The Ann Hamilton experience - installation artist - Interview

Interview, July, 1999 by Lynne Cooke

Over the last decade, Ann Hamilton has emerged as one of the most provocative installation artists of our time

Best known for her site-specific environments that make use of sephisticated technology, unusual and highly sensual materials, recorded sound, and literary and historical allusions, the forty-threeyear-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.