NEW YORK -- Turkey carcasses. Flour. Soot. Old wool coats. Meat-eating beetles. Pennies. A pocketful of honey. Wax. Canaries. Eucalyptus leaves.
These are elements in the worlds that artist Ann Hamilton invents. She uses unusual materials to create sculptural environments that are simultaneously cerebral and sensory. Her installations are almost always site specific. They often include plants or animals or a person doing a repetitive, hypnotic task. And they wrestle with the questions: How do we know what we know? How does language affect what we know?
"We live in a culture that privileges something that can be stated in language over other kinds of experiences. This is what I think about," Hamilton says. "Can you have a thought without language? Isn't thinking [in words] how you think it through?"
Hamilton is representing the United States at the 48th Venice Biennale, a sort of world's fair for contemporary art that this year features 102 artists sent by 58 countries. Her installation, called "myein," will be on view at the U.S. Pavilion through Nov. 7.
"We thought that she exemplified many of the best parts of contemporary art making," says Katy Kline, director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine and co-curator of the Venice installation. "She is deeply informed, but she never lets intellectual baggage come before the visual and visceral impact of the installations."
Instantly accessible
At 42, Hamilton has an international reputation. Her projects have appeared in the Miami Art Museum, Musee D'Art Contemporain De Montreal, the Van Abbe Museum in the Netherlands and the Tate Gallery in England, among others. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, and in 1993, a so-called "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. However, though it inspires reams of scholarly text, her art remains instantly accessible.
Hamilton asks her viewers to step outside the typical patterns of experiencing art. Entering one of her projects is like going to a play at which the audience is invited to sit on stage. You become part of the installation.
In one -- "tropos," a 1993 installation at New York's Dia Center for the Arts -- Hamilton remodeled the gallery's floor so that it undulated like the gentle swell of a wave. She covered it with a carpet woven from horse hair, then placed a single table in the room's center. A woman sat before it on a stool. Using a tiny tool, she burned the words out of a book, line by line. As the slightly acrid smoke drifted away; the words metaphorically hung in the air.
"I don't know anyone who reads more than she does. Science, history, poetry, everything. So her ideas spring from an enormous range of sources," says Harry Philbrick, director of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut. "Her work is almost like a novel. She weaves together so many strands that all circle around a body of ideas that finally come together. It's poetic."
One evening -- several weeks before the grand opening in June of her Venice installation -- Hamilton was in New York, drinking tea and fretting over whether she'll be able to complete her project in time. "I'm kind of thinking that I should leave it very spare. But then you think, 'How much is enough?' 'How much is too much?' " she says. "It has to work. It just has to. I was up all night last night worrying about it."
A compact person, with close-cropped hair and friendly blue eyes, Hamilton's conversations range from highly intellectual discussions of her latest readings in philosophy to retellings of her 4-year-old's favorite storybook. There is a striking sense of openness about her.
She was born in Lima, Ohio, and studied textile design at the University of Kansas and sculpture at Yale University. Much of her work is infused with a Puritan sensibility that labor is necessary and good. And there is nearly always a relationship between interior and exterior.
When not traveling to and from installations, Hamilton lives with her husband, a sculptor, in Columbus, not far from where she was born. She rejuvenates herself through her closeness to her family and, lately, with daily runs with her dog. And she reads: poetry, philosophy, social and political history, texts on ecology and ethics.
"The reading doesn't directly flow into the idea [that forms each installation]. The reading is part of the atmosphere that I work out of as much as the space is the atmosphere that I work in response to," she says. "I'm reading not for the larger argument of a text, but for the way that something is written. The way two words sit side by side and touch in a particular way so that you go: AHA!"
To create "whitecloth," an installation at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Hamilton considered its history and location. The museum, a large white house that sits on a main street in Ridgefield, Conn., has been a private home, general store, town meeting place and church. Hamilton's work refers to the roles the building has played in a Puritan society, and in domestic and spiritual settings.
The first room of the installation is furnished only with a wooden kitchen table. A white cloth hovers about an inch above it, as though levitating. (It is held aloft by tiny jets of air channeled through the table's legs.)
In a second room, a butcher's block squats near a tiny video screen embedded in the wall. An image flickers repeatedly: Hamilton's hand moves sensuously in a pocketful of honey. Walk across the room to peer into a barrel of water and the floor shudders, sending ripples across the skin of the liquid. You see the water move. You feel the floor in your bones. Suddenly there is a bright flash. A slightly tattered white cloth, propelled by a wire and pulley whisks from this room to the next. What does it suggest? A ghost? The Shroud of Turin? A woman dropping her handkerchief flirtatiously?
Venice installation
Though Hamilton never explains or translates the titles of her installations, they may add to the layers of meaning. The Venice installation's title, "myein," is a Greek root of the word "mystery." It can mean an abnormal contraction of the eyelid or a rite of initiation.
The U.S. Pavilion in which it's housed is one of 30 pavilions in Venice's Giardini Castello. With two galleries that flank a central courtyard, a domed rotunda, the 60-year-old pavilion resembles Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home in Charlottesville, Va.
Hamilton's preparations for the biennale began last summer with a site visit. "It's just to really know and feel in a physical way how to respond to what the physical tensions are, what the qualities are that you keep coming back to in this space. To get the sensation of being there."
The artist knew from the beginning that she wanted to treat the pavilion as an object -- not as an architectural structure for housing artworks. Beyond that, she wasn't sure what she would do. She read American history and poetry, including an essay about the politics of democratic space by Philip Fisher, called "Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency."
In the end, she built a screen made of thick, wavy glass in front of the pavilion. The screen alters how you see: From the outside, the building's outlines are blurred as though you are peering through a waterfall. And when you are inside, looking out, the view is distorted, as well.
"The glass wall liquifies the image of the building in relationship to your movement. First in the view in and, specifically, it distorts the view out. That immediately makes you think about the building and your relationship to it," Hamilton says.
Inside the pavilion, a fine pink powder floats from ceiling to floor, collecting on Braille dots engraved on the walls. The Braille text is from Charles Reznikoff's "Testimony: The United States: 1885-1915," which has passages drawn from court cases involving violent crimes. A voice hovers, barely audibly; it is a tape of the artist reading parts of Lincoln's second inaugural address -- in code. "Alpha." "Echo." "Omega." The whispered sounds hang in the air.
"I think the work is actually quite literary, but is not actually about words. It is literary in its structure, in its references," Hamilton says. "It's about the felt sense of this in relation to the quality of that. It is always about that thing you can't quite name."