In its morphological abstraction Roni Horn’s Asphere resists the category of portraiture more emphatically than any other object in the exhibition. As one of the first objects encountered upon entering Portrait/Homage/Embodiment, Asphere presents for us a literal (and conceptual) stumbling block, its matte steel surface blending in with the poured concrete floor on which it sits. In incorporating the sculpture, the show’s organizers clearly attempt a conceptual abstraction of the notion of portraiture itself. (Might we say that they throw down a steel gauntlet?)

If Asphere is a portrait, then, it encapsulates a state and a set of relations rather than any individual identity. Neither a sphere, nor any other geometrically familiar form, it embodies a liminal state between prescribed states, a liminal form that defies known forms. And this it does, not anecdotally, but by inducing in the viewer an initial uncertainty and defamiliarization that prompts sustained looking and, ideally, reflection. A viewer reaction is then not unlike the double take the androgynous figure prompts from even the most self-conscious of individuals. Indeed, the prolonged oscillation between the first and second takes is frequently Horn’s tack:
Questions gather around moments of doubt—that’s how you enter the work. Often nuances and subtle differences that verge on the imperceptible are enough to cast you in doubt, to catch you in a moment of hesitation; this infinitesimal pause is the place where engagement occurs.

Asphere condenses and succinctly embodies two long-standing lines of inquiry in Horn’s work: an interest in linguistic shifters and in paired objects. Horn’s titles frequently rely upon linguistic shifters: A Here and a There; A This and a That; This is Me, This is You. Horn exploits the shifters for full effect, so that the me of “This is me” is indeterminate and transferable. In 1980, Horn developed a series of paired objects in 1980, in which identical objects were placed in adjacent rooms or at different ends of the same room. The authority of the unique object is challenged by its other, the perception of the one interrupted by the memory of the other. The moving back and forth from room to room, the oscillating instability of the linguistic shifter—these are condensed for me in the Asphere’s distortions and in the visual irritation it induces. In a related dry pigment drawing The Odd Morphology of the Asphere, 1988, the letters in each circular cell spell “who,” but its anagrammatic complement also begs the question “how.” In the morphology of the Asphere, who is a question of how: how it is that one becomes a who.