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A a few weeks ago, Ronnie Horn70, was removed from his flight, shortly after leaving the US for Germany. A male flight attendant became so angry when she asked him to change his seat – and he politely refused to move it, because it was as upright as possible – that he grounded the plane and Horn was escorted away, where he reported to shocked police. “I was in business class, because of the story,” he says.
The artist and writer returned home, to the island of Maine where he lives, and canceled the first leg of his European tour. This was two weeks ago. Then he flew to London, for his first solo exhibition in ten years – Seizure of Hope at Hauser and Wirth.
Horn doesn’t usually answer questions directly – he likes to be vague. I think he tells this story not because “it’s good for my image”, as he jokes, the character of quiet rebellion, rebellion, but because it shows something in the way he meets the world, as an androgynous person who does not fit in the box, especially in America Trump. Horn’s art is like this – unabashedly anti-authoritarian, he delights in absurdity and contradictions. The undeniable nature of his work, the play in form and the transformation in things, including photography, painting, sculpture and film, is where it finds its strength. It has presence without appearing, like Horn himself.
Entering the gallery on Savile Row, it doesn’t seem like much at first: 80 drawings, drawn in “very soft” graphite pencil with wax pencil, repeat the same phrase, “I am paralyzed with hope”. What you see and the words, which make noise around the spartan room, are the spaces between the frames – the gaps, the lacunae, the ellipses – where the meaning slips and shakes. Last night, Horn was left here alone to edit some frames at the end. “It’s all about experience,” he says of careful installation. “Things have their proportions, even though they’ve become so distorted in today’s culture that bigger is better. This looks like more, but it’s not a picture frame.”
Foreshadowing, doubling and repetition are constant in Horn’s work. These drawings are posted at midnight madness. He describes it to me as “non-stop screaming.” I’ve lost a lot of friends and one of the things that comes up when you’re really sick is what gives me hope. That is why, when he heard it in the performance of Maria Bamford’s play in 2020, he was deeply moved by the words “I am paralyzed with hope”.
“It started at a time of political collapse in America,” says Horn. “I used to come home at night and the words stuck to me, I couldn’t get rid of them. It was like the scene from Alien when the Facehugger sticks to John Hurt’s face – it felt like there was a little fear. Every evening I had to do this, even if there was something.
The term has appeared in previous publications, including LOG, a popular publication that was produced over a 14-month period during the shutdown. It was also the subject of his exhibition at the Centro Botin in 2023. The paintings are crushed in places, which makes them fast, and his style is different – “I was always told that my paintings were ugly,” Horn tells me. “Banks ask me for several signatures, to prove that they have money.”
In the room with the paintings, there is also a solid glass sculpture – Horn has been creating since the 1990s – that resembles a very large, transparent and medium-sized ice cube. The title is taken from Bertolt Brecht – What Happens to the Hole When the Cheese is Gone?
“I loved the idea of a hole that disappeared,” Horn laughs. The title was designed to be a gentle touch to the work, which could mean anything – and that’s exactly what Horn wants. The cube captures shadows and light, constantly changing without moving. These works are made by pouring molten glass into a mold, which dries slowly over many months, and the surface is polished by fire – the final piece is also unclear, glass and water that seem solid. It’s a clear explanation of Horn’s insistence on remaining anonymous and central.
We linger over the sculpture – the head, he explains, is a crook, not a hammer – it has “nothing to do with the work, but I’m not actively fighting it, I can make it clear and just call it nameless, but humor is very important to me. He says critics tend to ignore this aspect of his work. “Or it was just a joke,” he smiles.
It’s not a bad joke, but it’s probably fun. How his brand of emotional intelligence, too, is a slow-burning thing. They won’t solve anything for the viewers, and the show can make the viewers a little bit more sure about the situation. And that’s not bad.
The art reminds me of lines drawn on a blackboard as a punishment – was this self-aggrandizing imitation? “No – it made me feel there. When you feel that all your values are being destroyed, and all the things that have been affected by that erosion, for me, the weather and the environment, you don’t stop thinking about those things, you don’t stop feeling them in your body.
The more you have words that run through the walls of this building, the more you think about the strange thoughts, seizures, paralysis, and that’s when it turns you to the body – a political disease that becomes a disease. The last few years, he adds, “it’s been very toxic, not going into politics – a year ago they found PFAS plastics in the rainwater, so they replaced it – and you can’t get away, you can’t take care of yourself, they’ll take that way from you, the ability to choose based on information.”
It must be difficult, I suggest, to continue making any kind of art, against all this. “Now add to the danger of human instability and brutality, the loss of all ideas, to put it mildly – all this goes away when I work, and this one sentence had a lot of meaning for me. That’s why I call it hijacking, I’m frozen in the air, keep going and it will be fine.”
Horn tells me another story, about one of his many solo trips to Iceland. “It was very cold, I was on a motorcycle, the roads were very bad, it was like raining, and I was singing Hank Williams, you know, ‘I’m so lonely I could cry'”, he recalls. “Then I couldn’t control myself, and I drove off the road. Asa. It was amazing – the motorcycle was still moving. So I just got out of the lake, but it was sad. I spent the whole night haunted by this memory but what I noticed at the same time was that this was a very unusual event, that somehow I had lived my life without this experience. “
There is a strange, unexpected but important sense of hope in this show. “With all the challenges I’ve had – not more or less than anyone else but the routine I’ve been in, I feel lucky,” Horn says wistfully. “And I always take my chances.”
This is what Seizure of Hope is all about – the near misses, the surprise of the order that pulls us out of the dry sea.
