Twins & Twinning: Roni Horn’s ‘Things That Happen Again’
“I do not know which of us has written this page.” –Jorge Luis Borges
PART 1
Enter room.
There is a single copper cone occupying the center of the floor, but the space is otherwise empty. I do the familiar circular dance, apprehending the cone from multiple viewpoints. I move around the room, and I feel my body become more aware of the cone and its position relative to it. I spend ten minutes with the object, and once I am sure of its form, I move around the partition into a second gallery.
Sitting on the floor is another copper cone. It seems to be identical to the one that preceded it, and this assumption is reinforced by their proximity. However, since the cones are in different rooms, the certainty of their likeness or the degree to which they are identical mechanical reproductions is impossible to determine. With one cone always out of view of the other, I can only speculate (fig. I).
Artist Donald Judd saw Pair Object III (For Two Rooms) (1987) by Roni Horn, in an exhibition at Galerie Lelong in 1988. He purchased the cones and the same year, invited Horn to install them at the Chianti Foundation, Judd’s museum campus in Marfa, Texas.[1] When Horn arrived for the installation, she and Judd agreed to adapt the work to a better suit a single gallery space. [2] The adaptation changed the work’s identity: Pair Object III (For Two Rooms) became Pair Object VII (For a Here and a There) (1988) (fig. II).[3]
Both works are part of a larger, four-part series by Horn titled Things That Happen Again. Although doubled forms and images infiltrate much of Horn’s larger practice—double rods in Pair Object I or doubled spheres in Pair Object II—Horn manufactured the double cones as a limited suite. The present analysis will focus on this limited suite, the four configurations that make up Things That Happen Again: Pair Object III (For Two Rooms), Pair Object V (For Things Which are Near) (1988), Pair Object VII (For a Here and a There), and Pair Object VIII (For a This and a That) (1989-90), all manufactured between 1986 and 1990 (fig. III & IV).[4]
Each of the four “pair object” configurations includes two truncated copper cones.[5] Each cone is 35 inches long, tapering from a 17 inch diameter on the larger face to 12 inches on the smaller, and, as suggested by the series title, each cone is doubled—or “happens again.” The individual paired identity—for “two rooms,” or for “near”—is relative to the cones’ position and determines the viewing situation created by each.[6]
Most recently, I saw Pair Object VIII (For A This and A That) in an exhibition James Meyer curated for the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 2022. The exhibition, titled The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900, was apparently the first of its kind, tracking the “double” through the visual art of mainly 20th century modernism. For Pair Object VIII (For A This and A That), Horn’s contribution, she displays the identical cones in the same gallery, but in opposing positions. One cone sits facing the viewer while the other looks away (fig. V). The viewer is meant to walk into the gallery and see two upright copper disks of different sizes. The disks comprise the small end of one cone and the large face of the other. By orchestrating the situation so that the cones initially face the viewer in different manners, Horn forces the viewer to see opposite forms—a “this” and a “that.” It is only by walking around the space that the viewer learns that the cones are clones of one another positioned head to toe.
In the introductory text to the exhibition catalogue, Meyer defines doubling as a “visual grammar involving the combination of forms or motifs that appear like and unlike.”[7] He divides the work featured into four distinct categories: "Seeing Double," which involves repetition; "Reversal," which entails inverting or mirroring an image or form; "Dilemma," which presents absurd or impossible choices; and "the Divided and Doubled Self," which explores the concept of fragmented or mirrored identities, personae, ego, unlike doubles, and pairs.[8] While it seems like Meyer takes a holistic view, inviting multiple assessments of the topic, when it comes to doubled sculpture that is formally reductive—literal, minimalist, etc.—Meyer approaches “two” through the same methodologies used to talk about the singular and the serial work.[9] For example, the section of his introduction addressing Pair Object VIII (For A This and A That), amongst other literal objects, is titled “The Double is Infinite.” In it, Meyer writes about the double’s phenomenological “endless” quality, calling such endlessness the “only certain attribute” of a doubled form “apart from twoness.”[10] By discussing the infinite quality of a doubled form in the same manner critics such as Rosalind Krauss previously used to explain serial work, Meyer wrongly grounds the double in the language of Minimalism as it was understood in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Meyer calls back to one of Krauss’s most important essays, Illusion and Allusion in Donald Judd (1966), in which she asserts that meaning in Judd’s sculpture is found through the embodied perception of the object in space. Writing about Judd’s Untitled (1965) wall relief, Krauss quotes French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘phenomenology of perception’ to say that an object, like Judd’s, exists only in a viewer’s changing perception: “it is given as the infinite sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views.” In each perspective, “the object is given, but in none [is it] given exhaustively”. [11] Krauss makes the case that the success of reductive sculpture lies in the viewers embodied orbit around the object (fig VI & VII). Meaning here is public and activated by the viewer. If there were only one cone, one might prescribe a phenomenological reading, but since there are two cones, I contend that Horn’s objects also speak to each other.[12]
Meyer’s emphasis on phenomenology and the “infinite” relies on a dated methodology inapplicable to a fixed pair. By wrongly prescribing a serial philosophy to Horn’s cones, Meyer misrepresents the import of the reductive double. While seriality and singularity in Minimalist production was meant to create an endless viewing experience, i.e. Judd’s “one thing after another,” Horn’s doubled Things That Happen Again challenges such a self-centered reading. Two poses questions of an ontological rather than phenomenological nature.
Take, for example, artist Robert Morris’s first sculptural work, Two Columns—also featured in Meyer’s exhibition and mislabeled in the catalogue as “infinite” (fig. VIII).[13] In 1962, Morris performed Column (1961) at the Living Theatre in New York. The curtain opened, and a gray column stood alone on the stage, upright for three and a half minutes.[14]Then, the column fell parallel to the ground where it remained for another three-and-a-half minutes before the curtain closed (fig. IX & X). Over the course of the performance, a single column assumed two positions relative to the floor. (The first perpendicular and the second, parallel.) When Column was adapted for the Leo Castelli gallery in 1973, Morris constructed a second column to visually represent the distinct positions the single column had assumed in his performance the previous decade. He displayed two independent columns, side-by side, in their distinct positions (fig. XI). By doing so, he changed the work’s identity from Column to Two Columns. The result resembles identical twins in a gallery space rather than a single column moved from one position to the other. They are identical but in opposite positions like Horn’s Pair Object VIII (For A This and A That) in the same exhibition.
In the catalogue, Meyer asserts there is no difference between the “upright and horizontal” columns. He states they are “interchangeable.”[15] While this claim may acknowledge the identical nature of Morris’s columns, it does not acknowledge their twinship. Unlike copies or clones, twins are inherently two whole individuals; neither is a spawn of the other. Perhaps the double then, while not a new phenomenon, was actually a type of art that broke with minimalism and minimalist theory of the 1960s and ‘70s, and was consequently overlooked, misconstrued, or scorned. Pair Object VII (For a This and That) must be read as an identical duo.
II.
The double-motif has long been a popular device for invoking the uncanny in literary works, a practice documented in psychoanalyst Otto Rank’s literature review, “The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study,” which examines, specifically, Romantic deployment of the double-motif.[16] Through doubles, authors of the 19th century vanguard demonstrated the duality of existence—natural and contrived—in analogous forms: mirrored or shadowed projections of the inner-self, clones as the image of ego, the ego as inescapable past, the double as solitude, the double as echo, the clone as soul-mate, and so on. Even Meyer grounds much of his general discussion of sculptural doubles in the legacy and language defined by Romanticism. For example, speaking (again) about Morris’s Two Columns (1961), Meyer says:
The work’s anthropomorphism is felt in the ‘special complicity’ that it ‘extorts’ from us, the attention it requires, the sense that is has been ‘waiting for’ us—a ‘theatrical encounter,’ [Michael] Fried called it. Lurking within the hollow cavity of Column and comparable works is a disconcerting other, an importunate doppelgänger, that challenges our feeling that we are fully ourselves.[17]
Acknowledging the works anthropomorphism (a claim critic Michael Fried made in the 60’s to condemn minimalist works as a species of theater), Meyer invokes a typical twinned symbol: the doppelgänger.[18] The literary doppelgänger, defined by Meyer, is “an embodiment of the primary narcissistic fantasy of the soul and eternal life.” He continues that this relationship is “ultimately a portent of death, the fate of Narcissus, who wastes away pining for his mirror image or twin.”[19] Romantic authors deployed doppelgangers to represent their protagonist’s true, inner, or secondary nature. This mysterious fiend is the narcissistic embodiment of the protagonist’s subconscious, identical to him but unrelated and seemingly unwelcome. Meyer asserts that, like the double-motif in literature, doubled sculpture provokes the uncanny, a strange feeling identified by Sigmund Freud that one gets when something that “was meant to remain secret and hidden [but] has come into the open.”[20] With doubles, the dualistic inner and outer nature of all humans is materialized in flesh; doppelgängers provide imagery to address a fundamental problem.
Edgar Allen Poe’s short story William Wilson (1839) is exemplary. The main character and narrator, William Wilson meets his double while still a child in grade school. William’s double has the same name and birthday as William, and he resembles him in speech, appearance and behavior. The double’s voice, low like a whisper, is the only trait that distinguishes William from his double.
Their relationship takes many forms, but in the end, William feels stifled by his copy. William sneaks into his double’s dorm room one night to play a prank on the sleeping William. He shines his lantern on his doppelganger and sees a face he does not recognize as his own. He flees from the academy the next day due to horror of their uncanny resemblance. William’s double leaves the academy too, and a chase ensues across Europe. Each time William hides, his double finds him and exposes his “mischief.” For example, William cheats at cards games to pay his bills, but before he can liquidate, the double arrives and exposes his tricks to the group. William has to flee again.
Their story culminates at a masked ball in Rome where the double, dressed identically to William, stops him from flirting with the married wife of the ball’s host. Fed up and determined to rid himself of the fiend, William takes his double to a private room for a duel. He stabs the double, a violent act followed by a knock on the door. William turns toward the sound and notices a mirror he had not before seen. In it, his reflection announces, "in me didst thou exist—and in my death, see ... how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”[21] By killing his double, William has killed himself—or so the story goes.
In the translator’s introduction to Rank’s study, Harry Tucker Jr. explains that the immense saturation of the double-motif in early modernist literature—and the fascination with the existential questions they pose—was a consequence of the birth of modern psychology and early psychoanalysis in the nineteenth century. To Rank, such a “quest into the mind [was] simultaneously the quest into the individuality and integrity of the self.”[22] Therefore, according to Rank, employment of double-motifs in Romantic literature did not derive from an author’s “conscious fondness for describing preternatural situations,” or a need to explain their multiple personalities—as one might imagine is the case in Mary Shelley’s The Modern Prometheus or Robert Louis Stevenson’s the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde respectively. Instead, Rank puts forth that the double-motif originated in literature from “an unconscious impulse to lend imagery to a universal human problem—that of the relation of the self to the self.”[23] In other words, if it were true that the psychoanalytic quest into the human problem is like a confrontation between the inner self and the projected self, akin to standing in front of a mirror, the double-motif can be taken as the necessary and appropriate response.
Rank posits that the resonance of a double-motif is tied to one’s need for “self-perpetuation, for immortalizing himself.” He continues, “the primitive concept of the soul as a duality (the person and his shadow) appears in modern man in the motif of the double, assuring him, on the one hand of immortality and, on the other, threateningly announcing his death.” It is not surprising then that efforts to rid oneself of an uncanny double in literature are usually violent and result in harm or injury for both parties: the double and the person being doubled. The twin depends on the double, and cannot be wholly manifest in their absence.
In Passages on Modern (1977), which Krauss wrote a decade after Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd, she hints that phenomenology might be inadequate to doubled works or art. In this later work, she discusses Morris’s two columns from earlier and his triplet L Beams—identical “L” shapes in three different configurations (fig. XII). Her argument suggests that because phenomenology locates meaning in the external, embodied experience viewers, hypothetically, to acknowledge that the two columns are exact doubles, despite their distinct positioning, would be, Krauss writes, “to imagine that one’s knowledge of space leaps over the specifics of one’s perspective.” She attends to the seemingly different forms. Instead of seeing three identical shapes (oriented differently), or twin columns, Krauss insists that meaning exists in perspective, and perspective enacts spatial illusion. For Krauss, Morris’s L beams are may ultimately be one L transformed in front of her into three different positions as she, and they, recede into space, but, she argues, that knowledge comes foremost through perception, which double checks a viewer’s prior assumptions. For Krauss, this unfolding of shape is catalyzed by her own body, and an alleged priority of perception. Therefore, to look at Morris’s Columns or Horn’s cones and see twins—two identical yet distinct and autonomous individuals—rather than two different objects positioned uniquely in space, would reject this phenomenological imperative by privileging thinking over our own sensory perception. The double, I contend, is an idealist motif that does not shun a priori knowledge, but brings it to the forefront of sculptural meaning. Phenomenology fails when one requires the other to exists.
Contra Meyer and Krauss, as Rank explains, the double necessarily arouses in viewers, “man’s eternal conflict with himself and others, the struggle between his need for likeness and his desire for difference.”[24] As Ranks’ translator explains, this conflict “leads to the creation of a spiritual double in favor of self-perpetuation and in abnegation of the physical double which signifies mortality.”[25] If we think about Horn’s cones in this regard, the psychological effect of their viewing overtakes any phenomenological consideration.
III.
Because the relationship to self—who am I? and how am I perceived? —is fundamental to humans, the double has always been on interest. There are fascinations with the double in every cosmology—despite the relative recentness of nineteenth century depictions and the modern discovery of DNA’s twinned structure.[26] Plato constructs the first ideas in Western philosophy around the twin, formulating the concept of a twin soul existing in all humans. Plato says that man constantly seeks his male or female other half, and that when these twins who were apart find one another, they never want to be separated again.[27]
Homer refines the claim a few centuries later. In Homeric conceptions through the centuries, man exists as a double form: in his visible presence and in his invisible image which only death sets free. A modern example of this timeless formulation is found in Edgar Allen Poe’s 1839 story, “William Wilson” – though Freud, for his part, would later call the two characters in Poe’s story the ego and the super ego. In the Freudian continuation, the divided psyche is reconceived in psychological terms as the conscious and subconscious, and it similarly leads to fundamental questions about mortality, divinity and control. Thus, even before Rank identified the conception of the double in Romanticism as an ideal motif, it was embedded in the human intercultural and philosophical conscious. I would like to argue that the absolute origin of the motif came with the mystery and magic of the first human twins.
Comparative mythologist, John Lash, explains that the coincidentia oppositorum, the unity of opposites, is the universally favored creation story across otherwise disparate cultures.[28] Further, he writes, “because [twins] reproduce the image of cosmic near-symmetry” here on Earth, they “[violate] the boundaries of the secret, invisible realm where those [cosmic] forces are believed to originate.”[29] A double-births are therefore culturally interrupted as somewhere between two extremes: either super-mortal and divine or something sinister, taboo, or unnatural.[30]
The doubling phenomenon began with the belief in a dual creation story and was projected from here onto human twins—a phenomenon that seems to break with mortal law in favor of something divine—in an attempt to reconcile and understand self. The universal presence of the double-motif in culture suggests that twins and twin-viewing tap into the fundamental aspect of the human consciousness. Twins visually represent the dualistic certainty of existence, in mind and body but also in conscious and subconscious.[31]
Accordingly, the present investigation presents the paired work—and the double at large—as an inherently psychological engagement, not only through mere reference to uncanny literary doubles, but through the employment of biological twins to show in specific how the double breaks open the logic of the single or serial object.
Unlike the doppelgänger Meyer invoked in his analysis for the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition, Horn’s doubles are more than look-a-likes. Freud defines literary doppelgangers such as William Wilson and his double as merely “persons who have to be regarded as identical because they look alike.” But speaking about twins specifically, Freud says the relationship is “intensified” by the “spontaneous transmission of mental processes” from one autonomous induvial to another— “what we would call telepathy”—so that one is not a mere shadow, figment, or doppelganger of the other.[32] In this respect, Meyer chose the wrong theoretical lens, since his phenomenological perspective treats the double in Roni Horn as an unequal pair rather than as two equals.
Despite the primary importance of biological twins to fields like psychology and medicine, they have been left out of sculpture. Twins are the most strange and natural manifestation of the double-motif, yet no critic writing on Horn’s doubles has acknowledged the precise nature of the twinned relationship as it manifests in Things That Happen Again. In four configurations, Horn lends imagery to the human problem by employing the ideal doubled model and using the limited knowledge of exact doubles to her advantage. The mysterious relationship between twins becomes the perfect psychological device for Horn to reject phenomenology and instead conjure meaning in the viewer’s private, affective sphere.
To consider Horn’s pairs through an examination of early childhood development in twins, i.e., as part of the field of twin studies, will be to consider the double-motif at its most radical. Therefore, twins rather than imagined doubles provide a better model for understanding Horn’s Pair Object series.
PART 2
Horn is not the only artist interested in twins. One of the more salient images of human doubles is artist Diane Arbus’s photograph of identical sisters Catherine and Colleen Wade in Roselle, New Jersey from 1966 (fig. XIII). Arbus encountered the twins at a Christmas party hosted by the Suburban Mothers of Twins and Triplets Club at the Knights of Columbus Hall. Arbus attended the event with hope to photograph more “human multiples” after documenting the Slota triplets three years prior (fig. XIV). Of the triplets, Arbus said, “they remind me of myself, my own adolescent self, lined up in three images, each with a tiny difference.”[33] The Wade twins from 1966 can be read the same way, this time representing the ideal model of the human psyche as dualistic and divided—the self and its projection. The image echoes a sentiment issued earlier in the century by Rank in regard to the proliferation of literary doubles:
[There] are odd representations of the double as shadow, mirror-image, or portrait, the meaningful evaluation of which we do not quite understand even though we can follow it emotionally…In the writer, as in his reader, a super individual factor seems to be unconsciously vibrating here, lending these motifs a mysterious psychic resonance.[34]
For this reason – the generation of an unconscious vibration – Arbus’s photographs of twins interested director Stanley Kubrick, who used the Wades as a reference for the Grady sisters in his 1980 film, The Shining (fig. XV).[35] The twins are, in this case, a visual representation of the conscious and subconscious mind. They appear to the Torrance family, but first to only-child Danny in a vision. Danny’s vision represents the confrontation with self that he and his parents experience during their extreme isolation at the resort. Interestingly, Kubrick first introduces Danny to viewers through his headless reflection in the mirror: Danny here talks to Tony, the imaginary double who lives inside his mouth (fig. XVI). Neither the twins nor Tony ever behave in a violent or threatening manner, but their looming presence, and more importantly their impenetrability as a unit, is one of the more sinister images in the film.
In Twins and The Double, writer Penelope Farmer suggests it is not likeness or difference that makes twin-viewing uncanny or emotionally resonant, but the doubleness itself: “in our species, it is normal to come singular.”[36] She argues that shared gestation and litter-like delivery are the primary factors motivating the psychological draw of twins. Humans are the only animal that birth identical offspring, and the evolutionary significance of such is unknown. The double is, consequently, a humanistic, or extra-human, motif by its very nature.
In single-births, two gametes, typically a sperm and egg containing twenty-three chromosomes each, meet in the womb. They fuse together to form a new zygotic cell: the embryo. The embryo then implants into the wall of the mother’s womb, and a placenta forms around the embryotic sack (fig. XVII). It is at this stage in gestation that a chance split suddenly occurs in the embryotic sack, creating two embryos sharing same placenta, or identical twins (fig. XVIII). The resulting babies will have the exact same genetic coding and will grow into being side-by-side. While the cause of the division can be genetic, it is typically a purely random occurrence.[37] Perhaps the psychological element of twin viewing can be attributed to this randomness. What if you were the random cell that happened to subdivide?
In the second configuration Horn made for Things That Happen Again after Pair Object V (For Things That are Near),the two copper cones lay side-by-side in the same gallery (fig. XIX). While the configuration for two rooms relies on estrangement to call attention twinned nature of the cones, in Pair Object V (For Things That are Near), Horn uses closeness to the same advantage. The cones touch. They sit snuggly as if back in the womb, or like they found one another from opposites sides of the same crib (fig. XX). Writing on Horn’s Paired Mats For Ross and Felix from 1994, one of Horn’s later doubles she made for Felix Gonzales Torres, in which two sheets of gold rest on top of each other, art historian Briony Fer observes that the dividing line between the two forms is “so fine” that one “cannot see the change happening in perception.” She continues, “[the dividing line] is only visible in its sudden effect when one kind of surface has switched invisibly into another” (fig. XXI).[38] Like the nestled mats, the line between the two cones is “so fine that in perception it no longer exists.” The two become one form, one experience.
Child psychologists Barbara Schave and Janet Ciriello write in their book Identity and Intimacy in Twins (1983) that “in early childhood there appears to be a continuum, never sharp delineation, between a sense of oneness and the realization of separation.”[39] Like the nestled mats, whose dividing line is “so fine that in perception it no longer exists,” in Pair Object V (For Things That are Near), Horn inadvertently references shared, twinned gestation as well as the intimacy of early identity formation in infant twins – while also showing how, in contrast the first configuration, for two rooms, there is here zero possibility for separation.
II.
The observations psychologist Dorothy Burlingham recorded while working with children at Hampstead Nursery help further explain the relationship between sculptural doubles at length.[40] Burlingham observed that when single-birthed children under two years old are shown their reflection in the mirror, “at first, they usually [say] ‘baby’ as if they [do] not recognize themselves;” other single children show “great pleasure and affection toward the mirror image,” trying to hug, kiss and validate it.[41] Nursery staff often observed single-birthed children age two to three talking to their mirror image. The notes suggest that single children at this age do not yet recognize themselves as individuals.
Curator Thomas Kellein engages three of Horn’s paired works and explains that two identical forms rest so closely in relation to each other that they seem like a “solid object” that has “entered a mirror phase, embarking on a dialogue with itself.” Kellein calls Horn’s Pair Object I (1980) the beginning of “a shift” toward “self-reflecting objects that [seem] capable of surviving without the viewer” (fig. XXII).[42] While he is correct in identifying that doubles do not depend upon a viewer in the same way a phenomenological, singular object does, Kellein sees the cones as an object and its reflection, much as Jacque Lacan formulates in his theory of the mirror-stage, an esoteric psychoanalytic theory of child development. But what if the cones are two identical infants regarding one another, i.e, twins?
Consider that when Lacan proposed the mirror-stage, he also did so with single-birthed children in mind. He argued that before a small, single-birthed child understands they have an identity, the child will think of themselves as an undefinable, unified essence: “the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objective in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.”[43] Lacan argues that the moment an infant sees himself in the mirror, the child develops a concept of self in relation to others. Children realize they are a distinct subject like their mother and distinct from their mother. Early identification with the mother then leads the single-birth infant to further develop an awareness of their own individuality, or an idea of ego or “I,” in relation to her. For Lacan, the image reflected back enables the idea of a divided psyche: the one perceived by the outer world, or mirror, and the one felt on the inside. Mirrors then form the basis for self-identification—the self and its projection—which becomes a lifelong project.[44]
While Kellein may invoke the mirror stage, by doing so he wrongly assumes that doubled works are one object viewing its own reflection. In reality, Kellein is in the presence of two cones. The present investigation argues that Horn wants the viewers to know it is they who are looking at twins: her art is not an infant child and its own mirror reflection, but rather identical object existing concurrently. But better understand this art, we must ask how identity formation materializes in twin pairs, whose realization of themselves as a subject likely occurs before they recognize themselves in the mirror.
Burlingham’s case studies suggest that while the mirror is a novel experience for single-children, the mirror appears to the twin as a “most ordinary and familiar” experience. Observing twins, she writes they “followed the pattern of the other children in the nursery in not recognizing the mirror image as that of themselves”; but, unlike the single-children, each twin identified their mirror reflection as that of their double. One twin bypassed a mirror to see how his twin looked in their new (matching) clothes instead. Another, when asked to point at her feet, pointed to those of her sister. Further, at around two-and-a-half-year-old Burlingham observed Bill repeatedly calling his twin Bert, “other one Bill.” In one strange instance, the twin saw his own reflection in the mirror above a urinal and said of the image, “other one Bill do wee-wee.”[45] While the nurses likely found mistakes like these endearing, the importance of the anomaly became to Burlingham when nurses reported that Bill also called Jessie and Bessie, another set of twins in the nursery, Bessie and “other one Bessie.” It is evident that Bill must have thought his reflection was Bert, or “other one Bill,” and he believed Bessie to have a copy as well.[46]
When the twins were even younger—seventeen months—Bert was in the infirmary with a cold and separated from his twin, Bill. While in the infirmary, Bert claimed to have no appetite and refused the nurses’ attempts to get him to eat. However, one mealtime, a nurse set Bert in front of a mirror to distract him while she slowly brought a bite of food towards his mouth. The nurse reported, “Bert was delighted with the image in the mirror; he opened his mouth wide and ate spoonful after spoonful enjoying watching his reflection eat.” What this proves is that the mirror most likely appeared to be an “ordinary” experience for the young twin, not because they were used to seeing their reflection, but rather, it seems more plausible they mistook the reflection for their twin.[47]
In twins, early self-identification with the other leads to codependent development through the rest of childhood.[48]During these years, a fluid continuum emerges between the experience of unity and the recognition of distinctiveness within twins, without a defined demarcation point. The relationship between infant twins is largely “elusive and nonverbal.” Based on their research and supplemental accounts by adult twins, Schave and Ciriello determine that while there exists “a lack of differentiation that precedes awareness of bodily boundaries, […] Gradually, a twin baby perceives that his/her twin is really another individual, not an extension of himself/herself or a mirror image.”[49]
While a single-child realizes their independence from the mother by first identifying with her and then separating from her, a twin has a more difficult time. A twin has to separate from both the mother and their sibling. The second separation proves much harder because the twin, unlike the mother, is not (and never will be) a fully realized autonomous being. Thus, each twin becomes the bearer and the source of the other’s identity. Therefore, in infancy, twins often experience one another as a part of the self. This biological continuum is similar to the dividing line between Horn’s cones in Pair Object V (For Things That are Near): “so fine that in perception it no longer exists” (fig. XXIII). Flimsy division between twins gradually solidifies as the infants begin to realize they have a playmate rather than just a shadow or mirror-image. This moment is when a new since type of telepathy begins to develop in secret.
To illustrate in human twins, a night nurse observed that toddlers Bessie and Jessie were separated into two rooms, Bessie in the infirmary with whooping cough and Jessie asleep in their bed, alone at the other end of the shelter. According to the nurse’s report, Jessie woke early in the morning one day and repeated several times “my Bessie crying.” Burlingham writes that the nurse “thought Jessie was dreaming as she herself heard nothing”; however, when the nurse went to check on Bessie in the infirmary, she found her in tears.[50] There is the impression that even when separated, twins communicate subliminally.
Horn demonstrates something akin to twin telepathy in the relationship she creates between the two cones in Pair Object III (For Two Rooms) (fig. XXIV & XXV). She obscures a comparison of likeness and difference by placing the cones in different rooms using either the gallery’s original architecture or an added partition. Like in Pair Object VI (For a Here and a There) or Pair Object VIII (For a This and a That), the viewer cannot see the cones in the same position at once; however, in this configuration, Horn literalizes the polarized experience through the added distance of psychical separation. Even when separated, the cones in Pair Object III (For Two Rooms) communicate telepathically. The delineation between the two siblings is clouded. As Freud writes, the twinned relationship is so strong “that the one becomes co-owner of the other’s knowledge, emotions and experiences,” in infancy and as they grow into adulthood.[51]
III.
In the configuration Horn installed at the Chinati Foundation, Pair Object VII (For a Here and A There), the viewer enters the gallery into the space between Horn’s cones. The copper forms face each other and the door; appearing to the viewer in the entry like identical upright circles (fig. XXVI). Only by engaging the space does the viewer come to know their protruding volumes. This is the inverse experience of Pair Object VIII (For a This and a That), in which Horn reveals to the viewer the face of one cone (the larger end) and the backside of the other (the small end) (fig. XXVII). Through shifting positions, the engaged viewer learns that both disks form the larger face of identical cones. However, because the viewer is unable to see the full form of the two cones at once—looking at the small end of one while only able to see the profile of the other—the initial assumption that the forms are perfectly alike is called into question (fig. XXVIII & XXIX). Unlike Pair Object VIII (For a This and a That), in Pair Object VII (For a Here and A There), Horn mobilizes the viewer’s doubt regarding the identical nature of the cones, rather than the realization of it, to underscore the psychological dimensions of twin viewing. Because a search for visual, or even biological, differences between the two cones produces none, and the viewer is re-confronted with the fact of the cones’ twinship.
Carl Jung writes in Psychology and Religion: West that “such mechanical reproduction” of the number two “flouts our assumption that each and every one of us is unique.”[52] In the presence of Horn’s fabricated cones, viewers are reminded that perfect replication should be impossible; even with machines, there are differences. Just like the single child could have been born a twin, the double-motif diminishes the individuality of us all. Perhaps, then, the psychological effect of twin viewing is that in the presence of a doubles, non-twins feel confronted with the solitude and uncertainty of their being. Non-twins did not have a partner in the womb.
The experience of viewing Horn’s paired objects consequently feels different from viewing Judd’s One Hundred Milled Aluminum Boxes, which must be passed by or through on the way to Horn’s Pair Object VI (For a Here and a There) (fig. XXX). Whereas Krauss might say the viewer activates the infinite quality of Judd’s boxes, when entering the space in between the Horn’s cones, I felt I was interrupting an episode of “twin speak,” the autonomous language (crystophasia) that develops from the babble of infant doubles and usually ceases when outsiders are near.[53] With the gift of the perfect playmate, twins often become a unified pair existing in the world in tandem. In the space between the Marfa pair, non-twin viewers may feel like an excluded mother or lonely single child on a playground.
When Jessie and Bessie were separated another time, Jessie reportedly discovered a long panel mirror in their shared bedroom where she could “easily see her entire self.”[54] Jessie quickly gathered all her and her sister’s toys and piled them in front of the mirror then she sat down and played with her image. In Burlingham’s analysis, she notes that while it is typical for a single-child to show interest in the mirror and “hold out an object” toward it, “by bringing all her toys to the mirror and settling down next to it for long play, [Jessie] gave the impression that she had really tried to find her twin and in this way attempted to gain the companionship she was missing.” At this stage in their development, Jessie and Bessie have reached an understanding of their unit as comprised of two equal parts; each twin perceives the other as a separate, autonomous individual, not simply an extension of themselves or a mirror image. Even still, Jessie was soothed by the image of Bessie, as if it were really her own. It is thus a combination of doubleness and partnership that makes twins formidable.
Twins’ accelerated separation from the mother likely develops naturally and is carried out because of the benefits it provides. While the primary relationship for the single child exists vertically between mother and child, the primary relation for the twin is horizontal—regardless of fraternal or identical status. While the mother-to-child relationship is hierarchal, the one between twins is peer-to-peer. The twin comes into selfhood in relation to an equal – the other twin in this psychological dyad.[55] What follows from having a double is a recognition not only of self but an experience of validation, affirmation, and care from the other twin, who was likely mistook for the self in early infancy. Farmer points out that this makes “horizontal relationships, between equals, experienced later, secondary by definition” to the single child but the norm for the twin.[56] Separation from the mother, and thus the viewer, comes early—if attachment forms at all. Lash calls such partnership the “perverse autonomy” of twins. Appropriately, each twin will grow independent of the mother, but there is no known mechanism that will help the twins grow apart from one another.[57]
In Parallels: A Look at Twins, scholar Ted Wolner writes:
In the duality of their union, twins may embody the Socratic dialogues which occur within each of us, dialogues of a self which questions and a self which answers … Twins seem in fact to be surreal disfigurations, strange identical dream figures who appear before us as if in the half-life of the unreal, messenger from out of the subconscious.
Wolner continues that these messengers, like the cones, “[bear] us some needed, even bearing us some needed, even dreaded knowledge of ourselves,” that twins know something single-birthed adults do not, or that their partnership has taught them answers to life’s questions that might otherwise be unanswerable. He writes, “twins unleash a flood of associations, each of which triggers its converse;” twins “induce a vertigo of the self: they are indisputably two, inescapably one, both and neither at once.”[58] Phenomenology fades as the viewing experience instead becomes dominated by a psychological confrontation with twins. Thinking back to Pair Object III (For Two Rooms), the addition of a second element calls for closer looking at the first—and for a comparison of the pair.
CONCLUSIONS
Horn first demonstrated the distinct nature of a double, an opposition to singular and serial philosophies in her thesis exhibition at Yale University ten years earlier. Here, she presented sculptures Field and Slab (Slope Forms) (1978) as an installation spanning three galleries. Field, occupied the first gallery; the second room was left empty; and Slab sat in the third. Horn recalls that the empty room was the largest.[59] The experience of the first sculpture was separated from the second, and vice versa, by the empty room. Although the forms were not identical—Slab was thick and blunt and Field was thin and delicate—they were linked in memory. Horn later called the work her first paired work.[60] By emphasizing the space between, bookending the void with nearly identical forms and granting it the largest room, the work created a brief history. Unable to see both forms at the same time, the relationship between then-estranged pair-objects exists only in the mind, linked by memory and speculation.[61]
This work was likely the impetus for Pair Object III (For Two Rooms) (1986), the first configuration Horn made for Things That Happen Again. As with the Yale work of art, the two cones in Pair Object III (For Two Rooms) are connected by memory.[62] Horn’s Pair Object III (For Two Rooms) remains immune to phenomenological understanding: it substitutes “I think” for “I perceive,” and it adds in the subjective “I remember.” Furthermore, because of the anthropomorphism and emotional resonance inherent in double viewing, any final attempts to read the cones only through infinite bodily and sensory perspectives—or as antitheatrical (and thus literal)—would be futile. Each configuration in Things That Happen Again is concerned with the effect twin-viewing has on a viewer’s private affective sphere. By placing the viewer in the realm of speculation, memory, and the uncanny, Horn removes the experience from the body. She uses the language of Minimalism to turn its formal features on their head and change the coordinates of the work’s meaning.[63]
In an interview given to James Lingwood, Horn explains how she arrived the idea of a “paired object”:
I discovered quite early on that…a single object would not give me the kind of relationship I was interested in having with the viewer. Because its singularity leads more toward a separation from the viewer. So I arrived at the idea of the paired object, which diffused that possibility. The idea was to create a space in which the viewer would inhabit the work, or at least be a part of it.
The singularity of a specific object, like Judd’s, intends to separate the object from the viewer, but the pair, as an ideal model, dissolves any possibility for separation.[64] In order to engage the viewer’s subjectivity, or “the space in between” them and the object, Horn presents a doubled form.[65]
What phenomenological and literary analyses omit is that the cones, like all twins, are two different people. The modes of treatment Meyer considered, in which Horn’s double is an appendage of the ego—a doppelganger, for example—are different from those actual figures of the double. Twins never meet or confront one another; their bond belongs to them from birth. The problem with Meyer applying a literary or surrealistic sense of the double-motif as a lens to read reductive sculpture like Horn’s (or Morris’s Column and Two Columns) is that it assumes an original and a copy—a protagonist and a doppelganger. In reality, twinship includes two equal and autonomous forms. Therefore, any analysis of Things That Happen Again, and doubled sculpture in general, requires an engagement with twin studies. The mystery around twins is the origin of the double-motif. Horn’s cones, like Jessie and Bessie and the Wade’s, are twins related on every level, cut from the same genetic cloth in a way that even the closest of single-birthed humans are not. Viewers must not equate them.
Recall Pair Object VIII (For a This and a That) from Meyer’s double exhibition at the National Gallery. By presenting the cones in inverse positions, Horn demonstrates the twins are autonomous, maybe even opposites. When Meyer called these two cones “infinite,” and Morris’s Two Columns “interchangeable,” he fails to see their autonomy as objects. Both examples present a double inverted, not exchangeable parts. He ignores the truncated nature of Horn’s cones and the reason she positions them head to toe in For the This and a That.[66]
Horn’s copper cones are identical by a formal definition, but they do draw one sly distinction. The shape of the cone—large, flat face and smaller, convex end—has clear directionality. I can imagine the Marfa configuration, Pair Object VII (For A Here and A There), would provide a much different feeling if the viewer walked in and saw the cones — the little ends — facing away from the doorway instead. They go further than Morris’s double column in this regard. In Pair Object VIII (For a This and a That), what Horn is doing with her chosen shape is obvious. In this configuration, the cones have about two yards of distance between them. They lie perfectly parallel and inverted. Horn presents opposites explicitly as opposites, not as infinite or interchangeable.
Here, Meyer is like a young twin parent who chooses names that rhyme or begin with the same letter. They dress them in identical clothing and send them for a haircut at the same time.[67] The urge to treat the twins equally, and thus grant them the same opportunities, ignores the fact the twins are two different people. Doubles must be treated as two, not one or as many. Examining identical twins disentangles the psychological resonance of twin viewing and how such encounters shape one's sense of self, relationships, and the view of world at large. By analyzing the lived experiences of twins, the origin of the double-motif, the present analysis considers the essence of doubleness in its purest form.[68]
MAY 2023
