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"tropos"
- Dia Center for the Arts, New York
October 7, 1993 – June 19, 1994 |
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“tropos”
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For "tropos,"
Hamilton covered the floor of a 5,000-square-foot factory space
entirely with horsehair. The hair, which varied in color from black
to blonde, was sewn in bundles and seemed to gradually undulate
– like ocean waves – across the horizon of the space.
What would seem to be a normal factory floor was in fact also altered
by the artist, re-poured into subtle shifts of elevation. One discovered
this only after walking on and through the horsehair, navigating
the now difficult terrain. Hamilton also made subtle alterations
to the light which entered the building, replacing the transparent
windows with translucent, textured glass. This rather restrained
intervention of light and hair immediately focused attention on
a solitary figure situated at the room’s center. Here sat a
person at a small
metal desk, day after day, performing the same ritualized task.
Smelled before it became visible, the task was to silently read
and burn
the printed text from an entire book, line
by line. By walking around the space, charged by the silent
activity of the attendant, visitors would activate a halted, perplexing
audio component. From the perimeter of the room, located outside
the windows, was the murmur of a man struggling to speak. Sounding
like ordinary language and yet garbled beyond sense, this slow speech
had the effect of transforming the empty warehouse into an otherworldly,
mental space.
Hamilton has often juxtaposed elements from the natural world (bees,
canaries, flesh-eating beetles) with elements from the world of
commerce and letters (poetry, books, ledgers). In the 1989 installation
"privation and excesses," the artist made a large rectangle
on the floor out of 750,000 pennies, laid into a skin of honey,
while caging three sheep in a nearby room. What connected the pennies
and sheep for the artist is the way in which both have lost some
of their magic or mythology in our society. In the case of pennies,
they have become a burden, devalued to the point where their existence
is worth less than their monetary value; for sheep and other animals,
they have become domesticated over time, “reduced to being
either pets or indistinguishable raw material in isolated producing
and consuming compounds.” For both, the allure of a shiny penny
and the mythical power of the animals has been tarnished by familiarity,
age, and the advent of civilization. In "tropos," a similar
juxtaposition is at work. Here, the words from the page, literally
transformed into smoke, mingle with the horsehair strewn about the
floor. As one traverses the space, one metaphorically wades through
language. While the large quantity of horsehair is at once overpowering,
horsehair as a material bridges the gap between animal and human,
having been used by wigmakers for centuries. What Hamilton carves
out of this warehouse is a space before language, where dyslexic
speech calls out from behind frosted windows and where the gap between
horse and humanity is bridged by a material which also serves to
distinguish the two from each other: the written word. |
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