Art, Artifacts, and Residue: The Space of The Exhibition in Ann Hamilton's indigo blue.
Thesis
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the
Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Therese Marie McCann, BA
Graduate Program in History of Art
The Ohio State University
2018
Thesis Committee
Lisa Florman, Advisor
Philip Armstrong, Committee Member (Reader)
Copyrighted by
Therese Marie McCann
2018
Abstract
Through a close reading of Ann Hamilton’s indigo blue (1991), this thesis offers a critical investigation of the ways in which the exhibition space informs and embeds meaning in works of art. As the space of the exhibition changes the notion of what the spectator views as art, the thesis will explore how a change of context can alter both the meaning of the work and the viewer’s understanding of an art object. In addressing indigo blue (1991) in its original form, and then examining its reappearance in three subsequent iterations— as object-details in untitled (indigo blue/2), shown in 1996 at The Wexner Center for the Arts in “the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1984-1996” exhibition; as object-relics in (indigo blue • books) as part of the private collection of Lois
Plehn; and in the context of a contemporary art museum, in the re-installation of indigo blue (2007) at SFMOMA alongside works by other artists – the thesis will examine the critical implications of these displacements as the original version of indigo blue (1991) is transformed through different exhibition sites and viewing conditions.
i Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Lisa Florman who, because of her passion and ability to deliver history as a scholar and storyteller, caused me to fall in love with and pursue my academic career in the History of Art. She re-opened the cracked door and allowed me to step through to return and finish my MA. I would also like to thank Dr. Philip Armstrong, who has helped me in innumerable ways both as a reader and a student. His encouragement and insight propelled me to approach and knock on said door. For each, thank you doesn’t seem to be enough; I will be forever grateful. I also thank Ann
Hamilton with whom I had the honor to work as a Graduate Assistant. Her work as an artist and a human being, her appetite to tell a transcendent story with objects, and her ability to transform spaces into sublime installations is inspiring. Thank you for being my teacher and for your time and energy. I also thank you for your work. Thank you, Sarah
Rodgers, who throughout this process gave graciously of her time and invaluable insight.
Thank you to my family and friends who also provided endless encouragement and love over the course of this long journey. Thank you, German Village Starbucks where I sipped on Trenta Iced Green Tea, no water, no sweetener, light ice for countless hours every day while I read and wrote my thesis. Lastly, I give eternal thanks to God who is my source.
ii Vita
2001 B.A. Cum Laude, Art History, The Ohio State University
2002 – 2005 M.A. Candidate, The Ohio State University
2006 – present Creative Director, LBrands, Black Purse, llc.
2018 M.A. Art History, The Ohio State University
Fields of Study
Major Field: History of Art
Contemporary West African Art, Contemporary Western Art
iii
Table of Contents
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………….…i
Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………….………..ii
Vita……………………………………………………………………………………….iii
Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………iv
List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………..v
Indigo blue, (1991), “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival” …………………………………………………… …………………………….1
An Interpretation of indigo blue………………………………………………………....11
After Spoleto: Dismantling indigo blue………………………………………………….19 untitled (indigo blue/2) (1991) altered books in “the body and the object” (1996)….…..24
(indigo blue • books) (1991), Collection of Lois Plehn………………………...………..39
Indigo blue (2007)………………………………………………………………………..43
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….49
Endnotes……………………………………………...…………………………………..54
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….….62
iv List of Figures
Figure 1 - indigo blue, (1991) "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at………….....1 Charleston’s Spoleto Festival” Charleston, South Carolina. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 2 - indigo blue, (1991) "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at………….....1 Charleston’s Spoleto Festival” Charleston, South Carolina. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 3 - indigo blue, (1991) "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at…………….3 Charleston’s Spoleto Festival” Charleston, South Carolina. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 4 - indigo blue, (1991) "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at…………….4 Charleston’s Spoleto Festival” Charleston, South Carolina. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 5 - indigo blue, (1991) "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at…………….4 Charleston’s Spoleto Festival” Charleston, South Carolina. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 6 - indigo blue, (1991) "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at………...... 5 Charleston’s Spoleto Festival” Charleston, South Carolina. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 7 - indigo blue, (1991) "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at…………….6 Charleston’s Spoleto Festival” Charleston, South Carolina. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 8 - indigo blue, (1991) "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at…………….6 Charleston’s Spoleto Festival” Charleston, South Carolina. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 9 - indigo blue, (1991) "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at……...... 7 Charleston’s Spoleto Festival” Charleston, South Carolina. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 10 - indigo blue, (1991) "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at……...... 8 Charleston’s Spoleto Festival” Charleston, South Carolina. Reprinted with permission.
v Figure 11 - indigo blue, (1991) "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at…………...8 Charleston’s Spoleto Festival” Charleston, South Carolina. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 12 - indigo blue, (1991) "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at……...... 9 Charleston’s Spoleto Festival” Charleston, South Carolina. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 13 – privation and excesses, (1989), Capp Street Project……………...………...21 San Francisco, California. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 14 – privation and excesses, (1989), Capp Street Project……………...………...21 San Francisco, California. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 15 – privation and excesses, (1989), Capp Street Project……………...………...22 San Francisco, California. Reprinted with permission.
Figure 16 - untitled (indigo blue/2), (1991) – 5 altered books on a pedestal…………….25 "the body and the object, Ann Hamilton 1884-1996" Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (1996). Reprinted with permission. Figure 17 - untitled (indigo blue/2), (1991) – 5 altered books on a pedestal…………….26 "the body and the object, Ann Hamilton 1884-1996" Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (1996). Reprinted with permission. Figure 18 - untitled (indigo blue/2), (1991) – 5 altered books on a pedestal…………….26 "the body and the object, Ann Hamilton 1884-1996" Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (1996). Reprinted with permission. Figure 19 – Video-clips from indigo blue, (1991). "the body and the object,…………...28 Ann Hamilton 1884-1996" Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (1996). Reprinted with permission. Figure 20 – Video-clips from indigo blue, (1991). "the body and the object,…………...28 Ann Hamilton 1884-1996" Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (1996). Reprinted with permission. Figure 21 – Video-clips from indigo blue, (1991). "the body and the object,…………...29 Ann Hamilton 1884-1996" Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (1996). Reprinted with permission.
vi Figure 22 – Video-clips from indigo blue, (1991). "the body and the object,……….…..29 Ann Hamilton 1884-1996" Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (1996). Reprinted with permission. Figure 23 - untitled (privation and excesses), (1989) metal chair, felt hat…...……….…33 cloth, honey. “the body and the object – Ann Hamilton 1984-1996”. The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. (1996). Reprinted with permission. Figure 24 - untitled (privation and excesses), (1989) metal chair, felt hat……....………33 cloth, honey. “the body and the object – Ann Hamilton 1984-1996”. The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. (1996). Reprinted with permission.
Figure 25 – video-clips from (privation and excesses), (1989) “the body and………..…34 the object – Ann Hamilton 1984-1996”. The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. (1996). Reprinted with permission. Figure 26 – video-clips from (privation and excesses), (1989) “the body and………..…34 the object – Ann Hamilton 1984-1996”. The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. (1996). Reprinted with permission. Figure 27 – video-clips from (privation and excesses), (1989) “the body and………..…35 the object – Ann Hamilton 1984-1996”. The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. (1996). Reprinted with permission. Figure 28 – video-clips from (privation and excesses), (1989) “the body and……..……35 the object – Ann Hamilton 1984-1996”. The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. (1996). Reprinted with permission. Figure 29 (indigo blue - books), (1991). Collection of Lois Plehn………………………39 Reprinted with permission.
Figure 30 indigo blue, (1991/2007) – Re-Installed, San Francisco Museum……………43 of Modern Art, San Francisco, California. Reprinted with permission. Figure 31 indigo blue, (1991/2007) – Re-Installed, San Francisco Museum……………43 of Modern Art, San Francisco, California. Reprinted with permission.
vii indigo blue (1991), “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival.”
Figure 1 – indigo blue (1991) “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival.”
Figure 2 – indigo blue (1991) “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival.”
1 A garage is a place for storage—tools, machinery, and miscellaneous odds and ends—a place where labor is evident and mechanics are put to work. A garage is typically dirty and dark, full of peculiar smells and discarded objects. It is not a place where one might expect to encounter an art exhibition. Located on 45 Pinckney Street in
Charleston, South Carolina, Mike's Garage was nonetheless the space chosen by artist
Ann Hamilton as the site for her 1991 work, indigo blue, commissioned as part of curator
Mary Jane Jacob’s “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston's Spoleto
Festival.” For the artist, the former carriage house felt like a “place with a past.” Its stunted scale suggested it was built in a different era for another purpose. The space appeared as a visual relic, awkwardly shoehorned between a newly erected faceless parking structure and an “Old South” style building in the Pinckney Inn. The garage was made of brick with a calcified, white-washed facade. The once pristine, white-glazed structure revealed its own history, where the original terra-cotta was visible through the chips and cracks of eroded paint and where signature Spanish Moss clung to parts of the façade, a visual reminder of the humid, deep South. The horizontal register of brick below the long, left-hand window had been painted black, foregrounding a contrasted black number 45, the structure’s address on Pinckney St., but also bearing a subliminal reminder of the grounding foundation of black bodies on which the white, prosperous
South was built. The only exterior indications that the garage had turned into an exhibition space were a small white sign, hung higher than human scale, reading “Mike's
Garage has moved to 111 Alexander St.,” and a red pylon at street level, marking the space as a site participating in the “Places with a Past” series of exhibitions.
2 In addition to the fact that the street’s name conjured associations with slave labor and indigo (in that it was Eliza Pinckney who, while running her father’s plantation, introduced indigo to Charleston in 17441), Hamilton chose the space because she felt that the walls reverberated with past histories. The unconventional interior of the garage seamlessly blended an ethos of labor with an environmental installation, in which the work was presented against a dirty garage floor and surrounded by old, painted wooden slat-boards and abraded brick walls with a beamed ceiling. Empty wooden shelves lined a portion of the back wall, punctuating the absence of activity and alluding to the fact that the space itself was a relic. One can imagine the familiar and habitual smells and sounds that were already present in the old garage, ones that no doubt contributed to the experience of the space.
Figure 3 – indigo blue (1991), “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival.”
3
Figure 4 – indigo blue (1991), “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival.”
Figure 5 – indigo blue (1991), “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival.”
The transition from Mike's Garage to an exhibition space was already evident when first encountering the site. Standing before an open garage door, bathed in a warm,
4 natural light streaming from a section of second story windows located directly above, the spectator could view a monumental sculptural mound of blue cotton work-clothes.
The tumulus of 48,000 pieces of men's and women's shirts and pants were meticulously folded and placed on what looked like a massive automobile lift. Each garment was carefully arranged by Hamilton and her team of workers, with the respective collar and waistband facing outwards toward the viewer on the 17' x 24' steel platform in the center of the garage floor. Only gradually did one grasp the countless hours of guided, repetitive labor undoubtedly required to create the massive focal point. Inordinate care had been taken to make the name badges referring to the previous owners visible, a reminder of the individual faceless laborers whose identities had been omitted from the written histories of Charleston.
Figure 6 – indigo blue (1991), “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival.”
5
Figure 7 – indigo blue (1991), “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival.”
Figure 8 – indigo blue (1991), “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival.”
Giving voice to the voiceless, visualizing the invisible, remembering a lost past, both erasing and reconstructing history—these were the ambitions materialized in indigo blue. Hidden behind the heaped pile of clothes, Hamilton positioned a new form of laborer at the far end of the garage. Her back to the viewer, a single worker was seated behind a long wooden farm table that Hamilton had borrowed from a local market,
“which had previously served as an agricultural exchange and, many years before that, as a site of slave auctions” (Simon, 107). For several hours a day throughout the course of
6 the exhibition, the artist or an anonymous man or woman sat silent, dressed in a pressed white shirt and khaki work pants, hovering over a blue-covered textbook. These performer-workers or laborers were instructed by Hamilton to execute the repetitive, mundane task of erasing the text from the end of the blue book to the beginning with a
Pink Pearl eraser. The unnamed white-collared laborers performed the assignment of regularly licking the eraser to keep it wet, then erasing the words, line by line, until the text was gone, leaving the ghostly void of the erased words evidenced in the gummed residue that collected in the hem of the book and spilled out onto the table.
Figure 9 – indigo blue (1991), “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival.”
7
Figure 10 – indigo blue (1991), “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival.”
Figure 11 – indigo blue (1991), “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival.”
8
Figure 12 – indigo blue (1991), “Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival.”
Upstairs, in a purposeful demonstration of a hierarchal power structure, set-apart from the work going on below, a second-story management office constituted the final part of the environmental installation. Darkened by a lack of natural light and low ceilings, the cramped space had only a small exterior window that was partially veiled by draped sack-cloth, and two other symmetrical windows added by Hamilton that overlooked the laborer and the blue cotton mound below. In the tiny loft space, from a painted masonry wall, Hamilton hung sixty woven-net sacks filled with soybeans.
Varying in size, the tonal sacks crowded the wall, giving a feeling of organized excess and texture similar to that of the heap of countless shirts and pants below. The chubby flesh-toned sacks appeared breast-like or like a series of pregnant bellies, and so decidedly female compared to the somber yet strong masculinity of the work clothes shown in the space below. Hamilton chose soybeans as the other living presence, in addition to the erasing laborer, of indigo blue. As a cash crop important to the local and world economy, soybeans also represented seeds whose cultivation was dependent on slave labor. During the tenure of the exhibition, the soybeans were exposed to the
9 moisture of a humid summer in Charleston as well as rain that fell through the cracks of the old leaky roof, causing the office to behave more like a greenhouse. The soybeans eventually sprouted, grew into ornamented vines, then began to die, rot, and fill the space with a rancid odor.
During the Summer of 1991 and the duration of indigo blue, Mike’s Garage became less a space for literal mechanical labor and more a space where labor was on display. It became a space of exhibition or the space of encounter. Each readymade object selected by Hamilton would temporarily become part of a work of art; some would be returned, while others would record time and the performance and then be salvaged.
Some would yet live and die in the context of the exhibition. In exhibiting labor in different forms, indigo blue revealed how, when materialized and shown in concentrated excess, the installed objects become a powerful statement of humanity and collective labor.
10 An Interpretation of indigo blue (1991)
Every place, every object in the present, has a unique relation to the past, one to which it is often difficult to respond. In the summer of 1991, Ann Hamilton’s indigo blue was commissioned for the “Places with a Past” festival in response to an invitation by
Mary Jane Jacob for twenty-three select artists to respond to the “social history and contemporary context of the city.”2 Charleston’s present-day Southern charm is inviting.
The scripted history is living, tangibly manifest in the architecture and pace of life, where the city itself feels gracious and obliging. Perhaps part of the appeal for Jacob in choosing the exhibition’s subject was “that [the city] makes convulsive American histories seem both ever-present and manageable. Slavery, the Civil War, the Military Industrial
Complex—within the beauty of this city, they can seem benign” (Brenson, n.p.). This tension between the present and past, between an ugly, furtive history veiled by warm, gracious charm – how Charleston’s “labor” history had been untold and retold – became the basis for Hamilton’s indigo blue.
In discussing her rationale for the exhibition, Mary Jane Jacob remarked:
“Redefining, at times re-writing, history was a theme of the exhibition. An issue of postmodernism, the interest in and regard for history – using and deconstructing with such questions as whose history is presented, what is written in and out of history, and the idea that there is not one history but many – was given artistic realization with these projects” (Jacob, 18). The issues raised by the exhibition opened up a number of questions: To whose or what history is one responding? For whom is one speaking? How can the gaps or lapses in contradictory and conflictual histories be filled? The chosen city 11 of Charleston is clearly a place with a past, an inviting city characterized by the image of swinging on a wrap-around front porch on a hot summer day, sipping lemonade. It is a city that has a haunting beauty, but where in the murky July air one can sense the weight of its history. It was the capital of the Old South, the cultural and political hub of a stubborn plantation society, a place with a black majority and a white elite. The charm of the city somehow renders this contested past amicable. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett has written that Charleston is “a living environment of memory (milieu de mémoire), not just a site of memory (lieu de mémoire) as found in museums and monuments” (quoted in
Brenson, n.p.). It was this milieu de mémoire to which Jacob asked the artists to respond, thus engaging with everyday life and its relation to the past as a resource when creating their works: “In Charleston, the artists encountered a real world of the present with all the textures of the past; the location engendered new works that were both contemporary in their issues and site specific in their references and physicality” (Jacob, 19).
The exhibition in Charleston had its precedent in the Spoleto Festival in Italy in
1962, where contemporary sculptors made newly commissioned works for “Sculture nella Città,” placing works throughout the city of Spoleto in alternative, more common utilitarian spaces against the backdrop of the medieval town. “Places with a Past” similarly installed works throughout Charleston in what would be the first exhibition in the United States to use an entire city for its staging. The selection of Charleston as the context proved to be fertile ground: “Among the timely issues were those of gender, race, and cultural identity, considerations of difference, the notion of the colonizer-colonized paradigm, ideas of domination and exploitation. These are subjects much in the vanguard of criticism and art-making” (Jacob, 17). This was the larger framework for indigo blue, 12 an installation by a woman artist whose critical significance was connected to an erased history of blue-collar laborers and part of a series of exhibitions that dealt with difficult issues of a racial history and engendered identity. A reaction to the old garage space, to the curator’s larger ambitions for the festival, and to the Southern tradition of storytelling, indigo blue was profoundly shaped by both told and untold narratives of history and memory. Jacobs remarks: “In most cases the artists succeeded in creating works that were truly site-specific, that is, they could not be located elsewhere, or if physically possible to do so, they would have been diminished in the relocation ...The installations became like chapters in a book that together told a larger, more complete, and alternative story of
Charleston” (Jacob, 17). Hamilton produced her contribution by, as she said, “responding to my perceptions of the selective memory that the city markets as a tourist industry, and to my concern with a history that is based more in the somatic experience of the body than in the accounting of events and facts” (quoted in Simon, 103-104). Over a six-week period, Hamilton investigated life in Charleston and American labor history through the stories that had been left unsaid, unseen, and unwritten.
The garage space chosen by Hamilton was purposefully situated in the margins and not located in the heart of the city center. It was tucked several blocks away from the historic Charleston City Market and the French Quarter. Initially, Hamilton visited the typical tourist sites in Charleston, ones with an overly scripted history such as the
Nathaniel Russell and Aiken-Rhett houses, The Charleston Museum, the Battery and
White Point Gardens, the market area, churches, graveyards, Fort Sumter, The Citadel, and other well-known areas, but she decided instead to “go to the edge of history” and to
13 focus on a space where she could tell her story of “those who had been marginalized and whose stories had been forgotten over time” (Jacob, 18).
Hamilton chose Mike’s Garage precisely because it was not one of the pre- determined stopping points in the “Charleston Tour” but an alternative, banal place, “a space that had been closed up for a while.” It was also a site with a history of labor and surrounded by construction projects, literal work zones. In conversation, Hamilton noted,
“the (construction) workers would come by the garage during the installation; they thought the space sold work clothes.” The space was purposefully and authentically “blue collar,” filled with the ethos of labor. In addition, the garage’s location on Pinckney
Street, with its reference to Eliza Pinckney, conjured associations of indigo’s introduction to Charleston. As such, the cavernous garage space lent itself to housing the monumental heap of work clothes along with the surrounding performance-based object installations.
As an early site-responsive work, indigo blue had a serial impression on Hamilton’s future installations in the sense that it would be the first of many works that occupied an entire industrial building as its exhibition site. In the garage, she had room to explore, using countless compiled and borrowed objects to achieve a monumentally scaled “focal point.” It would also be the first of many installations in which Hamilton would use altered books.
As Hamilton began to weave together the different materials that would be used in indigo blue, she became specifically interested in the economy of indigo, with its “high social history” spanning from a European elite to American dungarees3, as well as in the ways its social currency had shifted over the years, much like labor. The associations of the dye were critical when Hamilton employed the cotton indigo garments as a focal 14 point in the making of the installation. In addition, the donated cotton work clothes4 were specifically sourced. Hamilton recalled that “the material was important, no synthetics, we were looking for cotton. Cotton self-extinguishes so for laborers such as welders, etc… it’s preferable. Cotton also holds temperature, it holds smells. The hand is different, the experience is different. Things are a consequence of their materiality. The clothes had to be cotton” (Hamilton, 2017). According to Rebecca Des Marais, who worked on the project: “The uniforms had come from a commercial supplier. They had been worn by people who had since been laid off or were from companies that had gone out of business, adding yet another unspoken element of loss” (quoted in Simon, 105). The cotton then held the wear-patterns and memory of the forgotten laborers, as evidenced in their embroidered names on the work-shirts: Margaret, Kenneth, Oswoldo, among others.
Each identity was remembered and made visible by Hamilton, showing the viewer that the disembodied garments had names and stood in proxy (on the slab or auction block) for the countless “blue collar” laborers and slaves in Charleston’s turbulent past. The untold layers of garments behaved more like geographic strata in an eighteen-foot mountain of blue. Hamilton purposefully alternated a seemingly endless number of shirts and pants to create “bodies” in which the hues of indigo reveal as broad a visual spectrum as the colors in human skin.5 Could the laying and stacking of blue bodies also be reminiscent of the stratum of brown bodies laid in the slave ships during the Trans-
Atlantic passage, perhaps scheduled for Charleston, a point of entry for enslaved
Africans? The laying out of shirts and pants together was “like laying out a body” according to Hamilton, a respectful address of the material and body, not unlike “a ceremony in preparation for a burial” (quoted in Simon, 105). In as much as the 15 individual garments accounted for the thousands of “blue collar” laborer-bodies, the collective pile could also be read as a singular, enormous body laid out upon an altar, emphasizing the laborers’ collective experience, in addition to their individual identities.
Perhaps in her response to “Places with a Past,” Hamilton sought to build a monument using blue bodies laid atop a platform-turned-altar to memorialize the countless, forgotten laborers who had been erased from history’s textbooks.
Upstairs, in the management office-turned-greenhouse, Hamilton employed a different kind of silent, living performer in the form of countless thousands of soybeans.
The seed-filled sacks were hung on a painted brick wall adjacent to both an exterior window overlooking Pinckney Street and two interior windows that overlooked the pool of blue fabric below. Hamilton notes: “It was a different experience to look down on them as an army rather than being immersed in them as a body” (quoted in Simon, 107).
That Hamilton makes the distinction between the mound as “an army” and “a body” when encountering them from different vantage points illustrates the critical nature of perspective as it relates to the perception and the location of the viewer. Seen from above, a vantage point looking down onto the mound, Hamilton opens up a reading of the laborers as an organized group of many people. By contrast, when encountered at eye- level, face to face, the viewer sees the thousands of individual laborer-bodies as humanized; they become people.
Steps away from the mound of “blue-collar laborers” sat the singular “white- collar laborer” who was deliberately altering the text books. He or she hidden from the first encounter, another living presence located in the shade of the blue heap. As she erased the text books, “the gesture took away one mark – the printed word – and replaced 16 it with another mark – the mark of the body, and as acknowledgement of individual experience” (Jacob, 76). The temporal content of the used blue textbooks along with the fact that the words were being erased was “saying something with material that you can’t say with words” (quoted in Simon, 107). Perhaps the muted performer-laborer sat in proxy for the installation itself, in which the erased text that opens up a new reading of history becomes the condition for the installation’s own subsequent history and after-life as it moves from site to site. Hamilton also allowed the blue bodies to become the focal point, a protagonist to the surrogate, voiceless and disembodied laborer that laid in an ephemeral heap just steps away. Hamilton considered having a reader in the piece; “the idea was to have a spoken history. Nothing came of it, and I went this other way” (quoted in Simon, 107). The silent performance caused the encounter to be more powerful or to speak more loudly than any single narrative history could have. Ultimately, the words were rubbed out and the waste from erasing the text was left to speak for the performer; it accumulated on the table and in the margins of the text over the duration of the piece.
Like the blue work clothes, the textbooks in the installation were also second- hand. Taken from Charleston’s used book stores, the military manuals that Hamilton chose—naval manuals that regulated the establishment of legal boundaries between land and water—would ultimately be erased. The choice of a military text was perhaps a commentary on the confederate presence during the civil war, as well as on the importance of the Atlantic Ocean in the port city of Charleston’s sordid past. The performance of erasing the text from back to front, essentially reversing the writing, produced wordless books for which each new viewing offered an opportunity to imagine what else might be written or rewritten in the erased text. The erased books also offered 17 an image of the complexity of history and memory in the sense that neither are ever simple accountings of events but instead depend heavily on the author’s and reader’s points of view. Hamilton’s blue, erased historical textbooks offered a “blank page” on which to author a new history.
18 After Spoleto: Dismantling indigo blue (1991)
When indigo blue closed in early August, 1991, the installation was dismantled and the building was cleared out; with Mike’s Garage permanently relocated to
Alexander Street, the space was made ready for a new tenant. The decomposed sacks of soybeans were gathered and thrown away. Once planted as a cash crop in the Colonial
South by slave labor, the soybeans were shown in concentrated excess, perhaps visualizing the amount of seeds needed to plant a field. Hamilton, however, left the seeds to grow freely in the cloth sacks, only to die, with the rotten remnants then disposed of after the exhibition. In this sense, Hamilton did not depend on labor for the soybeans to be tended and harvested. She did not use them as a commodity for sale at maturation.
Instead, she allowed for a new narrative that foregrounded transparency and sentience in the beauty of life as well as the stench and finality of death.
The cotton work clothes, however, were not thrown out after the exhibition.
Instead they were donated to the Salvation Army, put back into circulation and returned to their original purpose: to be worn. The clothing that bore the residue of labor and laid in proxy for the society of blue-collar workers was sent back to the milieu from which it came.
This practice of borrowing, using, and returning had its installation precedent in privation and excesses (1989), where in an old garage-turned-project-space in San
Francisco’s Mission District6, Hamilton borrowed 750,000 pennies and, using honey7 as a foundation and binder, laid the pennies into in a 45’x 32’ rectangular focal point in the center of a white-walled cement garage. As with indigo blue’s clothing mound, at the end 19 of privation and excesses the enveloping carpet of 750,000 pennies that had employed honey as their adhesive were cleaned, counted, and the $7500 was used to cover the expenses of the project.8 In this sense, in both exhibitions, the respective collections of objects were given back to their original use, the former given back for a need-based donation or to be resold as a commodity, and the later reused as they were originally intended: as currency. However, both objects had also metamorphosed throughout the installation, leaving a serial impression in which they (clothes and pennies) were at once made into composite objects, then returned to their initial, individual form and re-used.
Only the erased books from indigo blue – the objects in which the performer left her gestural mark of voiding the text – were salvaged, books that were “made” in evidence, in Hamilton’s own estimation, of “time spent.” Unlike the other borrowed and returned objects installed in indigo blue and privation and excesses, the altered books could not be returned to their original condition.9 The performance and its “evidence” had forever changed the books. In this sense, the preservation (the history of unmaking and making) became a part of the condition of their salvation. Like time and history, the live performance left an abstracted mark on the book, one that in the absence of the body could be interpreted in countless ways. As the only surviving vestige of the original
Charleston installation, the erased books became a literal place where memory, history, and the installation’s own legacy could be housed. They became the location of an encounter where new readings of the work become possible.
20
Figure 13 – privation and excesses (1989), Capp Street Project, San Francisco, California
Figure 14 – privation and excesses (1989), Capp Street Project, San Francisco, California
21
Figure 15 – privation and excesses (1989), Capp Street Project, San Francisco, California
The original Charleston installation was temporary. The elements, performance, and objects were a part of an exhibition that lasted only a few months. The making of indigo blue was ephemeral by design. You had to be there to experience it. Hamilton had a specific response to the time and place of the Spoleto exhibition. As such, the space of the original exhibition also deeply informed the spectator’s experience of the work. In this sense, indigo blue challenged the ways in which we think about the work of art in relation to the space of its exhibition, as well as how the spectator addresses and engages the work of art in that space. But how does the interpretation and even identification of the “work” change after the dismantling of the original installation and the removal of certain elements and their re-exhibition in different contexts? In addressing the original installation and its objects’ “life-cycle” in subsequent exhibitions, this thesis raises questions of aura, metamorphosis, and survival. It also examines what is at stake,
22 conceptually, physically, and monetarily, when indigo blue was dismantled or unmade, and then parts remade and exhibited again in various different permutations.
The “auratic”10 quality or value of the work is implicated when the various aspects of the installation (whole) and pieces (objects) undergo transformation as the work is physically altered and, more importantly, displaced from one context to another.
On each occasion, the significance of the different elements of the work changes, moving from everyday use- (or exchange-) value to an ephemeral existence, from mundane objects to belonging to the work in the space (and during the time) of the exhibition, before being transformed again back into everyday use. This continual movement then suggests a metamorphosis of value and of meaning as objects become transformed or exchanged from one stage to the next in the exhibition life-cycle.
23 untitled (indigo blue/2) (1991) altered books in “the body and the object” (1996)
As Philip Fisher argues, “the life of Things is in reality many lives” (Fisher, 3). indigo blue’s erased, salvaged books reemerged four years later in 1996 as a lieu de mémoire in a new exhibition entitled “the body and the object, Ann Hamilton 1984-1996” at The Wexner Center for the Arts. In the catalogue, curator Sarah J. Rogers underscores the focus of the exhibition in terms of “details.” By definition, details are sections or pieces, individual units or objects that are taken from a larger whole, isolated and focused on in order to see and experience the specific attributes of a given object. In “the body and the object,” details were taken from over a decade of early performance-based works, intermediate site-responsive installations, and more recent digital media-based projects, all of which were then explored in an eighteen-month residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts, which then became the focus of the exhibition. Objects, such as the erased books of indigo blue, were presented as “details” not only of specific past installations but of Hamilton’s entire œuvre to date. In conversation Rogers recalled that Hamilton wanted to do a show that focused on objects, images, or video that captured gesture: “she does all of these things that go away…we took integral (performative) parts of the original installations that could or should live on their own.” (Rogers, 2017) These
“integral parts” were object-details that bore the residue of performance and gesture.11
The exhibition dealt at once in retrospection and introspection. The former involved putting objects alongside video-clips that referenced the original, site-responsive installations; for the latter, Hamilton used the residency and the exhibition as an opportunity to explore her practice or, as Sherri Geldin wrote in the forward to the 24 exhibition catalogue, “to explore previously unchartered domains or, more accurately, familiar domains with new navigational instruments” (Geldin, 5). Which is to say, “the body and the object” presented details from specific past installations in such a way that viewers could discern continuities and recurrent interests across multiple projects spanning many years. The object-content of the exhibition was presented as a weaving in which “each thread retains its individuality as it becomes part of the fabric, just as each object, material, or action in Hamilton's installations retains its own identity while part of a whole piece” (Rogers, 18).
Figure 16 – untitled (indigo blue/2) (1991) - 5 altered books on a pedestal, “the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1884-1996.”
25
Figure 17 – untitled (indigo blue/2) (1991) - 5 altered books on a pedestal, “the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1884-1996.”
Figure 18 – untitled (indigo blue/2) (1991) - 5 altered books on a pedestal, “the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1884-1996.”
26
untitled (indigo blue/2) (1991), consisting of five altered books exhibited under glass on a pedestal, was a detail taken from the 1991 exhibition, “Places with a Past: New
Site-Specific Art at Charleston's Spoleto Festival.” The sets of erased books were one of the two saved objects from the original indigo blue installation. The five books exhibited were a donation of the artist, perhaps taken from the end of the show as they were incompletely erased. During the original garage installation in Charleston, each book- object seemed to be embedded with a certain fullness, weight, and agency because of its structural connection to the exhibition. When encountered in the new exhibition, however, the slim blue-covered books appeared old and delicate, the history of their use and (un-)making not immediately evident. In addition, the books were not presented as in their original form: singularly on a pre-Civil War Charleston slave market table, in the performative act of being erased. Rather, the five books were collectively displayed as sculpture, encased in a contemporary, light wood-and-glass vitrine on a pedestal.12 The used military manuals, their erasure, and their embodied mark, became historical details largely invisible to the new viewer in the Wexner Center, the ghostly texts now presented as a single, autonomous work of art. Encased in their transparent modern-day sarcophagus, the five altered books each lay opened to a random page with bits of debris from the erased words trapped in the hem, the only visible gesture of erasure, with the silent act of un-reading itself hauntingly erased from view. When presented as a series, the books could have been read as if only Hamilton’s hand elegantly created the works of art. Though the erased marks were random in both size and weight, because the books were shown as a set, they felt deliberate and constructed. Conversely, the time-based 27 accumulation was evidenced in the five altered books: presumably Rogers chose to show five books rather than only one to punctuate the time and meticulous labor it would have taken take to erase multiple books over the duration of the show. In its new exhibition space, however, the erased series of books foregrounded a sense of absence and lack, in direct opposition to the original installation that featured performance, ambience, and excess.
Figure 19 – Video-clips from indigo blue (1991), “the body and the object, Ann Hamilton 1884-1996.”
Figure 20 – Video-clips from indigo blue (1991), “the body and the object, Ann Hamilton 1884-1996.”
28
Figure 21 – Video-clips from indigo blue (1991), “the body and the object, Ann Hamilton 1884-1996.”
Figure 22 – Video-clips from indigo blue (1991), “the body and the object, Ann Hamilton 1884-1996.”
Part of Hamilton’s residency and the resulting exhibition at the Wexner Center was devoted to exploring the digital realm in her work, including capturing and documenting the ephemeral nature of gesture, the body, and performance. The use of video allowed for a new way to (re)view her process of making and unmaking. Video also provided the kinetic, corporeal, performative presence that has become signature in
Hamilton’s installations, the living enactment otherwise lost in an institutional exhibition.
Supporting untitled (indigo blue/2) were seven video clips, new works ranging in length
29 from two to six seconds each. Like the objects, the miniature 4 3/8” x 4 3/8” video screens were displayed with just a few feet between them, the negative space requiring the viewer to stand close to each video in order to focus on, and make sense of, the looping videos. The video clips were presented at eye-level, playing on a small screen on an adjoining wall away from the respective object. Because of their tiny size, content, and proximity to the related book-detail, the videos seemed to re-create or elicit memory, or bring into consciousness the feeling of a memory from the original monumental installation. The minute, filtered space a memory occupies in the brain situated against the fullness of the experience through which it was created is analogous in scale and interpretation to the miniature screens that were vestiges created in stark visual and experiential contrast to the original garage installation.
The series of clips showed motion video created with select still photographs taken from the original Charleston installation of indigo blue. The looped imagery recalled the garage space; the mound of 18,000 pieces of clothing; the performance of a laborer sitting at the market table, erasing the used blue book; the upstairs office with the sacks of soybeans; and the view from the office toward the heap of clothing – all resulting in a feeling of contextual presence. The captured memory of the installation, reminiscing in the form of a home-video collage, at once illustrated the displacement of the object-detail from Mike’s Garage in Charleston while at the same time acting as a bridge to the other tables, textiles, performers, and, more directly, the chair with a honey- soaked hat and cloth assemblage taken from privation and excesses (1989), as well as indigo blue’s (1991) altered books, which were also exhibited in “the body and the object.” The individual video works were made with a vintage filter over the moving 30 image that elicited the feeling of a past encounter, connecting the images to the vacant chair-detail or ghostly altered texts. At the same time, the ways in which the photographs were bundled and edited revealed a specific memorialized vantage point, one chosen by
Hamilton. In this way, Hamilton’s perspective and memory were inserted or documented through the choice of images, creating a specific lens through which the works were seen or read. By showing vitrines with video, souvenirs with sound, and photographs with performance, Hamilton was in effect capturing an ephemeral version of memory while connecting it to the tangible artifact-details that had survived past installations. The objects, however, relied on the embodied technology to activate a memory. The video- clip memories not only made reference to the body as spectator but also as performer by showing the acts that helped to make the related object. They also worked to connect the objects to their original installations and to the other object-details that made up the exhibition. As such, they acted as threads that wove together a reading that was more a remark on the work than a more typical response to the space. Perhaps for that reason,
Hamilton created the video-memories in response to the new exhibition space. The performative nature of the kinetic clips added the gestural, living evidence while also activating both viewer and object. Indeed, “the body and the object” exhibition housed a variety of objects that relied on the context and memory-experience provided by the videos to connect the disparate collection of object-details directly to their original installation and, more obliquely, to one another.
These works or details shown in “the body and the object” were, by design, conceptually but not literally connected, and as a result did not read as a typical Hamilton installation, in which a series of objects make up a fictive “whole.” Rather, each 31 exhibited object-detail taken from shows spanning over a decade showed itself as an individual object with a unique identity. Despite their separation, the vestiges shared characteristics with others, ones that could be analogous to children in a family where, though different, all embody the genetics of “family resemblances.”13 However, the new object-details and video-clips were shown in relative isolation, where the viewer was given a generous amount of space between the works, visually disconnecting them. The absence or negative space surrounding each object-detail visualized lack; the implications of missing objects from the original installation signaled an absence or loss of aura, of performative activity, of connectivity. The reading became dependent on the encounter when viewing the exhibition. In other words, was each object seen as individual, unique, and separate? Rogers noted in her essay “How does the body become object?”,
“Hamilton’s early “capturing” of elements from temporary situations allow them to exist beyond the life of the original project. With each installation, the artist carefully considers if an independent object will survive the temporary work to stand as its own container of meaning, not as a souvenir.” (Rogers, pg. 16) In this sense, each object- detail was deliberately chosen by Hamilton to survive and become a “thread” that would ultimately contribute to a larger “weaving” of her oeuvre.14 In “the body and the object” exhibition, Rogers offered a reading of Hamilton’s work where the object-details could be seen as part of a larger whole by showing the serial repetition of certain materials
(textiles, wood), objects (books, tables), and gestures (the hand, the mouth). As such, the exhibition at once isolated the “captured” object-details, while at the same time built connectivity and meaning between the objects installed.
32
Figure 23 – untitled (privation and excesses) (1989) metal chair, felt hat, cloth, honey in “the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1984-1996.”
Figure 24 – untitled (privation and excesses) (1989) metal chair, felt hat, cloth, honey in “the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1984-1996.”
33
Figure 25 – video-clips from Untitled (privation and excesses) (1989), “the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1984-1996.”
Figure 26 – video-clips from Untitled (privation and excesses) (1989), “the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1984-1996.”
34
Figure 27 – video-clips from Untitled (privation and excesses) (1989), “the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1984-1996.”
Figure 28 – video-clips from Untitled (privation and excesses) (1989), “the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1984-1996.”
35 Hamilton’s serial use of certain kinds of objects was on display in the Wexner
Center exhibition. Rogers chose details of past installations, markers that acted as place- holders but also as a pattern of practice where Hamilton employed everyday objects to account for the presence of the body. Object-details included familiar items that could be found for use in kitchens, sitting rooms, libraries, and clothing closets. As part of “the body and the object” exhibition, Rogers chose, among others, an object-detail from
Untitled (privation and excesses) (1989), the first large-scale installation in which
Hamilton responded to the entire first floor of a garage turned-exhibition-space in San
Francisco’s Mission District.15 Untitled (privation and excesses) was one of five chair- assemblages shown in “the body and the object.”16 In an upper gallery, positioned rather nonchalantly in the corner of the space, the borrowed set of objects were displayed. The solo metal chair with a white cloth draped over the seat and a felt, honey-stained hat on top of the cloth became the evidence of performance, and gave the impression that the person using the hat and cloth had just gotten up from the chair. As curator Sarah Rogers noted, “the two objects of the still life seem abandoned, awaiting someone’s return to complete a chore or task” (Rogers, 29). To the left of the “still life” sat another series of 4
3/8” x 4 3/8” video screens replaying a loop of merged stills from the original Mission
District installation: the penny-carpet with the honey seeping from its boundaries, the attendant sitting facing the open garage door, her hands wringing in the hat-bowl of honey, the Capp Street façade panning into the open garage door, and then another pan from the pennies to the performing attendant. Like the screens supporting the erased books in untitled (indigo blue/2) (1991), the three image-videos were separated from the chair, but referred to the original installation while at the same time connected the objects 36 and performances in the looping imagery to other details in the show. Located several feet away, positioned at an average human eye-level on an adjacent wall, the clips’ miniature size and spatial relationships again required the viewer to intimately engage
“face-to-face” with the moving image in order make a connection between the image and the tangible “details” also displayed. Here, too, the space of viewing turned the spectator into a performer, activating the object-detail with the memory-inducing videos so that the viewers could begin to imagine themselves sitting quietly in the gallery, wringing their own hands in a honey-filled felt hat.17
Rogers chose three additional sets of altered books as details in “the body and the object.” Like the blue erased books in indigo blue (1991), the subsequent books continued the explorations of altered texts, where in each case the words in the books had been erased, removed, or obstructed. In untitled (1992), the books were commissioned for a fundraising project by the New Museum. Here, however, the process was additive as the text was covered with little stones. In untitled (tropos) (1993), a figure sat at a table reading while using a heated stylus in proxy for their word-tracing finger to burn away the text. The accumulation of the forty-eight altered (secondhand) books were created over the course of the original installation and displayed collectively to view. Untitled
(lineament) (1994/1996) was both reductive and additive, Hamilton playing with text and textile in which the books were cut with switchback lines, the text lifted from the page and wound in to a yarn-like ball, leaving the cavity of the book empty. In each case, the viewer was left to interpret the significance of these textual alterations, turning them into both reader and author. The books offered an investigation of the body with its various insertions: reading, erasure, un-reading, burning, cutting, repurposing the text among 37 others, resulting in a sensual physicality that comes through the gestural act of reading, thereby creating a physical residue of absorption.
indigo blue (1991) was the first installation in which Hamilton engaged performance to alter used books. In this sense, the concept of erasure and un-reading a history (of labor in Charleston) that was fraught with inconsistent narratives gave
Hamilton the ability to open up a new reading based on the notion that a recorded past could and should be actively re-read and retold. “the body and the object” exhibition revealed Hamilton revisiting the altered book as an object, in which the evidence of performance would be recorded over the course of her installations to date. By showing untitled (indigo blue/2) with the subsequent (three) book-objects in the context of the
Wexner Center exhibition, the viewer would be able to connect the separate “details” to a larger conceptual practice of un-reading and making, reading and unmaking, where each new encounter would produce new associations and meanings.
38 (indigo blue • books) (1991), Collection of Lois Plehn
Figure 29 (indigo blue • books) (1991). Collection of Lois Plehn.
“A private collection is not a better model than a museum, but it’s an important add-on …You need a museum for historical purposes – to show the best art of the decade, for example. Then you have private collections, with their mistakes, their subjective tastes” (Mauk, n.p.). Perhaps it was taste or an affinity with the artist and her work, or perhaps merely a financial investment, that caused art collector Lois Plehn to acquire the second set of erased books taken from the original Charleston “Places with a
Past” exhibition. (indigo blue • books) (1991) is composed of four altered used books presented in a wood-and-glass vitrine. The four remaining books are described as being
“completely erased,” presumably collected from the beginning of the show. In contrast to
“the body and the object” exhibition, this set of four altered books does not have the support of additional book-objects from other Hamilton installations, nor does it have the
39 kinetic video-clips that buttressed the five erased texts at the Wexner exhibition. Instead, the set of altered books were isolated from the experience of an Ann Hamilton retrospective and the memory of Mike’s Garage. The altered books thus became isolated relics where the encounter is one of curiosity or appreciation. Here the erased books as a collected work of art require a reading without the benefit of contextual reference to a previous exhibition.
Because (indigo blue • books) (1991) became a part of Lois Plehn’s personal collection of art works, the four encased books are a part of a new, private exhibition, sitting alongside completely unrelated works that have been collected for various reasons.
The work no longer responds to an installation space; rather its identity as a commodified art object has been solidified. The significance of this move is the way the exhibition project has turned into a love for the work, a personal curation of meaning, the story of the object now told through the voice of the owner-collector. In this sense, the work is brought back to the “original museum,” a private home, viewed only by a privileged few, collected by the wealthy, the final exhibition opposed to the original, free, public exhibition.
In contrast to the showing of indigo blue (1991) in a garage in Charleston, the book-relics’ ownership by a private collector is a problematic permutation since it removes the objects from the possibility of public access and a public reading of the work. To the extent that the books are still able to evoke the Spoleto Festival installation from which they came, they are dependent on private readings and recollections to do so.
Unless the work of art is loaned, donated, or re-sold, the object-relic has been given its final value, its final use. The private collection establishes value in both the literal sense – 40 what did it cost to purchase? – and in the sense that it has become a true contemporary relic. There is an element of conquest in the acquisition, where the ownership of a valuable object generates a kind of belief in the power of the collector as well as in the relic as collectable, as one of a kind. The collected object resonates with the original installation regarding questions of voice and ownership (of property, slaves, labor) and power with the wealthy collector having the capacity to own and control the fate of that which is owned. In the Charleston installation of indigo blue, however, Hamilton sought to liberate, to erase, to unify, to give voice to and to free that which was owned. Perhaps the ownership of the object-relic was then more akin to showing the laborers’ work clothing as bodies lying in a mound as a collective group of workers, where the altered books sat in proxy for the performer and ultimately for the installation itself. In both cases, the objects were collected, in the first sense by Hamilton who, through their erasure, established the books as art, then secondly by Plehn, who established the books as collectible by a prominent art patron. As such, in each case the use-value was transformed: from book, to work of art, to a one-of-a-kind treasure. In this sense, the purchase was a validation of collectability, one of the highest order: in a private art collection for private viewing. Taken out of circulation, the books have gone through a metamorphosis where, in their final phase, they have been collected and are privately viewed by a discerning few, in contrast to the erased books made available to view by a paying public in the Wexner Center exhibition, itself already different from the original installation where the object – a single text book, in the gestural act of being erased – was free to view by the public. The object turned “detail” turned relic, then, through its
41 metamorphosis, has become increasingly more exclusive and valuable, and by implication, increasingly costlier to view and possess.
42 indigo blue (2007): Re-installation at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Figure 30 – indigo blue (1991/2007), re-installed, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Figure 31 – indigo blue (1991/2007), re-installed, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
43 The final permutation of indigo blue (1991) was a re-making of the original site- responsive installation fifteen years later, in 2007, at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art (SFMOMA). The historical evidence of value and collectability in
Hamilton’s works was further confirmed in the 2007 acquisition as the museum boasts a robust collection of over 33,000 works of contemporary and modern art, making it one of the world’s largest of its kind. As Fisher suggests: “These institutions are … storage areas for authenticity and uniqueness per se, for objects from any culture or period whatever that were ‘irreplaceable’ or singular…the museum became more skilled at preservation, that is, at keeping selected things in a state what would never deteriorate or change”
(Fisher, 165). Because Hamilton’s work is installation-based and primarily to be seen in situ, it is not typical to re-make her pieces. Instead, they are made to deteriorate or change. She says of her work that “very little of my installation work has survived in any way. The Hirshhorn (Washington, D.C.) has a piece, but there's not a lot. I think it's not perceived as the kind of thing that has a longer life. To enter the conversation about what it means to revisit something like this and bring it forward is a really great thing for me to be able to do” (quoted in Baker, n.p).
Located on a second-floor gallery, the reinstalled version of indigo blue was presented as a sculptural still-life in a white-walled room with a clean, light-colored wood floor. As is typical of three-dimensional installations in museum spaces, the work was displayed in the center of the gallery. In conversation with the artist, Hamilton noted: “the flow was important…that the work became a part of the museum.”18 As with the original garage installation, the viewer had to enter the room from a centrally located doorway, circumnavigate the mound of work clothing, and walk past the erasure performance in 44 order to leave the room through another doorway, symmetrically placed just opposite the door they entered: by design, the viewer had to engage with the whole work. The
(re)making of the 2007 indigo blue installation consisted of a new mound of used blue cotton work clothes, a new wood table and stool, a new set of used blue books, new Pink
Pearl erasers, and new “attendant" performers. Absent was the old garage exhibition space and the sacks of soybeans. In addition, for a portion of the museum hours of operation, the erasing attendant was also absented.19 The blue cotton work clothes had to be re-sourced, as the original pieces had been donated to the Salvation Army. As such,
Hamilton solicited donations of used cotton work clothes from uniform suppliers around the Bay Area and beyond to make up the 18,000-unit mixture of shirts and pants. The small replacement “farm table” that was part of the new erasure performance was visually similar to the original slave market table; however, the inherent cultural and historical meanings were gone. Hamilton remarked of her work: “These pieces are initially conceived to be site-responsive, but I don't think they're site-specific. While the history of indigo as the first cash crop of South Carolina and the plantation economy was important ... I don't think the piece is meaningful only in that context. The social history of blue, of how it came from Europe and was used here, how it got into work clothes – all that history is still part of what you see here and I think it translates from place to place.
You might also point out that there's a very strong labor history here in San Francisco”
(quoted in Baker, n.p).20 While the reconstructed work held historical meaning as a memorial to the original installation, the ways in which the piece was encountered and viewed in the context of this new exhibition space had radically changed and, as a result,
45 the meaning had the potential for a similarly radical transformation. In short, Indigo blue
(2007) demanded a re-reading.
Hamilton’s re-installation was a metamorphosis of indigo blue (1991). Similar to the original garage installation, however, the new work was also materially responding to the museum space, where Hamilton effectively required the spectator to “pass by” and become an active viewer-participant in the work. In this sense, she demonstrated her belief that “objects are dead in a museum,” and that “the act of viewing re-animates a work.” By prescribing a specific ambulatory path, Hamilton was effectively giving life back to the otherwise “dead” objects. The viewer became the reader and was given the sentient power to interpret the work, to give it life. Atypical of Hamilton’s installation works that completely occupy their own spaces, at the permission of the artist the new indigo blue installation was surrounded in adjoining rooms by other artists’ works taken from SFMOMA’s collection. Hamilton’s piece was now sitting adjacent to other powerful works that, while hanging or leaning against flanking walls, attached new meanings by virtue of their presence alongside hers. There were structural implications to the new showing. The re-installed indigo blue was no longer a single, site-responsive work occupying an entire building; it was a massive still-life heap of blue cotton work clothes presented as a sculptural focal point in a museum gallery that became a visual tangent to other artists’ works, a collective group of art pieces conceptually woven together by a curator’s perspective. The exhibition included “works that make oblique or direct reference to the body, such as Janine Antoni's self-portrait busts carved respectively from chocolate and soap, and Bruce Nauman's Wax Impressions of the Knees of Five Famous Artists (1966). Doris Salcedo's untitled bed frames with shirts twisted 46 through them evoke torture, and Kiki Smith's life-size bronze nude Lilith (1994) crouches upside down on the wall, like a fly, a pale echo of the massed work clothes in the blue of her glass eyes” (Baker, n.p). These works from SFMOMA’s permanent collection reference the body, humanity, and its disruptive condition. However, they were not responding to a colonial-south, its labor and historical posture, “places with a past,” questions of history and its censorship, or other interpretive issues dealt with in
Hamilton’s original Charleston installation. The re-created work took on a different ethos, one embedded with new meanings and agency.21 The new associations resulted in a series of tensions between the original Spoleto installation and the new SFMOMA sculptural interpretation of indigo blue. The former exhibited connections to a specific place and time where the site-responsive, environmental installation manifested interpretive issues of labor and slavery in a performative exchange of borrowing and giving back and life and death, and where the associations of “the body” were more in relation to performance, gesture, and the physical act of making. In the later, new associations were made in relation to the adjacent works of sculpture that referenced the body22 as well as meanings derived by being shown in a prestigious art museum, each causing the previous meanings to be effaced, and new connotations to emerge.
At the same time, the new work that was situated in the place of the original was already a collection of memorialized relics. The work was twice borrowed. The newly acquired readymade objects were a borrowed concept, reminiscent of the original installation which consisted of borrowed objects. Unlike the Charleston piece, however, the entire SFMOMA installation would survive.23 The work clothes were not borrowed but purchased and would be kept in the sculptural mound. The table and stool would 47 remain, and the erased books would be collected and saved as collateral from the installation. Only the performer would be temporal. Moreover, the work was shown in the context of an institution where the installation would be opened up to new historical conversations brought about by the art museum as a space, including questions of history, privilege, membership, the choice of which artists’ works are collected, as well as commodification in terms of purchasing art works, entry fees, and so on.
indigo blue (2007), shown fifteen years after its original manifestation, became a metamorphic culmination of sorts: a permanent (exhibition) memorial, in the sense that the re-worked objects took on the embodied meanings implied in the new SFMOMA showing while also retaining associations with not only the original 2001 Charleston installation but also the subsequent exhibitions: of individual object-details in “the body and the object,” the commodification of the acquired altered book-object-relics in private and, in this case, public institutional collections, Lois Plehn’s and SFMOMA’s, respectively. Also included here are the value and meaning brought to the work by
Hamilton’s increasing reputation as a major artist. In this sense, the exhibition-cycle of making, unmaking, and making again demonstrated a metamorphosis where objects and their use-value and meaning are transformed and where, with each space of exhibition and with each encounter, new associations are acquired and a new reading is required.
48 Conclusion
Ann Hamilton’s 1991 installation, indigo blue, in an old Charleston, South
Carolina garage, was a site-responsive exhibition that elicited a contextual encounter.
When experiencing the space, the viewer was confronted with familiar, everyday objects: work clothes, tables, books, and seeds that conjured specific thoughts and memories. But because of the location to which she was responding, the patina of the objects, and the meticulous labor required to create the piece, the installation, “made us feel…that [the art objects] are left there rather than brought there” (Fisher, 255). The objects felt as if they
“belonged” both in the exhibition space and to the past. The objects were in fact chosen and brought to the installation, each with its own history of making, meaning and use.24
Each object that was selected for use in the installation crystallized a dense critical conversation that Hamilton either metaphorically embraced or disregarded. However, the mental imagery left with the viewer is specific to the time and space of the encounter.
There is a structural connection that causes the knowledge of the objects’ original use to concede to the new use as a work of art. Such knowledge is combined with the auratic quality of the installation, bringing about a sensory reading of the work.
indigo blue (1991) gave Hamilton the space and time to play with the dynamics of ephemerality and permanence, in which both conceptually and literally the work was created to be dismantled. She used borrowed materials in the installation with an unexpected temporality: the scale and tedious labor required to build the monumental heap of cotton, blue work clothing inspired a sense of permanence. In addition,
Hamilton’s choice to use self-evident, repurposed objects such as tables, books, seeds, 49 and clothing in an alternative setting offered a layered meaning because the “everyday life” purpose had been displaced. Hamilton used living seeds in the environmental installation, which she left to their own natural devices: to sprout, grow, and die. She also employed living performers for whom she gave specific instructions in the repetitive, laborious task they were directed to execute: to erase the textbooks, line by line, from the back of the book to the front. Hamilton’s determination the objects’ “fate” was particular: the massive focal point of indigo blue, which consisted of borrowed clothing, was dismantled and its constituent parts donated, to be bought and worn once again as clothing; the countless thousands of seeds that eventually died in the context of the installation were cleaned up and discarded; but the altered (historical) textbooks were collected and saved.
indigo blue (1991) was a response to the original time, space, and interpretive issues raised in “Places with a Past,” but the serial act of making, unmaking, and remaking would cause a metamorphosis of the salvaged objects, and ultimately the transfer, loss, or creation of meaning. The subsequent series of exhibitions set up a trajectory where the original indigo blue that was an entire site-responsive installation would reappear in the form of object-details in untitled (indigo blue/2) (1991), shown with other works by Hamilton in “the body and the object” exhibition, as well as object- relics in (indigo blue • books) (1991) as part of the private collection of Lois Plehn, and finally in a contemporary art museum alongside works by other artists as a sculptural still-life in the re-installation of indigo blue (2007) at SFMOMA.
The altered books from the original Spoleto exhibition reappeared first as object- details in untitled (indigo blue/2) (1991) shown in “the body and the object” exhibition 50 alongside new referential video-clips with various kindred object works by Hamilton.
The book-details shown in the context of an exhibition where the objects were conceptually, materially, and serially connected, opened up the possibility to encounter the work as an individual detail taken from a past installation. At the same time, the collection of books connected or detailed a perennial motif of making and unmaking, performance and gesture, and use of materials whereby the salvation of said altered objects became a recurrent visual discourse. The encounter of the altered book object- detail required a new reading of the object as a pure detail taken from the Charleston exhibition but also challenged the viewer to connect the works to a more comprehensive practice of Hamilton’s oeuvre to date.
Next, the altered books reappeared as an object-relic in the context of the private collection of Lois Plehn. Through this acquisition, (indigo blue • books) (1991) had been permanently disconnected from its original installation. Unlike the set of five altered books shown in “the body and the object,” Plehn’s books did not have structural connections to either the Pinckney Street garage installation or the Wexner Center show.25 The viewership is now private, with a reading of the work connected to the memories and perspective of the collector.
Finally, the altered books made a reappearance as an acquisition to the SFMOMA permanent collection in a 2007 re-installation of indigo blue. The books were accompanied with a new set of objects that recreated a memorialized still-life, referring to the original 1991 Spoleto exhibition: a re-sourced monumental mound of used cotton, blue work clothes, folded and laid in countless layers atop a platform, a used wooden stool and farm table, used blue books, and during certain open hours of museum 51 operations, there was a performer-laborer dressed in a white work shirt and khaki pants, erasing the text line by line from the back of the book to the front, using saliva and a Pink
Pearl eraser. Like the four altered books in Plehn’s private collection, the re-installation did not have the kinetic video-clip memories to visually connect the work to its original context, nor did it have other kindred works by Hamilton to connect it to her oeuvre.
Rather, it was purchased as a sculptural still-life relic, as evidence of the original “Places with a Past” show. Is the absence of certain objects and the element of performance, and the loss of context evidence of Jacob’s belief that the original works were truly site- specific and that they would be diminished in relocation? Or did the shift offer the possibility of a metamorphosed reading of indigo blue? In addition, to an altered meaning, the purchase by SFMOMA also solidified Hamilton’s work as collectible.
Hamilton re-installed indigo blue as a permanent memorial to the original 1991 work.
The select objects would all survive the exhibition, where they would be read as less a response to “Places with a Past” and more as a work of art with a historical reference to
Hamilton and her ability to produce a true contemporary art relic. The work would also be closed to a free viewing by a public audience. Instead, the “owned” work would be viewed solely by museum patrons, where further associations with value and exclusivity would contribute to the meaning. Finally, the structural connections to the museum along with the exhibition’s proximity to other artists works would offer new associations and demand a new reading of the re-installed work.
indigo blue (1991) offers an early demonstration of an artistic practice by
Hamilton where, by responding to the time and space of an exhibition, she conceptualizes a temporary coming together of things with the intention of dispersing the same things: 52 some returning back to their original use, others used to produce life or death, themselves becoming waste only to be discarded, while some are altered by performance and are salvaged and either archived by the artist or sold as a contemporary relic.26 Hamilton’s original installations are an ephemeral response to a particular set of conditions, where the consequences of the displacement of the objects result in a diminishment or loss. The transitory nature of the surviving objects, however, open up the possibilities for new associations and encounters, and ultimately to the point where, with each new exhibition, a new reading becomes necessary.
53 Endnotes
1 Eliza Lucas Pinckney (born Elizabeth Lucas on the British Leeward Islands colony of
Antigua in 1722) transformed agriculture in colonial South Carolina when she introduced indigo as what would become an important cash crop for an expanding textile market.
She was also an avid writer and book maker. Pinckney copied all of her letters sent to family and friends and compiled them into “letter books.” The books documented her life on the plantations, her many experiments with the indigo seeds, her marriage and family, even things like social visits and pastime events, among other glimpses into the everyday life of an elite colonial women. Historians have found her books important as they constitute one of the most complete collections of writing from the 18th century.
2 (http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/images/projects/indigoblue/AH_indigo-blue- project-description.pdf).
3 This would become important later when indigo blue was re-installed in 2007 at
SFMOMA, San Francisco in California, the city that birthed the Gold Rush and the likes of Denim retail giant Levis Strauss & Co.
4 The fact that the clothes were borrowed (then returned) adds another layer of complexity with regards to the concept of ownership and property: “Property rights, however, begin with the right of he who first finds or notices a thing. A man walking along the seashore who finds a pearl in its shell can call it his. Our modern notion of the found object as a work of art plays with the same notion” (Fisher, 177). Ownership, much like the fact that the “thing” becomes a work of art, is temporary.
54
5 In The Body in Pain, The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry talks about clothing as an unconscious act of the projection of skin: “When, for example, the woven gauze of a bandage is placed over an open wound, it is immediately apparent that its delicate fibers mime and substitute for the missing skin, just as in the less drastic circumstances the same weave of threads (called now “clothing” rather than “bandage,” though their kinship is verbally registered in the words “dress” and “dressing”) will continue to duplicate and magnify the protective work of the skin, extending even its secondary and tertiary attributes so that, for example, any newly arrived observer would not say people come in hues of yellow, pink, brown…” (Scarry, 281-82). In this instance,
Hamilton could have used the hues of blue clothing to simulate the hues of human skin.
6 privation and excesses (1989) was Hamilton’s first installation where she responded to an entire project space. The exhibition was shown in the converted Capp Street Project garage space in San Francisco’s Mission district. The project space, established in 1984, was created to exhibit conceptual and performance based art projects. Hamilton was the inaugural artist to exhibit her work. In this sense, this early exhibition helped to establish the narrative of Hamilton as an installation based, conceptual, and performance artist. privation and excesses (1989) employed 750,000 pennies, honey, three sheep, two electronic grinders that ground a small bowl full of pennies in one and a combination of human and animal teeth in another. A solo-figure sat on a metal chair with a grey, felt brimmed hat on their lap, the bowl of the hat filled with honey. They sat silent, performing the repetitive act of wringing their hands together in the honey with their back to the sheep, and facing the bed of pennies and the open garage door. At the end of the
55 show, the sheep were returned to their ranch in Northern California, the pennies were cleaned and used to pay the expenses of the show, but the grinders and chair with the honey soaked hat and cloth were salvaged as “evidence of time spent.”
7 Honey as a material is a commodified by-product of a society of laborers: bees. It does not spoil or rot. It also has anti-bacterial qualities and can be used as an agent of healing.
Perhaps the use of honey was an attempt to cleanse or mend the effects of the borrowed bed of currency.
8 By using honey as a binder for the carpet of pennies, and then cleaning them at the end of the show, Hamilton was in a sense returning the dirty currency back into circulation, but now cleaner and purer because of the anti-bacterial and healing properties of the binding agent and the washing. She was returning the pennies back to their original use- value, but a double transformation had already taken place: the pennies were used as art, then they were cleansed before being “returned,” or rather reused as currency to pay the expenses of the installation. By borrowing the hundreds of thousands of pennies only to give them back “cleaner,” Hamilton is demonstrating both “excess” and “privation.”
9 In this sense, the books of indigo blue had a correlate of sorts in a honey-soaked hat left over from privations and excess. There a performer had sat, dipping and wringing her hands in a large felt hat filled almost to the brim with honey. Like the indigo blue books, the altered hat was the only thing saved from the exhibition, a record of the performance and the “time spent.”
10 Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura” or the work having an “auratic” quality is important in this context because of the idea of authenticity and history which it also
56 implies, especially when the work of art’s aura is tied to its unique presence in time and space, as in Hamilton’s installations. The aspect of performance is also interesting in these terms as it is uniquely ephemeral, including the bodily gesture that creates a relic or vestige, “evidence of time spent” in Hamilton own phrase. When the installation is dismantled, is there then a loss of aura? As such, does the aura or authenticity of the work disappear when the object is reproduced or exhibited again? Or does the object retain a residue of its original aura when it is exhibited as “one of a kind”?
11 Rogers included such things as untitled (suitably/positioned) (1984) and untitled
(reciprocal fascinations) (1985): both men’s clothing covered in toothpicks and bits of mirror, flashlights, and reflectors, respectively. Hamilton wore each as part of a performance. Rogers also included the various named tables, chairs, books and videos that also referenced performance and gesture.
12 This is interesting since tables are recurring motifs in Hamilton’s installations. In “the body and the object,” Rogers included tables from the capacity of absorption (1988) and between taxonomy and communion (1990), which used teeth imbedded into the table top.
Teeth showed up again in privation and excesses (1988). Other tables included in the show were from malediction (1991) and aleph (1992). Hamilton did refer to the performer-laborer erasing the book atop the borrowed slave market table at the original
Charleston installation of indigo blue (1991) in video clips. The original table was not recreated in the 1996 Wexner Center exhibition. However, as we will see, the table performance would be recreated in the later SFMOMA exhibition in 2007.
57
13 “Family resemblance” is a philosophical term for this kind of relatedness-by-a- disparate-set-of-similarities. The term was coined by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his
Philosophical Investigations [1953].
14 Rogers also discusses Hamilton’s studies in weaving where the training, “provided a system of logic, with the ability to envision abstract structures on a large scale…One must be able to conceive the finished design from the abstract system of warps and wefts noted on weaving cards, conceptualizing not just the two-dimensional design but also its tactile presence as an object in space” (Rogers, pg. 17-18) This is interesting to think about Hamilton envisioning her own “life-quilt” or legacy as a visual artist and then choosing objects to participate as the object-threads that would ultimately make up her oeuvre.
15 Coming from her six-week residency and related show, the capacity of absorption
(1988) at LAMOCA in Los Angeles, where Hamilton made her first larger-scale installation occupying three rooms, curator Mary Jane Jacobs gave Hamilton “the space, the support, and the wherewithal to work beyond her usual bounds of one room, one work.” (Simon, 64). Jacobs was the same curator for indigo blue (1991) in Charleston, her first full-building, site responsive work.
16 Rogers also showed chairs in the following installations: untitled (body object series)
#1 – chairbody (1984/1991), untitled (body object series) #2 – stoolhead (1984/1991), untitled (malediction) (1991), untitled (aleph) (1992), as well as the chairs that appeared in the video-clips.
58
17 Thinking of honey as an agent of healing, the attendant was bathing their hands in the filled hat basin, perhaps attempting to absolve themselves of an embodied wrong or wringing their hands in the hopes of reparation.
18 In this sense, the reinstallation of indigo blue in 2007 became a response to the
SFMOMA exhibition space, though here more directly to the positioning of the work, and the ways in which it would be installed and ultimately viewed.
19 Without the erasure performance, the work would be encountered and thus read differently, less a re-installation of the original Charleston exhibition and more a still-life or sculptural installation.
20 Hamilton’s statements in the 2007 reinstall of indigo blue were in direct conflict with
Jacob’s assessment of the 1991 installation, where she believed the works were truly site- specific and that they would be diminished in relocation. Did Jacob mean diminished in only a literal sense? Or perhaps also in the sense of encounter, of meaning, and of aura?
21 The physical adjacency to works touch on a conceptual aspect of Hamilton’s installation: that of the body that demonstrates the power of association and context when reading a work of art. Because permission was given by Hamilton to surround her work with these new overt body associations, perhaps she was encouraging a new affiliation, a new reading.
22 Although the adjacent works were conceptually aligned with Hamilton: Janine
Antoni’s Lick and Lather, (1993) consisted of fourteen busts: seven made from chocolate, seven from soap were laboriously constructed only to be “erased” or used in the performative, gestural act of bathing and eating, and Bruce Nauman's Wax Impressions of
59 the Knees of Five Famous Artists (1966) is a fiberglass work that embodies the residue of the gestural act of kneeling. In Doris Salcedo's untitled, (1989-1993) the altered bed frames are a reference to her work centered around creating sculptural pieces that evoke a sense of how the daily lives of victims of political violence are disrupted. Finally, Kiki
Smith's life-size bronze nude Lilith (1994) that is the biblical Adam’s mythological first wife Lilith where the sculpture crouches upside-down on the wall: as if she was more of a super-hero like spirit captured in the act of landing from flight. Where three of the four works named are contemporaries to Hamilton’s indigo blue, (1991), they are classified by
SFMOMA as sculpture and the adjacencies and resulting visual associations with a physical body or its absence connect her work to new associations.
23 What are the implications when the work becomes a sculptural relic? When the new work is created to survive as a still-life reference to the original installation. This notion is in relation to the earlier quote from Rogers where she remarks on the practice of
Hamilton pre-determining the object-detail that will ultimately survive the otherwise ephemeral installation.
24 Elaine Scarry believes that “a made object is a projection of the human body” (Scarry,
281). Because Hamilton uses readymade objects, the projection of making is already evident (of patina in the tables or books, of wear patterns and smells in the clothing).
Hamilton then layers on or weaves in her own projection of making and unmaking and making again through the gestural acts (of performance and of the installation itself).
25 The four altered books in Plehn’s collection were presented in a wood and glass vitrine.
Unlike the five altered books presented in “the body and the object” exhibition, where an 60 old farm table presentation would have further connected the work to both the original
Spoleto installation and to the other three wooden tables in the show, the vitrine presentation in Plehn’s private collection supported the object turned relic. The books had been completely separated from their original conceptual and environmental exhibition.
26 Hamilton’s artistic practice of responding to a specific (multi-roomed) space of exhibition, borrowing and giving back (and in some cases lending archived objects), using living (human, vegetation, animal) performer-attendants to alter objects that created a residue of making, in most cases, a salvaged object, as well as employing the sentience of sound, memory, odor, and gesture in the act of reading as a way of encounter and absorption – all these are evident in her oeuvre to date, beginning with such early works as privation and excesses (1989), malediction (1992), aleph (1992), and a round (1993) to works such as salic (1995), reserve (1996), mattering (1998) and mandle (1998), to works as recent as air for everyone (2012) and again, still, yet (2016).
61
Bibliography
Baker, Kenneth. Salvation of indigo blue a triumph for all to see Hamilton's indigo blue - - free of cultural limbo, 27 May 2007, https://www.sfgate.com.
Brenson, Michael. Places with a Past; New Site-specific Art in Charleston Belongs to Its Place and Time The Brooklyn Rail, July 15, 2013, Critics Page, Retrieved from https://brooklynrail.org.
Fisher, Philip. Making & Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc. , 1991.
Geldin, Sherri. “Foreword” the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1984-1996. Columbus: The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, 1996.
Hamilton, Ann. http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com.
Hamilton, Ann. Studio Conversation Therese McCann. 31 August 2017.
Jacob, Mary Jane. Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charleston's Spoleto Festival New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1992
Mauk, Ben. The Rise of the Private Art "Museum". May 28 2015. https://www.newyorker.com.
Rogers, Sarah J. “How does the body become object?” the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1984-1996. Columbus: The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, 1996.
Rogers, Sarah J. Conversation with Sarah at The Columbus Museum of Art Therese McCann. 17 September 2017.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain, The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. – pg. 281
Simon, Joan. Ann Hamilton. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. , 2002
62