Dieter Schwarz about Roni Horn
Just Doubles This The DistantDoubles Must As & others
Doubling suspends the question of a form's reference by diverting the answer in another direction : a form accounts for itself by the fact, that it already exists, meaning, not through the absence of a model but through the presence of a second, in the broadest sense similar form.
The first form reappears in another place, suffiently displaced to it indisputably a question of a second object...Identity and difference...
...Distant Doubles, positioned so far apart as not to be visible together, emphasize chronological succession. The chronology is irreversible, as a fundamental difference exists between the perception of the first form, initially unique form, the perception of the second form, which then relates to the first, and the return to the first form. The moment of the first perception is fixed in the chronology, yet is lost forever. For from the time the spectator encounters the second form, the first form also becomes the second, only to be understood as familiar, as part of a relationship. The synchronised comparison of two phenomena confronts history which brings with it irreversibly accumulated time and space.
This form is significant, and it is so precisely because it is repeated, indeed it refers to a comparable form, which for its own part refers to the "first" form. Can this be an ideogramme which creates the distance to itself, which seeks comparison with itself, which finally summons the spectator as arbiter in a relationship involving historical accumulation?
Identity and difference call for a third party. They involve the spectator spatially, in measuring with his glance the distance from one form to another, and temporally, in experiencing in this way a historical sequence.
That which is drawn achieves a maximum of reality if it can be designated as being here and in another place.
To see a landscape as it is when I am not there.
Not to see a place as it is when I am there.
To see a place as it is not when I am there.
The paradox of perception means that the identity of a place is only to be experienced as the expence of one's own subjectivity - yet this cannot be achieved... The place is not there independently, it is always circumstantial; the place created by the drawing only exists in itself in so far as it exists between space, spectator and object.
The first form reappears in another place, suffiently displaced to it indisputably a question of a second object...Identity and difference...
Identity and difference call for a third party. They involve the spectator spatially, in measuring with his glance the distance from one form to another, and temporally, in experiencing in this way a historical sequence.
Not to see a place as it is when I am there.
To see a place as it is not when I am there.