Ann Hamilton
Thinking Things Through
If I had a heroine when I was young, it was probably my grandmother, Lois. We used to read to each other. One of us would read while the other did some household chore. Mostly she would read, of course, so my memories of her all revolve around words. She would read to me, and I would immediately start daydreaming. So, if you ask me what she read, I can only give you hazy answers. What I remember most is her voice, the rhythm of her reading . . . I didn’t care what she read once we left Winnie the Pooh, but I remember her voice.
—Ann Hamilton, 1993
Ann Hamilton was born in Lima, Ohio, in 1956. She grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and until 1991 her career was pretty much boilerplate: a college in the Midwest, graduate school on the East Coast, job on the West Coast. She showed here and there, at this museum and that festival, won this prize and that award—etc. Then, in 1991, Ann Hamilton moved back to Columbus, Ohio. This was news. Artists do not move back home anymore, so I spent a few days in an overheated, patterned, flounced, and ruffled room on the second floor of a bed-and-breakfast in Columbus, Ohio, owned and operated by two of the heartiest Christians in Ohio.
The tiny window of my room overlooked a narrow, sycamore-shaded street. I immediately flung the window open. There was moonlight out there on the sycamore leaves, and a soft breeze shushing through them. I felt like Thomas Wolfe, “lost and by the wind grieved.” I pulled my head back in. A framed rubbing from the tombstone of Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) interrupted the flowered wallpaper on the wall opposite my bed. I noticed similar rubbings throughout the house: Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) and Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) in the upstairs hallway; in the downstairs parlor, I spotted evidence that both Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) had lived, written, and died. I took these rubbings to be an earnest, if macabre, tribute to the flowering of nineteenth-century American letters, until I discovered that the reading matter at hand dealt almost exclusively with nature (gardening, local flora, matters equestrian), religion (Protestant), and local history (Ohio and the Ohio State Buckeyes).
Ann Hamilton, tropos, 1993–1994. Dia Center for the Arts, New York, NY. Photograph by Thibault Jeanson. Courtesy of Ann Hamilton Studio.
I thought about this anomaly, and the “piping hot” food served from the cozy kitchen by the ebullient Christians, and the starched napkins and the crisp sunlight angling through the lace curtains and spilling in lacy patterns onto the rose-patterned carpet. I considered the total absence of neon, cocoa palms, and poker tables and I began to suspect that the gravestone rubbings were not there to celebrate the fact that Twain and Dickinson and Emerson had lived, but to remind me that they were dead and it served them right.
When Ann Hamilton picked me up the next morning, I favored her with my supposition. Hamilton allowed that my “rubbings” theory was probably a valid reading, and by way of redeeming Columbus in my eyes she took me on a tour of a used bookstores. On our way I pressed Hamilton a little about the “quilting bee” aspects of her work. She made a face and said that it was fun to work with other people, but the “quilting bee” aspect really didn’t matter. “I’m interested in the accretion of small gestures, in the way we build the world with them. Immersing people in a communal bonding experience is actually counterproductive. I want people paying attention to how they take up space, to how they’re doing something. Like the figure washing her hands in honey, I was really interested in how that exercise of privation and excess might be done—in the greed and denial of that gesture. Mythologizing domesticity only gets in the way. The group labor has more to do with the scale at which I imagine things. You can’t be inside a painting and I want people to be absorbed into a physical kind of mass. I want to be absorbed—and I want it to be really beautiful and really present, you know. That takes a lot of work and sometimes a lot of people.”
In the first bookstore, I was confident of discovering a well-thumbed copy of Whittier’s Snowbound among the used books. I didn’t find one, but I did find two Morse Peckham anthologies, an album of Julia Margaret Cameron photographs, and a copy of Julian Jaynes’s The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I gave it to Ann Hamilton. She gave me a book by Walter Ong, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of the walls of books that Hamilton had installed in the gallery at MIT, nor could I avoid noticing the way Hamilton drifted down the aisles, calmly stopping here and there, then drifting on. It was the first time I had seen her demonstrate anything close to nonpurposive behavior, the first time I had seen her abandon her confident, no-nonsense stride and just mosey along.
It was interesting because, obviously, Ann Hamilton wasn’t predatory about books, but she was clearly being fed by being among them. She floated, comfortable in the atmosphere of language; and I realized that, for me, language is nearly always sensual transportation, for Hamilton, it is a place. It is the physical presence of language that beguiles her, not the absence that it signifies or the transportation it provides. She loves the physical page, the book, the way it smells—the voice, its timbre, the atmosphere that it activates and fulfills. And this, I decided, was the community that entranced her, not the community of iterative labor, but the community of voices, like the atmosphere of culture that her grandmother’s reading brought into being, the palpable, ephemeral opera of that ongoing, murmuring conversation. Here is John Shearman on that timorous relationship
Raphael’s portrait of Tommaso Inghirami introduces a paradox. Can it be right to interpret a spectator-subject relationship when the subject is explicitly described as unaware of anyone but himself? There are a number of very beautiful, very imaginative portraits . . . of the creatively distracted like Raphael’s Inghirami or of the utterly absorbed reader . . . in Correggio’s picture in Castello Sforzesco, or of the man lost to the world altogether, in a state of reverie, as in the extraordinary Moretto in London. In such portraits the reverie is descriptive not of a generalized state of mind, as it might still be in an idealized image, but in a space of a particularized character, because the context of the state of mind is emphatically particularized in . . . the lighting, texture, environment, and not least by a descriptive affinity with the spectator. But I find that in such cases, when the viewer is made to feel that, in a sense, he ought not to be present, he is all the more aware that he is, that his position and affinity are peculiarly privileged. Also, these portraits engage us all the more because they, preeminently, redefine the question. What is represented? What is supposed to be going on?
Standing within Ann Hamilton’s tropos in a third-floor loft at the DIA Foundation in New York, “What’s going on” is an urgent question. The room is approximately ninety-six feet wide by ninety-six feet long with a fifteen-foot ceiling. The rectangle of the room is notched by a large freight elevator centered on its long front wall, creating a U-shaped working space illuminated from three sides by large windows whose clear panes have been replaced by a marbled, translucent industrial glass reinforced by wire in diamond patterns. The brick walls are painted off-white, as are the ribbed concrete ceiling and the square concrete pillars that support the ceiling. The entire concrete floor of the room has been repoured into an irregular prairie of slow dips, swells, and berms. Its entire rolling surface is carpeted with a swirling layer of horsehair whose color shifts in mottled gradations from black to sorrel to blonde like a pied pony. The piece is entitled tropos, which alludes to the troposphere, the lowest level of the earth’s atmosphere and to those phenomena that cling closest to the earth.
Entering the space through a door situated at the upper-left-hand corner of the “U,” your gaze is drawn diagonally across the room through a haze of smoke and silvery light toward a young woman who sits facing away from us reading a book at a small table that is incongruously perched on a gentle rise of surging horsehair. As you shuffle into the young woman’s territory, you discover that the acrid smoke blurring the atmosphere rises in a thin stream from the page of a book whose lines, as the young lady reads them, are studiously burned away, phrase by phrase, with a homemade electric instrument that fills the air with a palpable aura of disappearing language. The language smoke is reinforced by a disembodied floating male voice enunciating unintelligible phrases with actual words that are being read by a vocally impaired stroke victim whose reading and speaking skills have been biologically rewired. The lines he reads, however, fall in stately, homiletic periods while remaining totally indecipherable. In the lines, we discern the vocabulary and the diction of modern American poetry, of T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton probably, or Ezra Pound perhaps.
The effect of the deracinated poetry is disconcerting, but once we perceive the disembodied rolling voice and the swirling, worded smoke as coextensive and analogous to the swirling horsehair, the quotidian sublinguistic context of Hamilton’s tableau becomes more available to us. Its synesthetic haze of incinerated ink, paper, and garbled vocalizations is rather straightforwardly presented to us as the sensory effluvia of the young woman’s reading as that activity might insinuate itself into a prelinguistic consciousness—as it might be overheard, perhaps, in the basement of the subcortex. In any case, we stand slightly off the vertical, ankle deep in a fractal slurry of hair, swaddled in smoke and vocalization, all but adrift in a fluid, decontextualized territory that quite rigorously means nothing and hides nothing—but which, when inflected by the slightest outside stimuli or colored by the merest whim of reverie, seems capable of meaning almost anything.
During my first few minutes in the space, I noticed the embodied musculature of the Gothic line—a rolling section of prairie steppe, much miniaturized—like the mountains of Michoacán from twenty thousand feet, or a languorous Caribbean swell, frozen in its flux, or the flank of my beagle, Ralph, much magnified. I listened to the liturgical cadences of the drifting voice and heard T. S. Eliot scrambled but still in cadence and saw a Wasteland swathed in smoke. And thanks to the millions of paintings that live inside my eye, I looked down and found myself walking on a Titian, striding across its surface, keeping pace with the swift, sure scumble of the master’s horsehair brush; and having seen the giant Titian beneath my feet, I lifted my eyes and found the haze of Leonardo’s trademark sfumato, and I could have continued. Had I stayed, I could have woven a filigree of allegory to rival the Alhambra while knowing that I hadn’t added a thing to it, that I had discovered nothing but my own associative proclivities on that cognitive vacant lot, which was not even mine to interpret, which belonged to its guardian, to the absorbed young woman seated at the table, reading and burning language.
We are placed inside a situation that we must remain outside of—since the atmosphere we inhabit is clearly an externalization of the consciousness presiding over it. If, like Alice, we could step through the frame into Raphael’s portrait of Cardinal Inghirami—if we could stand beside the cardinal’s desk as he reads—our situation would be much the same and equally proto-mythic. We would have full benefit of the atmosphere that Raphael creates for his friend and of whatever knowledge its ambience might convey, but the full, active content of the work would still seem occluded and remote, although, as trespassers in Inghirami’s space, we would be preternaturally sensitive to the nuances of that atmosphere. (I always imagine the Cardinal refusing to just sit there for a portrait and Raphael proposing that he read as a compromise.) In any case, as we occupy an analogous position in tropos, it is easy to understand why Hamilton refers to the figures that inhabit nearly all of her work as “guardians,” because they do, in fact, guard her works. They override the values of the institutions that enclose them and attenuate the proprietary gaze of the beholders who visit them.
:
After breakfast that Christmas morning, James Elliot Taylor and I emerged from the warm kitchen bundled in coats, hats, scarves, and gloves. We loaded the sacks of feed into the bed of the pickup as quickly as we could on account of the cold. Then we clambered into the cab and headed out through the bright, deserted streets of residential Lubbock. The curbs were lined with American cars parked in front of ranch-style homes that were set well back from the street, centered in plots of yellow grass, each trimmed with evergreen and adorned with red ribbons. Over the clatter of the truck’s heater, we could hear bells bonging out Christmas carols—“Joy to the World” and “Good King Wenceslaus”—but, otherwise, everything was cold and still. The cab of the pickup smelled of dry cow dung, cold grease, and James Elliot’s Red Man snuff.
Eventually, the houses fell away and the flat horizon began to assert itself. James Elliot pointed up the road. “There ’tis,” he said, indicating a low cluster of tidy silver cattle pens constructed of welded pipe. The pens were set about fifty feet off the road and surrounded by raw dirt cotton fields. As we pulled off the blacktop onto the gravel, we could see the dark cattle in the pens bestir themselves. They began to drift toward the troughs.
“Amazing,” I said.
“Huh,” James Elliot said.
By the time we pulled to a stop beside the pens, the animals had arranged themselves in two rows according to some bovine nudging order, one row just in front of the troughs and a second row, tucked between them, about half a cow back.
“What are they thinking?” I asked.
“They’re thinking they’re gonna get fed,” James Elliot said.
“No, I mean, do you think they really think?”
James Elliot pulled his hat down over his eyes and gave this some thought as he climbed down out of the truck. Walking up to the pens, he offered his conclusions:
“Well,” he said, “whenever the truck hits the gravel, the animals head for the troughs. So I guess you could say they think a little. But, then again, they’re obviously not worried about why I’m feeding ’em. So you could also say that even if they do think . . . they don’t think things through!”
While we were loading the troughs, James Elliot went on to explain that being in the livestock business undercut one’s confidence in the Scripture. “If you raise animals for slaughter,” he said, flopping the open mouth of a grain sack over the edge of the trough, “the Twenty-third Psalm is not all that reassuring. ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ is fine unless you know that shepherds raise animals for slaughter. This is just shepherding,” he said, indicating the feedlot with his chin, “but with better equipment.”
:
This Arcadian memory, bright and intact, rose into my consciousness on a cool November evening, careening uptown in a Manhattan taxicab, I was happy for it. Earlier that day we had walked through Ann Hamilton’s tropos, and in the interim, I had been talking with the artist about that mysterious endeavor—so this unbidden recollection amounted to the first intellectual fruit of those encounters. The horsehide. The cowhide. That smell. When I was younger, I would have dismissed it as neural static, but I have learned to trust those random bits of image and anecdote that the brain tosses up in the face of difficult art. More often than not, these fragments define a territory of confluence between one’s own sensibility and that of the work.
In this case, my preconscious had managed to come up with a point of intersection—one of the few—between Hamilton and myself. As banal as it seemed, it led me to suppose that somewhere in Hamilton’s background there must have been some experiential analogy to James Elliot’s subversive insight into the darker aspects of shepherding—for, if Hamilton’s work did nothing else, it fretted away relentlessly at the duplicitous relationship between humans and the living world in those communities where nature and culture overlap, where natural economies and abstract economies rub one another raw. So I found myself thinking about the sheep—the ones that Hamilton had penned up in San Francisco in the anteroom adjacent to a meadow of pennies and honey. Blood into money and sweets, would be my reading. Almost certainly, I thought, these captive creatures and that field of sweet currency were Hamilton’s clear-eyed way of insisting that the penned sheep were doubtless thinking: “The Lord is my shepherd, indeed!”
Criticism tends to work like this for me. It arises, when it does, out of the cacophony of such tangential similitudes and differences—and the more I thought about Hamilton’s work, the more theatrical our own differences seemed to be. The clearer it became that, while I might be far from the ideal beholder for Hamilton’s work, I was very nearly the ideal student for the visceral lessons it had to teach about the language and the blood—living, as I do, so happily, such a long way from the farm. Occasionally, at the Las Vegas airport, I will spot the white lobster plane from Seattle as it taxis over to the freight depot, but this is as close as I come, these days, to the livestock business. Otherwise, I live in a fissure of twentieth-century civilization wedged between the Metropolis and the Wilderness—between the pure neon of Las Vegas and the pure desolation of the Mojave that surrounds it. A few feet and a million years divide them.
Ann Hamilton is and always has been a creature of the Town and the Country, of the village and the farm—the daughter of a world in which nature and culture have so completely bled into one another that they are indistinguishable—where such nature as survives has been domesticated into “agriculture”—where such culture as exists has been subsumed beneath the rhetoric of “human nature.” Further, she has rigorously delimited the physical language of her art to the province of this nature/culture overlay, eliminating the exclusively “cultural” idiom of the Metropolis and the exclusively “natural” idiom of the Wilderness. This has contributed heavily to the exotic appeal of Hamilton’s work and to its casual misapprehension.
We are so used to the urban language of “art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” and to the wilderness language of “unspoiled grandeur” that we sometimes forget that Baudelaire did not invent urban culture nor Frederic Church wild nature—that both of these iconographies are the products of displacement. They are idealized antinomies from the wishful dreams of human inhabitants of pastoral cultures positioned at the cruel interface of domesticated nature and naturalized culture. We forget that we live in the utopian dreams of Protestant country people who tilled the earth, fed their livestock, slaughtered them and ate them, and dreamed of a peaceable kingdom without harvest or slaughter, who lived out their lives within the gestalt of large families, in full view of family and neighbors, and dreamed of a larger and more private world of the city where one might be free of that suffocating, tribal intimacy and the hard predation of human survival.
Considering our forgetfulness, it is at once cautionary and refreshing to confront an art like Hamilton’s that preempts both the rhetoric of mechanical reproduction and the liturgy of Arcadian nature and delves into these indeterminate, fractal mysteries. In this sense, we should regard Hamilton’s endeavor as an extension of the disheveled agendas that were introduced into American art in the late sixties by Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, and Bruce Nauman. These artists insisted upon art’s status as labor made manifest. Their endeavors made cruel fun of the object’s pretense to autonomy and cast an equally acerbic glance at the institution’s ambition to possess such objectified human struggle. Hamilton might be said to have executed a genetic shift. Where Hesse, Smithson, Serra, and Nauman concerned themselves with the calamitous intersection of human industry and inanimate nature, Hamilton concerns herself with the high-viscosity tussle of working humans and living nature, with the preindustrial economies of grazing and agriculture that feed industrial economy.
One problem arises. These preindustrial economies are so heavily invested with cultural nostalgia that Hamilton can inadvertently evoke it for stubborn utopians unwilling to dispense with its glow. It becomes vulnerable to nineteenth-century habits of nomenclature that denote the Metropolis and the Wilderness as “masculine” venues while designating the Town and Country as “feminine” enclaves. Thus, Hamilton’s work is routinely ghettoized as “woman’s work”—most often by women who should know better—and gathered into that branch of art making that revels in the mysticism of iterative practice and the communal romance of “materials.” This is an understandable defensive reaction, I suppose, considering the ruthlessness with which Hamilton’s practice lays bare the masochistic justifications that human culture has conjured up to redeem such mindless “woman’s work” and to valorize all the dehumanizing labor required to translate nature’s cataclysmic processes into a rational, usable form. Even so, as Hamilton herself puts it: she is nobody’s “material girl”—and, as anyone who has talked to her will testify, she tends to regard the willful labor required to make her art with wry anxiety, as if the proclivity to do that work were a kind of hereditary Puritan disease for which the art is but a momentary palliative.
Still, even though romantic “materiality” and the cult of “caring woman’s work” are light-years from the heart of Hamilton’s endeavor, it is instructive to note just how profoundly the iconographies of the Metropolis and the Wilderness have been purged from her idiom. Finally, there is nothing wild nor anything cosmopolitan in Hamilton’s language. The animals and the animal products that Hamilton integrates into her work are exclusively domestic commodities, organisms co-opted by culture. She employs producers and performers (sheep, canaries, silkworms, bees), their products and byproducts (honey, turkey flesh, horsehair, pigskin, tallow, and inarticulate song). Even meat-eating Dermestid beetles are recruited to devour turkey carcasses. Their breeders usually sell these insects to museums to devour the flesh of animals without damaging the bones. The Kiowa would look askance at this Enlightenment brutality. The plant life Hamilton uses is likewise domesticated: functional greenery like eucalyptus, cash crops and products like flax, lettuce, flowers, indigo, and grain.
Beyond these animal and vegetable products, there is very little manufactured in Hamilton’s work, just the occasional domestic artifact: a sink, a table, a chair, a cabinet, a shirt, a bag, a loaf of bread. For these objects to exist, the Industrial Revolution need never have transpired—the fixed firmament of replicated urban artifacts need never have come into being; and as if to emphasize this point, the preexisting architectural enclosures within which Hamilton’s works are routinely, and even aggressively, defaced and made mutable. The layers of candle soot and grime that contemporary restorers have been meticulously removing from the Sistine Chapel are meticulously reapplied by Hamilton and her assistants to the walls and ceilings of the Henry Gallery in Seattle—and such songs as fill this secular church are provided by hothouse canaries, flown in from Belgium to sing until they die—as die they must—and as we must die as well.
The historical genre of Hamilton’s artistic endeavor, then, is certainly that of the vanitas and very cold indeed—a genre invented to tell the mutable tragedy of material culture—the story of lost song, disappearing language, and dissolving smoke. As told by Hamilton, these stories tell themselves in colossal, not-so-still-lives that do not survive, as a painting might, but exist as momentary, material occasions to meditate upon the vanity and complexity of human wishes. They suggest a glimmer of redemption and then dissolve into the larger economy of things. This rhetoric of perpetual struggle and dissolution recalls John Calvin, sleeping in his coffin, and even if one doesn’t go that far, it is hard to avoid the inference of a refined, Puritan sensibility at work in Hamilton’s art. It is, however, a heretical Puritan sensibility, beyond the church—a Puritanism as distrustful of the Word as it is despairing of the Body, and full of longing for both.
Hamilton is the wordless poet of a world that defies abstraction—a world of abattoirs and plain churches—a world whose economies produce the food we eat, the shelter we seek, and the clothes we wear—whose values are ruthlessly focused on the disciplines of that production—on the “real economies” of en-cultured nature—to use the artist’s phrase. The whole construction of denatured “permanent” urban civilization feeds itself upon the plunder and production of the Town and the Country. Ann Hamilton’s bodily knowledge of this plunder and production might be taken as her gift to us; and her project as an artist, in its broadest terms, might be construed as an absorptive and nondiscursive effort at “thinking the culture through”—as an attempt to feel her own way down through the infinitely complex systems of the urban world (in which she works) to the equally complex systems of the town and country world in which she lives. The deeper message of her labor, I suspect, has less to do with making us “sensitive” to the “nature” of that world than it does with reawakening us to our complicity in its predatory predisposition—in its awesome capacity for abstraction, destruction, and denial.