The Process: Ann Hamilton in the Twenty-Teens

Abstract

The Process:Ann Hamilton in the Twenty-Teens Ann Hamilton (bio) and Brian McHale (bio) What kind of artist is ann hamilton? For someone who first emerged as long ago as the 1980s, and who has had an international reputation since the 1990s, hamilton is surprisingly hard to profile. She is, or has been, a textile artist; a body-artist and performance-artist; an installation artist; a photographer and videographer; an architect, a set-designer, and an animal-wrangler; a maker of civic monuments and of intimate, handcrafted objects. Moreover, in some of her most complex and celebrated works, such as the event of a thread at the park avenue armory in manhattan (2012), she is all these things at once. A cliché of critical writing and catalog essays about Hamilton is to call her work poetic—which, if it means anything, probably gestures at the associative, magical-realist, sometimes oneiric quality of her work: a room strewn with horsehair where a woman seated at a table uses a burning tool to efface, line by line, the pages of a book (tropos, at the Dia Center for the Arts, 1993–1994); an immense ex-industrial space in which leaves of onion-skin paper are mechanically lifted and released from above, to float down and settle on the floor in drifts (corpus, at MassMOCA in North Adams, MA, Click for larger view View full resolution Ann Hamilton. Photo credit: Calista Lyon. [End Page 209] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Ann Hamilton, the event of a thread (2012). Photograph by Thibault Jeansen. Image courtesy of the artist. 2003–2004). More concretely, to call her poetic is also to acknowledge how frequently she incorporates language in her work. Her installations regularly feature the act of writing as performance, and book-objects as materials, sometimes (as in tropos) under erasure. They often incorporate the verbal art of others, usually poetry—by Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Charles Reznikoff, A. R. Ammons, Jorie Graham, and especially Susan Stewart, a frequent collaborator—but sometimes also lyrical prose by the likes of John Muir, Angela Carter, or Virginia Woolf. Her own catalog statements often take the form of verse: short-lined, spaced as stanzas, sometimes approximating sonnet length. Born and raised in Ohio, Hamilton has lived and worked in Columbus since 2001, where she teaches in the Ohio State University's Department of Art and shares a bustling studio with her husband, the artist Michael Mercil. I interviewed her at her studio on two occasions, just over a year apart, in June 2018 and July 2019; the text of this published interview is adapted from those conversations. Hamilton reflects here on a number of the works she has made over [End Page 210] the course of the past decade, particularly two pieces that I experienced myself firsthand: habitus (2016) at the Fabric Workshop and Museum and Municipal Pier 9 in Philadelphia, and the theater is a blank page, a collaboration with Anne Bogart and the SITI company, staged first at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (2015), and later at UCLA (2018). Apart from these completed works, she also reflects on a number of works just then in progress—works in the works. The first part of our interview took place as Hamilton was developing a complex installation/event in conjunction with a textile biennial in Guimarães, Portugal, and beginning to think about a pending project in Portland, Oregon that would incorporate elements of the habitus piece from Philadelphia. I interviewed her a second time in the wake of the Guimarães and Portland events, as she was beginning to develop new projects at the University of Chicago, the University of California at San Diego, and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and, jointly with two other Ohio-born artists, Jenny Holzer and Maya Lin, a show at the Wexner Center at Ohio State (HERE, September 21 to December 29, 2019). In the interval between our two conversations, her public artwork CHORUS (2018) had been unveiled in the newly reopened Cortlandt Street subway station in Manhattan—a station that had been destroyed on September 11, 2001. Taken together...