Log: March 22, 2019 - May 17, 2020
"You move into gold dust: a multiform epic of play and insight. . . . A symphonic treasury of pure Roni Horn."
--Julie Ault, artist, curator, and editor
Fourteen months of daily drawings, photographs, collages and jottings from Roni Horn -- an artist's diary begun in ordinary time and finished in a shut-down world, reproduced in full color at nine by twelve inches.
On one page, a photograph of Audrey Hepburn. On another, the lit windows of a Manhattan tower still burning at night in a city that had emptied out. Between them: weather notes, overheard lines, a bird seen from an upstate window, a drawing returned to for the fourth time in a month. Roni Horn made a page a day for fourteen months, from March 22, 2019 to May 17, 2020, and did not stop when the world did.
LOG collects the whole of it -- 406 drawings alongside quotations, collages, photographs, offhand commentary, notes on news and weather events, and original texts. Horn, who has spent five decades pressing at questions of identity, doubling and difference across sculpture, photography, drawing and books, treats the daily page here as a form in its own right. The entries range from the funny and the strange to the sublime and the badly shaken. Certain images and phrases return as leitmotifs, threading the fourteen months together.
What the dates hold, without ever announcing it: the ordinary scroll of a life, then a pandemic's first months, a political system coming apart, birds and animals going about their business outside a studio window, and weather behaving in ways that no longer read as weather. The early pages are full of travel and celebrity; the later ones grow denser with text and with disaster. Read straight through, the book becomes a record of acclimatization -- of how fast the unthinkable turns into the daily.
First exhibited in New York in early 2021, LOG turns private experience into something closer to weather itself: cumulative, unhurried, impossible to summarize and hard to put down. It is a beguiling and immersive body of work that rewards repeated viewing.
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