Les Amants, 1991, Photo: Attilio Maranzano © 2009 Rebecca Horn. Les Amants consists of two glass funnels, ink, wine and motors of some unspecified sort that must spray the liquids about. Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin
Donald Kuspit's review of Rebecca Horn's drawings, both by hand and by machine, indicates something of his desires, found in Horn's sexual subtext: all the machines are metaphors for the coming together of bodily fluids. Well, maybe; it is called Les Amants —is it blood, or is it wine? However, one might also see in the desperate, cross throwing of ink in the corner of a room, the fan of a musical score there but ignored, les travails des amants.
Kuspit does say 'her drawings are written by her machines': does the machine write, or does it make the marks it is designed to make? In Alan Storey's drawing machines, below, does he build them to literally make the marks he already has written, or does he make them to make marks as an autonomous act? He assigned up and down to wind force, not immediately a logical choice, so he must have wanted his recordings on the paper to register elevation, rather than planarity — biblical, this, every mountain and hill made low: the crooked straight and the rough places plain. And then comes the wind.