Roni Horn - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 13, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich

  • Catalogue Essay


    When I was first becoming familiar with Emily Dickinson’s poetry, I found myself reading the ‘Index of First Lines’. Since Dickinson did not title her poems, each was posthumously given a number as a reference point. Each of the 1,775 poems is referred to by number or first line. The Index plays an especially important role in locating a Dickinson poem. In reading it, I found myself thinking of the first lines as entrances, tools, maps, signs, connections. I found myself thinking of alphabets, keys, and elemental things, thinking of things that were self-contained yet only beginnings.
     
    From the 1,775 first lines, I selected lines which are complete statements and detached them from the poem. In these instances I saw the statement as self-contained. While the content of the first line may carry the content of the poem it was taken from, the content of a Key and Cue has more to do with the particularity that distinguishes Dickinson’s poetry as a whole. Each Key and Cue carries these qualities and speaks as the part that contains the whole.
     
    The first lines I selected had to have a certain containment (closure) and yet a certain complexity that would hold this completeness open. An experience of a Key and Cue is the experience of an entrance; but since every entrance is also a point of departure, the Key and Cue prepares the viewer for departure. So while the Key and Cue is an object present like any other everyday thing, it is also a cue, a prompt, a signal to something that can only be brought here, wherever the viewer is, by the viewer. Each Key and Cue is a view in a room.
    Roni Horn in L. Neri, L. Cooke and T. de Duve, Roni Horn, London, 2000, p. 116

120

Key and Cue, No. 807: Expectation—is contentment

1994

Solid aluminum and cast black plastic.

57 3/4 x 5 x 5 in. (146.7 x 12.7 x 12.7 cm).
Inscribed “807” on the side. This work is from an edition of three.

Estimate
$50,000 - 70,000 

Sold for $158,500

Contemporary Art Part I

13 May 2010
New York