Listening to whales

Every 10 years, it seems, we are blessed or afflicted, depending on your point of view, with a major exhibition of the internationally acclaimed sculptor, poet and filmmaker Rebecca Horn (born 1944). The first show I remember was at the Serpentine in 1984. Then in 1994 she had the Tate and the Serpentine. Now it’s the turn of the Hayward. At the time of that first Serpentine show, I remember being intrigued and not a little fascinated by this strange artist who made occasionally functioning machines, wore custom-built bodystockings with strange appendages, and liked to be filmed disporting in long grass. At the Tate exhibition, her grand piano strung up from the ceiling jangled memorably from time to time. I was less impressed, and the technical inventiveness seemed a little lax. On this third showing (and I’m not counting chance encounters with her work in-between), I found it hard to be inspired, perhaps because Rebecca Horn at the Hayward is, in this case, the Hayward at its worst.

The exhibition is devoted principally to drawings, which have a hard job withstanding the unsympathetic architecture of the galleries. Luckily, there are other attractions: machines that spurt, flirt their wings or dig dirt. But these don’t perform very often, and are more usually quiescent than not. The only piece that really holds its own is a recent installation — ‘Light imprisoned in the belly of the whale’ (2002–5). One of the Hayward’s box-like galleries is transformed with sound and a little light. The sound is music composed by Hayden Chisholm, and might be a shade too lunar for some, though I have no immediate way of judging whether it actually resembles the noises in a whale’s digestive tract. It seems to fit well with the kaleidoscope of poetry projected around the walls, which is nicely fragmented and cunningly rotated.