painting and static sculpture can, the second time around.