The first thing that struck me about Roni Horn's Water Doubles was the near total silence that blanketed them. The stillness of the room and the stillness it seemed to require of its viewers. The atmosphere was reverential, as if I had happened upon ancient artifacts or hallowed talismans. The barrel-like Water Doubles cast a preternatural glow in an otherwise darkened room, they seemed to vibrate at a frequency just above hearing.
I hadn't bothered to read any of the accompanying exhibition materials so for a moment the illusion was complete. I was unsure whether or not the barrels held water or a clever facsimile as their name seemed to indicate.
I have an almost irrepressible urge to touch. I always have. True story: touching the artwork has gotten me kicked out of MoMA (more on that later). So, encountering Horn's Water Doubles was an exercise in extreme and painful self-restraint. I felt an actual ache within me to tap the containers to see if the surface would move. The exhibition's environment (and the two guards assigned to yell at people like me) was such though that I had to subdue the impulse. I did, however, allow myself to lightly blow across the Double's "oculus" to see if I might disturb the surface. It did not.
Water or not, the forms themselves, simultaneously delicate and monumental, ethereal and wholly physical, spoke to the character of water itself, and the way we perceive it. I once read that one cubic foot of water weighs 62.5 pounds. The Water Doubles recalled the memory of watching the East river, loosed from its banks, as Hurricane Sandy surged through lower Manhattan and onto 14th street. At the time, the sight struck very real terror into me. The water no longer flowed in an orderly fashion from north to south, it was alive, behaving of its own accord, and roamed free. It poured itself wherever it pleased, flooding not only my apartment building's basement and first floor but those of thousands of other buildings, parks, enclosures, and shopping centers.
The comparison of that memory and my current experience of Horn's gorgeous receptacles was staggering. Akin to the experience of encountering a lion in the wild and a tame cat in a home. I was deeply aware of the havoc these silent giants could wreak if allowed to escape their confines. An awareness that awakened within me a distinct and palpable awe. Roni Horn indeed captured elements of the wild and of the tame, and in the process, imagined the sublime.
