Weather Report: Roni Horn and Iceland

If Iceland is, in her words, Roni Horn’s “muse”, what is the reason for this relationship, and what becomes of it?

In December 2020 the anthology Island Zombie (1) was published, bringing together the writings on Iceland of the American Roni Horn, born in 1955 in New York. In 1975 she visited the island for the first time. “My memory of the trip”, she says in the introduction to her book, “is dominated by weather. The sky, the wind and the light all made a strong impression. Weather simply hadn’t occurred to me before then.” She returned four years later, thanks to a scholarship from Yale University, to spend six months there alone, riding her motorbike. And then she went back, “I returned to Iceland with migratory insistence and regularity. The necessity of it was part of me. Iceland was the only place I went without cause, just to be there.” Her relationship with the place, from the outset existential, is one of recognition and constant exploration. It has proved to be intensely fertile, in terms of her drawings, artist’s books, photographs, installations, as well as her texts.

In 2006 she noted: “Recently I found a picture that was taken during my first trip to Iceland (1975). I am posed in a thick, moss-covered lava field. But looking at it now, more than thirty years later, I am fascinated by how powerful, even then, the resemblance between me and Iceland was.” In the Subject Index of the second volume of the catalogue for her retrospective Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, at Tate Modern in 2009, this is the entry for ‘Destiny’.

TO PLACE ONESELF

The first solitary stay was decisive. Horn wandered around the island, where the roads were nothing but paths, where nothing distinguished public space from private space, where she was outside almost twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, sleeping in a tent, during a spring and summer that were “claimed as the coldest and the wettest in the island’s recorded meteorological history.” She couldn’t believe it. So says the first text of the first chapter, ‘Making Being Here Enough’: “I don’t want to read. I don’t want to write. I don’t want to do anything but be here. Doing something will take me away from being here. I want to make

Roni Horn. You Are the Weather. 1994-96 (détail). 64 C-prints et and 36 tirages argentiques gelatin-silver prints. Chaque each: 26,5 x 21,4 cm. Vue d’installation installation view Roni Horn: Five Installations, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 1996. (© Roni Horn ; Court. l’artiste et Hauser & Wirth)

being here enough. Maybe it’s already enough. […] And maybe because I’m here and because the me in what’s here makes what’s here different, maybe that will be enough, maybe rhat will be what I’m after.”

In 1982 the artist spent six weeks in a lighthouse, resulting in Bluff Life (1982), thirteen pencil and watercolour drawings of very dark or very luminous mineral fragments. In the same year she began a series of drawings/collages on maps of the island, some of which would join the earlier works in the book Bluff Life, in 1990. This was the first volume of “an encyclopedia of sorts”, to which she gave the title To Place. Ten have been published to date (the latest in 2011): the following ones, Folds (1991), Lava (1992), Pooling Waters (1994), Verne’s Journey (1995)... bring together photographs.

Over the years, Horn roamed the island, and wrote. She discovered the ever-changing weather and its effects on the world around her. There are no trees, they aren’t missed. One day she met Loa, whose son was in America; then an older woman speaking only Icelandic: they smiled at one another. These two women were sisters. There was talk of heat, entropy, rainbows, the Arctic Circle; of Jules Verne, who imagined nothing but what is true; of Emily Dickinson, who “invented a syntax out of herself, and Iceland did, too—volcanoes do.” (‘When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes’). From Wallace Stevens and a sound the origin of which the artist doen’t know, in the blue of the icebergs and the sky. Things settle down: “Big enough to get lost on; small enough to find yourself.That’s how to use this island. I come here to place myself in the world. Iceland is a verb and its action is to centre.” ( Island and Labyrinth)

EXPERIENCE AND SENSATION

Since the 1990s the texts have become more precise and in-depth; the aim is to transmit what is perceived, reflected. There is this inventory of hot springs and other pools, each with its own character. A face to face with a mink. A desert is a mirror. The Eldgjá fault opens up under your feet. These ‘Notes on the obsolescence of islands’ (2003-2019). Contemplation, meditation on a white stone, a milestone.

The same gaze, at once broader and more penetrating, elicits the eighty close-up portraits of the young Margrét Haraldsdóttir forming You Are the Weather (1994), thirty-six black and white prints, sixty-four in colour, on a line at eye level: her face varies according to the weather. And the forty-five colour photographs in the installation Pi (1998), landscapes and portraits, interiors, animals, drawing, like a near horizon, a version of an Arctic circle made visible.

As for the block of sixty-four black and white photographs of a swimming pool’s changing rooms in which one glimpses, or not, a silhouette— Her, Her, Her, and Her (2002-03)— it constructs an obsessive labyrinth. During the 2000s the artist took stock of her relationship with Iceland. Solicited by the

main national daily newspaper, she produced Iceland’s Difference (2002), a series of “visual editorials”, which introduces Icelanders to places sometimes unknown to them, to make them aware of the wonders that make up their identity, before it is too late.

COLLECTIVE SELF-PORTRAIT

Four years later at the Icelandic Academy of Arts in Reykjavik, Roni Horn gave a speech, ‘My Oz’ (2006), which is one of her most important texts. It begins with a warning: “Iceland is no longer an island: economically, chemically, climatically, and even psychologically speaking. This is a consequence of Iceland’s expanding relationship with the world at large, both voluntarily in the form of economic interests and communication and involuntarily in the form of pollution and inappropriate political pressure. […] And this fact necessitates a new approach to maintaining the integrity of Iceland’s land, water, and culture.” To make her point, she draws on her connection to this place: “I have spent many key moments of my life here in Iceland. I have used this place as an open-air studio of unlimited scale and newness. […] Iceland taught me to taste experience. Because that’s possible here, possible because of the intensely physical nature of experience on this island. […] Sensual experience balances the intellect and here the best of both worlds exist in provocative union. […] Presence is the thing sensed, never known. And this has become an essential ingredient in my work. Part of my desire is to equate the

Roni Horn. Iceland’s Difference no. 4, May 4, 2002. ( Court. l’artiste et Hauser & Wirth)

meaning of my work with the experience it offers. This Iceland taught me too”.

The artist talks about “the adventure of just being there. Not to want to change anything. […]I came to Iceland to discover this very possibility.” She borrows her last words from another: “I wish you luck. But as Emily Dickinson said: ‘Luck—is not chance’.”

2007 saw the opening of the ambitious Vatnasafn/Library of Water, a water library and residence in Stykkishólmur, and the publication of Weather Reports You (2007), a book of Icelanders’ words describing their relationship with the weather. “Everyone has a story to tell about the weather. It is perhaps one of the few things we have in common. And although it varies greatly from place to place—it’s the same weather we ultimately share.”

In 2017 Horn described her relationship with Iceland, from the offset, when, “There was nobody there. […] you used to be able to get lost there. Lost in the sense that: ‘All right, I’m going to figure this out or I’m fucked.’ [… ] Then the cell phone thing starts. I was very slow to pick up a cell phone. Because you can’t be alone with a cell phone. With the global satellite positioning, you have no privacy, and everything is a public gesture. So after a certain point I had trouble even imagining what the point of even going out there was. […] when I first started going there, the intent was of being alone as a woman. How many places in the world can you go like that?”

Today the artist lives and works in New York. If Iceland has been an essential part of her work, Roni Horn has reciprocated in the form of memorable images, a conservatory of waters, and books that keep a lasting trace of this inspiration. However, if the title chosen for her latest work makes the artist an “island zombie”, we will choose to see in this, rather than a wandering soul, a haunted body, animated by the strength that comes from the innermost perception of a place.

Translation: Chloé Baker

1 Roni Horn, Island Zombie. Iceland Writings, Princeton University Press, Princeton-Oxford, 2020, 246 p., $35/£30. Unless otherwise stated, quotes are from this book. 2 Roni Horn, in Brandon Stosuy, ‘Roni Horn on Politics in Art’, The Creative Independent, February 14th, 2017.

The Château La Coste, at Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade (13), just dedicated a monographic exhibition to Roni Horn, A Rat Surrendered Here (June 27th—October 24th, 2021).

Anne Bertrand is an art historian and critic and teaches at the Haute École des arts du Rhin, Strasbourg.