You acclimatize to the indecent,” Horn said. The granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, she grew up trying to understand why other Jews in Russia and Hungary had not scrambled to escape the pogroms. For Horn, gaining distance is not just a requirement for making art: It’s a method of survival. I’d always wanted to read ‘War and Peace.’ I just read it, and it was a way of ignoring reality for the moment until I could deal with it.” And when the first cases of Covid-19 emerged in New York, she was already a month into what she calls “voluntary isolation” - her preferred mode of working in her upstate studio. When President Trump was elected, in 2016, Horn went into a kind of intellectual retreat: “I immediately sat down. in sculpture from Yale in 1978, she’s taken solo motorcycle treks around Iceland and even, in 1982, lived for six weeks in a lighthouse on the island’s southern coast. “I remember feeling that I would have to be selfish to do what I wanted to do.” Since graduating with an M.F.A. “I’m very, to be honest, in a sense selfish,” she said. The daughter of a pawnbroker and a homemaker, she grew up in the New York suburbs feeling depressed and distant from those around her. Horn has built a career finding ways to step away from her work and from society. In a way, that’s a critical dynamic for me.” “But I wanted to get away from it so I can come back to it for the next stage. “I’m still too close to it, unfortunately,” she said. It’s been 92 days since I arrived.” Horn abandoned the log a few days later - not to give up on the project, but rather to understand what she had made. Or, this being a quarantine - I’m retreating silently, while the frogs leave. Or retreating silently from silent retreat. An entry from April 17, 2020, lays out plans to watch an Audrey Hepburn movie as an “antidote to the tyranny of involuntary isolation.” By May, her style lives somewhere between Henry David Thoreau’s descriptions of Walden Pond and what Thoreau might have written of his stay in a Concord, Mass., jail: “The frogs are gone. A year later, she was inadvertently creating an homage to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). But Horn also collected ephemera that interested her: quotes from the comedian Maria Bamford and from witnesses at a Siberian gulag musings on black holes and the near-extinction of a species of macaw photos of the Empire State Building as seen from her Fifth Avenue apartment and of the birches that grow around her studio in Austerlitz, N.Y. Drawings, photos and snippets of text record travels to Zurich and Oslo, days spent sick in bed, and in one instance, what she ate for lunch (caption: “LUNCH TODAY”). But for almost 14 months, she took on an intentionally modest, almost childishly simple task: making one work per day on a standard, 8.5-by-11-inch sheet of paper, only skipping a day here and there. Horn’s sweeping, 40-year career has brought her work into the collections of the world’s major museums and in 2009 landed her a retrospective that traveled from the Tate Modern in London to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. But when you add all of these bits together, you get my sensibility.” “I’m not telling you what I’m doing every day. But it wasn’t until 2019 that Horn, 65, started to keep track of time in a way that’s more familiar to the rest of us: “I like the word ‘log’ as opposed to ‘diary’ or ‘journal,’” she said. Photographsof her niece taken seconds apart show the mutations of the young girl’s face as she mugs for the camera in “This is me, This is you” (1998-2000).AndHorn’s “Library of Water” (2007) captures time on a grand scale: Its grove of 24 ten-foot-high hollow glass columns installed in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, preserves samples of water from the country’s glaciers that may outlive their source (one of the glaciers was already declared dead in 2014). Beginning in the 1980s, she has positioned pairs of identical sculptures at different locations in a gallery for her series “Pair Objects” (1980-present), which calls attention to the impossibility of experiencing the same thing twice. The artist Roni Horn has always been preoccupied with time: its effect on how we see a work of art, and how we see each other. This interview was originally published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on February 19, 2021.
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