"...You're coming in and you're in some instances animating
the space, and the process is often very social; for me,
that part of it is very satisfying."
"I'm very interested in my own process of research,
recognizing all of the layers of meaning that a very simple
gesture can have, without feeling like I need to put closure
around it being any one of those."
"It's like you want to leave the act of naming of the
work and within the work open as long as possible, to let
the experiences fill it out before it gets contained. So,
I think the first thing is that you hope is that people
come in and that they allow themselves not to name it too
quickly..."
Your work has often been described
as 'installation art.' Could you talk about what an installation
is and what it means to you, personally, to work in this way?
HAMILTON:
I think the form,
for me, of working in installation
is one that always implicates you actively within it. So that
unlike an object, which we are very comfortable standing outside
of and looking at, to work in installation is to work in relation
to a particular place and all of the confluences and complexities
of whatever it is that creates that (space). And so, as a
viewer, to come in, it's the experience the minute you cross
the threshold: it's the smells, it's the sounds, it's the
temperature, it's how all of those things have everything
to do with the felt quality of ultimately what the thing becomes.
I started in weaving, in textiles.
I think that my first hand is still a textile hand in some
ways, but I was very dissatisfied with the flatness that things
actually had when they were done. It seemed like they were
dead in some ways. And working, for me, in the form of installation
in the way that I have, it's that you're coming in and you're
in some instances animating the space, and the process
is often very social; for me, that part of it is very satisfying.
There's a way that it (the installation) has an ongoing life
as it meets the public. Every moment that it's up it's different.
It's different from moment to moment, and somehow it's that
live time that's just a factor of the form really, or something
that is characteristic or inherent in the form is something
that makes it continually interesting for me. It's like there's
no real repetition in that time. Every day you'll come in
and every day it may be the same, seemingly, but within that
there's a difference and it's only...I don't know, I guess
it allows that to be experienced and to be felt and registered.
ART:21:
And there's also the way in which
installations are impermanent, being specific to a particular
place and time.
HAMILTON:
Well, certainly. It's almost
like the attitude about this space is not necessarily to alter
it or deny it or erase it in any way, but to make present
something that's always here, make it more experienceable,
perhaps. And part of that is its live time, and so the duration
of that time means that it's ephemeral in this form here.
I don't think it means that it can't be reinstalled or have
another iteration, but that will always be different. The
experience of it will be different because of all the factors
that actually give this the atmosphere that it has; it won't
be there in another situation or context.
I suppose it is that live quality that is the thing that keeps
it animate for me. You know, it's that it's never quite fixed,
and so I don't really think that it's ultimately ephemeral.
I mean, I feel like the video could be installed in a lot
of different ways, and could take on different layers of meaning
depending on whatever context it goes into. But it will only
be like this once.
ART:21:
That idea ties into the way in
which, when you began work on this particular installation,
you had originally thought of it being housed in two symmetrical
rooms in the Bayly Museum.
HAMILTON:
Yes, in some ways I took the
model of the two rooms that were at the Bayly, and it was
partly that I was thinking that I wanted to have one room
be the room of the writer and one room be the room of the
reader. And I may still pursue this, either here or somewhere
else, a relationship between two ventriloquists - that there's
a ventriloquist in one room throwing their voice and they
are the writer or the reader, and then a ventriloquist in
the other. It's because in my own process, increasingly, I
feel like my process is one of reading, which leaves no material
trace. And so what does it mean if increasingly as a maker
I'm actually engaged as a reader, which is sort of the larger
question behind the work? So when I decided not to use those
two rooms and came here, the two rooms stayed with me, and
now they become ghostlike, suspensions of silk organza that
sit side by side so they're identical in form.
ART:21:
Do your works embody something
you want to communicate to others?
HAMILTON:
I think they do. I don't think
that they have a narrative.
I'm very interested in my own process of research, recognizing
all of the layers of meaning that a very simple gesture can
have, without feeling like I need to put closure around it
being any one of those. In the little thing that I wrote,
trying to describe the piece in advance of it actually existing,
I talked about a line, that it's a divide.
ART:21:
Could you talk more about your
interest in the line as a divide, as something that divides?
HAMILTON:
Do you want me to give you a
little more background about the line? I think one of the
things is that in my own work, the material aspect of it has
always been the hand-making that's transparently laid itself
out on to the membrane or surface of the architecture
in some way, and that's been this evidence of making. And
now, in this, it's actually not leaving a real material trace
but an image, so the act is now image rather than material
trace and there's as much a laying out as there is an erasure
at the same moment. I'm interested in the paradox of those,
within that relationship, so when I was sitting down to try
to describe what I thought this might become, I wrote: "To
delineate, to de-line line within the lineate, the inscription
of a line. Wound round an enclosure." And that's also what
you hear in the audio tape, because you hear the voice (saying)
"winding round with the hand, and the hand's enclosure. It
announces, fixes, establishes, marks, a visible trace. It
is a word, a name, a signature, roving the border between
a hiss, sounding the silence of a dividing from, a dividing
by, erasures, history." I don't think I can say more than
that.
ART:21:
What would you like for people
to take away from this piece? What sort of experience or meaning?
HAMILTON:
I think that I'm always reticent
to contain that too much. It's like the act of naming. It's
like you want to leave the act of naming of the work and within
the work open as long as possible, to let the experiences
fill it out before it gets contained. So, I think the first
thing is that you hope is that people come in and that they
allow themselves not to name it too quickly, but to actually
just feel the presence of it and spend time, to sink into
the time of it. But I think that ultimately, out of that,
all of the implications of what a line is and what it does
or doesn't do are then the things that you take away with
you. And I think behind that, if you step sort of further
out, it's about how we take in, or take responsibility, or
step into our own agency in terms of how we make our presence
in the world. And this extension of one's hand outward to
touch or to mark is the first offer and reciprocal gesture
that we make. And it's the one that is still our primary agency,
even if we live within all sorts of technologies that allow
the extension out of that into radio and Internet and whatever
is now perhaps more invisible to us. It's ultimately, I think,
about how we step into our own agency.
ART:21:
What is the title of this work
here in Charlottesville?
HAMILTON:
It's called "ghost: a border
act." One of the things that's really interesting - Monica,
who is helping found this out, and I didn't even know - I
mean, I certainly saw that there was a lot of fabric being
woven, and there was a lot of very fine fabric, but apparently
one of the main productions was of the silk that's produced
for coffin linings. So I didn't know that, and I thought it
was very interesting then, once I made the title, you know,
how things that you pick up when you're actually in a space
end up being part of it.
