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Ann
Hamilton Aldrich Museum
Ridgefield,
CT
Last year, as part of the Larry Aldrich
Foundation Award, Ann Hamilton created an installation piece, white
cloth, for the 200year-old portion of the Aldrich Museum, a typical
white clapboard New England building set on three and a half acres
of rolling lawns and trees. Nicknamed "Old Hundred," it
has been used as a grocery and hardware store, town meeting place,
post office, private residence, and Christian Science church, and,
in 1964, Larry Aldrich bought it to house his extensive art collection.
Adapting the structure to its new function he removed most of the
domestic architectural details and erected walls in front of fireplaces
and windows. In creating white cloth, Hamilton deconstructed these
renovations in order to expose the building's historic soul. She
exaggerated the dichotomies of exterior and interior and presence
and absence and made use of the location, the architecture, and the
Puritan heritage that infuses the site to serve her concept.
As in the groundbreaking works of Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson,
or Mabou Mines, Hamilton's installations are meta-theaters in which
she abandons linear narratives in order to restructure space, time,
and sense perceptions, creating a liminality and allowing one to
walk, like Alice, through a threshold into a completely absorbing
arena. Employing repetition, motion, and sound, she generates a dramatic
spatial presentation of social and communicative functions and dysfunctions
Objects, gestures, and various apparatuses collaborate with site
and viewer in white cloth to unveil the historical architecture and
to play with the fugitive nature of memory.
Hamilton removed most of Aldrich's museum renovation to create a
continuous tableau dictated by the multi-roomed space. Using domestic
objects, tables, chairs, a book, a window and encompassing the private
activities of writing and reading, she also employed hidden chicanery
to jog human and architectural memories. "As a maker I want
to animate the history of ecstatic voices," she said.
On opening day, Hamilton herself could be seen walking through the
exhibition while stitching the hem on a stained white cloth. "My
first hand is a sewing hand," she said. Attached to an awkward
mechanical pulley, the cloth runs through sawed holes in the floors
and walls, like a hysterical ghost. When it passes in front of 13
newly exposed windows, a motion detector triggers a speaker beneath
a copper drum, causing the water within to ripple.
The next room contained a long table on which a dining table-sized
white cloth was suspended in fluttering animation. Air hissing through
tiny holes in the table legs and surface created this effect, hinting
at the moments before the cloth came to rest: perhaps to receive
the decades of table settings, communions, sacraments of birth and
death, of ancestors.
Hamilton's weeping wall, welle, was first installed by itself at
PS.1. Brought into the context of the Aldrich, it evoked Puritan
notions of ecstatic mysteries, as well as the histories embodied
in the architecture. Unlike a medium or magician, Hamilton reveals
the mechanics of the work, since her intent is to expose, not mystify.
To make the wall weep, she contracted with a pharmaceutical company
to supply experimental intravenous technology. The wall, referencing
bodily secretions, also arose from Hamilton's reading of John Donne, "who
was writing at a time when the word was animate and spirit existed
in everything."
Writing and text have played a major role in Hamilton's works, not
as narrative but as deconstructed language which becomes object.
In mneme, an installation she created in Liverpool in 1994, she portrayed
a seated figure incising lines of text, which were then wrapped into
a ball. In 1993, at the Dia Foundation in New York, tropos contained
a person seated at a table burning text from a book. In white cloth,
an open room flagged left from a wide center hall, where the inclusion
of a too-precious antique butcher-block table was upstaged by a sermon
from Cotton Mather that was set like a fragment of stained glass
in the window. Hamilton copied the text in a continuously cursive,
blood red line, jumbling the words and spaces so that the words dissolved
into an illegible web. "As I write," she said, "each
undoing is an art of making: or reframing the terms," like a
preliterate level of knowing not short-circuited by language. Another
red text, inserted under a satin cloth inside a desk, referenced
the skin as exterior while pointing to the interior private realm
of sexuality. This contrasted with the cultural delirium of an American
colonialist pathology that emphasized devotion and denial of the
flesh.
A spinning disk of floor incised into the parquet of another room
was supposed to be a vehicle for disorientation or sensory release,
alluding to Dervishes or other group ritual practices. But it worked
only by implication: the patrons of the museum alighted, balancing
awkwardly in semiserious congregation, while the preponderance of
weight slowed the disc's revolutions to a sluggish drone. Hamilton's
continued heavy explanation was consistent, however, with her concerns
about perception, that, "at floor level, the disc directs one's
perception to see through the body and not the eyes."
Often in this installation, Hamilton’s abstruse significations
required a serious stretch for the viewer. A more successful piece,
in the same room as the disc, was a collar sitting on the wall, made
of metal and mirrors, and similar in overall form to Elizabethan
and Puritan ruffs. If donned, this collar would blind the wearer
with reflected light while, at the same time, the wearer's view of
the lower body would be blocked by the breadth of the collar.
Another less heroic work illustrating Hamilton's concepts was a tiny
blurred photograph made by placing a miniature pinhole camera inside
her lips and exposing the film using apertures created by various
sounds she made. The camera sat in her mouth, the border between
interior and exterior, between feeling and articulation. The image
portrayed was a staring omnipotent eye, a stunning conceptual move
that needed no trappings to succeed.
Unlike tropos, mneme and Hamilton's other large single focus installations,
white cloth seemed a transitional work whose surreal and intellectual
focus was often uncomfortably esoteric. Working within a meandering
domestic space, she was unable to create the singular pictorial theatricality
that is a most fascinating component of her oeuvre. White cloth was
instead, much like a puzzle that could be assembled only with certain
arcane information.
-Carolee Thea
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