By Jennifer Burke
In preparation for VET: To interview and then review an artist’s work I have been reading so many interviews of Artists who are influencing my own work at present. I would like to share an Interview with the Artist Ann Hamilton. Although I will not get the opportunity to Interview this Artist, I do want to Interview an Artist who’s work inspires me to "art"iculate what I am trying to achieve in terms of creating an Installation, I am intrigued by the materials used and relied on to create an environment that stimulates all the senses auditory, visual, touch and smell. I want to expose the viewer to a world where secrets are exposed. I want the viewer to enter a world "the installation" where their own body becomes part of the Installation and their experience is relying on so many senses, their response will be emotional. The key word is "experience" I want the viewer not just "looking" I want to get a particular emotion after they have had an experience, so to speak. The installation will be in control and will be designed to purposely ignite specific emotions the experiences which will be premeditated. "The viewer would be swept into an awareness beyond that of the normal viewer, intriguing the whole body. I want to bring to the surface the questions we should be asking" Ann Hamilton.
Katy Kline, the director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine, who chose Ann Hamilton for the 1999 Venice Biennale, says of Hamilton, "She invites the viewer into a set of visible and auditory conditions where their entire bodily experience is activated. They are swept into a state of awareness beyond that of the normal viewer. She tries to intrigue the whole body." - Jennifer Burke.
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| "Swing"The event of a thread-Ann Hamiltom at the Park Ave Armory. |
Ann Hamilton Interviewed by Lynne Cooke July 1999
Over the last decade, Ann Hamilton has emerged as one of the most provocative installation artists of our timeBest known for her site-specific environments that make use of sophisticated technology, unusual and highly sensual materials, recorded sound, and literary and historical allusions, the forty-three year-old artist – who received a MacArthur award in 1993 – was selected to represent the United States at this summer’s Venice Biennale, Her installation, entitled myein, will be on view through November 7.
LYNNE COOKE: What were your first thoughts when you were offered the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale?
ANN HAMILTON: From the very beginning I responded to the fact that this is an American pavilion in another country. So I took my cues from the pavilion’s American references and its neoclassical architecture.
LC: Was the pavilion built In 1895, the year the Biennale began?
AH: No, it was built in 1929, the year the stock market crashed. A rather auspicious date. Its architecture is very Jeffersonian; there are two symmetrical wings that embrace a central courtyard. You’re very aware as you step into the interior courtyard that you’ve crossed a first threshold, and on entering the central rotunda you cross yet another one.
LC: The architecture of several of the permanent pavilions in Venice – I’m thinking specifically of the Dutch and Russian pavilions – seems designed to symbolically reinforce the nation’s values. Is that true of the American pavilion?
AH: Yes. I saw the pavilion for the first time last June, and immediately upon returning to the States I went to see [Thomas Jefferson's Virginia home] Monticello, and I started reading about American history in a way that I hadn’t before. I suppose there were some parallels to how I approached my recent installation at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art [in Ridge field, Connecticut]; for that work, whitecloth, I researched New England’s Puritan history. For the Biennale the question became: How does an architectural ideal embody a vision of social democracy? And then what are the schisms, paradoxes, and contradictions within that vision?
LC: You seem to work simultaneously on two fronts – you think through the ideas in relation to a site on a fairly abstract level, and at the same time you think in response to very specific material conditions.
AH: Yes. And I was also thinking about the rhythms of actually being in Venice. The simplest observation I had that was pertinent to the project was that you’re always getting on and off boats, so you’re constantly accompanied by a subtly shifting horizon. I was thinking about air and movement, of metaphors of descent – that was a very visceral, emotional response. And then, because it’s a very particular circumstance to be representing a national identity, I had a more conscious sociopolitical response. I came away thinking about what issues might be most pressing for us now as a country.
LC: Where did these thoughts lead?
AH: I approached the building as an object, and began working with the relationship between its exterior facade and its interior space. I began with the idea of a mirrored wall that reflected the garden in which the pavilion sits. That went through several permutations before I arrived at what we’re building now, which is a large, rippling glass screen that extends across the entire front of the building. It doesn’t dematerialize the building but renders it very liquid as an image.
LC: And the viewer must decide how to enter the building, around one end of the wall or the other.
AH: Yes. And once in the rotunda, you must again decide whether to go left or right. One thing we’ve done is remove aH of the false ceilings that had been installed in the ’60s, which covered the skylights in the four adjacent galleries. For the first time in years there is natural light coming into the space, which is filled not with objects but with something more like a phenomenon. There is a mechanical system that sifts an intense, fuchsia-colored powder slowly down the walls. The powder is very responsive to your movements – to the turbulence in the air you create but are not aware of. It’s almost invisible as it descends over the walls, which have been encrusted with small raised bumps that spell out a text in braille. There’s a continual movement, a marking of the text that doesn’t actually stay on the walls.
LC: What is the source of the text?
AH.’ It’s taken from two volumes of poetry by Charles Reznikoff called Testimony: The United States 1885-1915 Recitative [1965]. They’re incredibly wrenching accounts of acts of violence based on turn-ofthe-century legal documents. And rendering them in braille in some sense mirrors the way this kind of violence is difficult to absorb into the democratic ideal.
LC: You will also have a spoken-word audio recording as part of the Installation. What will be on the tape?
AH: I used the middle section of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, which was an extremely important speech in its time, quite radical in its brevity. It’s an attempt to ask: How do you heal the schism that comes from the inheritance of slavery and that is the basis of much of this country’s early history? I translated the text into an international phonetic code and spelled out the paragraph according to that code, and you hear my voice, in unison with itself, whispering it over and over again with urgency. The meaning isn’t immediately apparent; it’s more about the rhythm of the voices than the voices as conveyors of meaning. The quality is halfway between an echo and a remembrance that can’t quite be pieced together.
LC: Frequently, your most immediate reference points come from literature.
AH: Yes, I’m beginning to do work that is more actively about being a reader. The way one reads is almost like a signature, much in the way one might write or speak.
LC: What practical problems did you encounter in working on this project?
AH: Well, lately my process has shifted, so that increasingly a lot of what I need is highly skilled technical help. Previously, I produced my installations with the help of volunteers who worked by hand. But now much of my work requires more complicated technology – this piece, myein, is set into the membrane of the building – so we’re really pushing the limits of what’s possible.
LC: What has caused this shift away from the labor Intensive hand-manufacturing?
AH: My work shifts in response to my emotional needs from the work, and I’m now looking for different kinds of experiences. But certainly making the braille is very much a hand process. And as we were standing there today putting dots on the wall, I recognized how the underlying concerns of the work are similar to other pieces I’ve done. No matter how much you think you’re making a new work, what rises out of it are continuing concerns.
LC: Do these preoccupations – which seem hinged on a dialectic between sensory experience and information acquired through codified forms of knowledge – date back to your formative years in the Midwest? You grew up in Ohio, where you still live.
AH: It’s hard to know because sometimes you’re blind to your own interests. On one level you do this intellectualized research and you think you’re really onto something – but it’s almost as if you’re keeping yourself busy because you’re blind to deeper issues. It’s like you set up a process that allows these issues to rise to the surface. And as my research takes its own path it almost forms an organism within which each project occurs.
Interview copied from bnet art publications.
Lynne Cooke “The Ann Hamilton experience – installation artist – Interview“. Interview.
