Island Zombie: Iceland Writings

by Roni Horn

Overview

An evocative chronicle of the power of solitude in the natural world

I’m often asked, but have no idea why I chose Iceland, why I first started going, why I still go. In truth I believe Iceland chose me.—from the introduction

Contemporary artist Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975 at the age of nineteen, and since then, the island’s treeless expanse has had an enduring hold on Horn’s creative work. Through a series of remarkable and poetic reflections, vignettes, episodes, and illustrated essays, Island Zombie distills the artist’s lifelong experience of Iceland’s natural environment. Together, these pieces offer an unforgettable exploration of the indefinable and inescapable force of remote, elemental places, and provide a sustained look at how an island and its atmosphere can take possession of the innermost self.

Island Zombie is a meditation on being present. It vividly conveys Horn’s experiences, from the deeply profound to the joyful and absurd. Through powerful evocations of the changing weather and other natural phenomena—the violence of the wind, the often aggressive birds, the imposing influence of glaciers, and the ubiquitous presence of water in all its variety—we come to understand the author’s abiding need for Iceland, a place uniquely essential to Horn’s creative and spiritual life. The dramatic surroundings provoke examinations of self-sufficiency and isolation, and these ruminations summon a range of cultural companions, including El Greco, Emily Dickinson, Judy Garland, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, William Morris, and Rachel Carson. While brilliantly portraying nature’s sublime energy, Horn also confronts issues of consumption, destruction, and loss, as the industrial and man-made encroach on Icelandic wilderness.

Filled with musings on a secluded region that perpetually encourages a sense of discovery, Island Zombie illuminates a wild and beautiful Iceland that remains essential and new.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691248622
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	02/21/2023
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	641,589
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Roni Horn is an artist and writer whose books include Another Water, Wonderwater (Alice Offshore), Weather Reports You, and Roni Horn aka Roni Horn.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Island Zombie 1

Pooling Waters

Making Being Here Enough 11

Sometimes Dead 13

The Cold Blood of Iceland 15

Bluff and Psycho 17

How-Is Visible Here 19

Floating in the Desert 23

Accidents Are Mundane 25

Roads Lack Dedication 27

Little Showers 29

Falling Trees Make Sound 31

Verne's Journey 33

The Probability of Round Rocks 35

Special Effects 37

Loa and Loa 39

Weather Is National Sport 41

Anatomy and Geography 43

Indoor Water 45

Pronouns Detain Me 47

Bluff Life 49

A Newark Here 53

Island and Labyrinth 55

Where the Earth Is Hot 57

Youth and Geometry 59

Sleep: Rotation Method 63

When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes 65

Pastoral and Cave 67

The Flats (After William Morris) 69

Crossing a Field I Remember 71

I Cant See the Arctic Circle from Here 73

A Franchise of Rainbows 75

Wallace Stevens's Ice 77

Collected

Hot Water Sampler 85

An Adhesive Feeling 89

A Mink Look 91

Mirror, Desert and Mirror 93

Monroe, Iceland 97

Throwing Itself Together 99

Something Shimmering 101

An Evening with Gelatinous and Glutinous 103

Cloth-Home Culture 105

The Other Here 107

Water and Clearing (Excerpt) 109

Conjecture a Cause: Seljavegur 2, Reykjavik 101, August 22, 2003 111

Notes on the Obsolescence of Islands 115

Eruption, Assassination (November 1963) 119

A White Stone 121

My Oz 125

Weather Reports You (Excerpt)

Introduction 135

Selection: 21 Reports 137

Morgunbladid Newspaper

Note on Texts 180

The Nothing That Is 181

Notes on Icelandic Architecture (Excerpt) 187

One Hundred Waterfalls, Five Hundred Jobs 189

Iceland's Difference 195

Colophon 246

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Island Zombie is an intoxicating artist’s journal and a work of art itself. We feel, through Roni Horn’s carefully rendered words and photographs, the delight of discovering ‘nowhere.’ Yet, Horn offers a provocative and heartbreaking question: ‘Is nowhere gone?’ At a time when many of us have come to understand the price of overusing and wrongly altering the earth’s resources, this is a powerful manifesto."—Anna Deavere Smith, author of Letters to a Young Artist

"Roni Horn’s Island Zombie depicts, with laser-like clarity, the complex and profound experience of being human in a vast, fabulous, and unforgiving natural world. It’s a remarkable accomplishment."—Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

"Roni Horn’s Iceland is part landscape, part lover. Scrambling over pewter shale and purple moss, sleeping so still she becomes a branch for a bird, Horn records her tectonic relationship with a strange volcanic island that is simultaneously other and self."—Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

"An astounding act of meditation and a guidebook back to our senses, Roni Horn’s Island Zombie rides the changeability of the life of a place with solitude at its center. This remarkable achievement is a gift to life, a gift of a life, a gift of life."—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric

“In these days of global disharmony, Roni Horn reminds us of the connection between us all: the weather. Horn never misses a word, no matter how big or small. She takes us to the edge of nowhere and fills it with content.”—Nan Goldin, artist

"There is an Icelandic saying: ‘A guest’s eye is a sharp eye.’ Roni Horn is an artist who has defined Iceland for me. Few know the country as well as Horn does and her work has taught me how to look at and feel this place."—Ragnar Kjartansson, artist

“Island Zombie engagingly tracks Roni Horn’s struggle to be present and to see—really see—the nuances of the Icelandic landscape. The artist is attentive and observant, and as a result, these pieces evoke solitude in nature as a joy and respite.”—Eva Heisler, author of Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic

"Roni Horn’s brilliant and timely book is a must-read for all who have followed the career of this stellar American artist. Island Zombie is concerned with the temporality of landscape, the agency of the nonhuman world, and the mutual constitution of subjects and places. It will interest anyone concerned with the philosophical and aesthetic aspects of the Anthropocene.”—Johanne Sloan, author of Joyce Wieland’s “The Far Shore”

Editorial Reviews

"'Iceland was the only place I went without cause, just to be there,' the New York-based artist Roni Horn writes in Island Zombie, her attempt to explain her powerful affinity for the country. Pieced together from decades of essays, interviews, poetry and photographs, Horn's latest book is a reflection on the complex beauty of a place that she continues to return to "with migratory insistence and regularity."—-Chris Allnutt, Financial Times

"A wonderful, beguiling read in which Roni takes us deep into her experience of Iceland."—-Ben Luke, The Art Newspaper, A Brush With . . .

"Island Zombie is a distillation of vignettes and essays on the natural and built environment (swimming pools are as much of a presence here as waterfalls), illustrated with the artist’s photographs. Often occupying no more than half a page, these fragmentary glimpses and reflections are indeed like “soil samples”, archived in an elegantly uncluttered volume that evokes Iceland’s forlorn emptiness as much as its places and people."—-Nancy Campbell, Times Literary Supplement

"Brilliant. . . . Prosaic and profound, [Island Zombie] felt like standing before art again."—-Bridget Quinn, Hyperallergic

From the Publisher

10/01/2020

Horn (Remembered Words) refers to herself as a "permanent tourist" in Iceland, having made frequent and extended sojourns there since the 1970s. The author has walked, hitchhiked, and traveled its environs by dirt bike, staying in tents, and occupying an abandoned lighthouse. Her deep connections with this cold-blooded, treeless terrain are revealed through lyrical prose punctuated with poetry verses. Her vignettes contrast the dreaminess of the place with the harsh realities of its unforgiving winds, ice, floods, lava flows, and ash. Horn delves into how the extreme climate conditions shape the country's culture and explains how Iceland is "[b]ig enough to get lost on; small enough to find yourself." Her existential musings are supplemented by reports from Icelanders young, middle-aged, and old, reminiscing about their lives, and excerpts of Horn's writings published in Iceland's nationally distributed newspaper. VERDICT this memoir will resonate with readers who have traveled to Iceland, those who have this place on a bucket list of destinations, and others who crave solitude as a journey, not minding storm and stress.—Elizabeth Connor, Daniel Lib., The Citadel, Military Coll. of South Carolina, Charleston

Library Journal

2020-07-31
An American visual artist collects her writing from four decades of sojourns to Iceland.

Horn first traveled to Iceland in 1975 at age 19, and she has been drawn to the island ever since, as reflected in this combination of poetry, short essays, oral histories, architectural reviews, and environmental jeremiads. In the book’s first section, featuring pieces published in the 1990s, the author writes about what has kept her coming back: wild weather, uninterrupted horizons, and solitude—a holiday from “the friction of seeing and knowing.” Traveling by motorcycle, she camped in outbuildings and lighthouses, and she notes how Iceland’s lack of violence, reptiles, and large mammals was liberating for a traveling single woman. “Relief from fear is freedom,” she writes. Horn trains her artist’s eye on the country’s fantastic volcanic landscapes, black beaches and white surf, and hot springs found in every corner of the island. Sensually arresting, these passages are solitary meditations in an empty landscape; at times, readers long for someone else to show up. In the second section, the author offers a series of oral histories about the weather. These short installments, three pages at the most, are eloquent descriptions from ordinary people, testaments to the intricate dance between the islanders and their wild weather conditions: obliterating blizzards, relentless wind, and even incidents of freezing and drowning. A government commissioner calmly reports seeing spirits on his long walks through the lava fields, and older citizens express a generalized unease about climate change. The final sections feel padded: reprints of Horn’s environmental opinion pieces and meditations on specific island locations accompanied by images of previously published photographs that fail to illuminate the place. The first sections of the book will stoke the desire for a more in-depth study of Iceland; the others will interest veteran Iceland-watchers.

A sometimes vivid yet uneven portrait of an artist’s many years traveling to and observing Iceland.

Kirkus Reviews