December 5, 2012 to January 6, 2013
643 Park Avenue, between 66th and 67th streets
New York City, (212) 616-3930

Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem ‘The Swing’ (from A Child’s Garden of Verses) offers an ebullient summons to Ann Hamilton’s wondrous new work at the Park Avenue Armory. A line from Stevenson sails into mind as—in the company of visitors ranging in age from infancy to near dotage, including portly businessmen whose well-cut jacket flaps trail behind them like the tails of flying fish—-I ascend weightless, airborne on one of 42 wooden plank swings.  Reminiscent of garment workers’ benches, these are suspended by chains some 70 feet from the drill hall ceiling . “Up in the air I go flying again,/ Up in the air and down!”  These blissful words might well have been known to the artist’s grandmother, who is lovingly credited by the artist as a prime source of inspiration for this entrancing piece.

The Gothic Revival Park Avenue Armory , erected just five years before the poem’s publication in 1885, provides a perfect venue for Hamilton’s swings, her 42 pigeons in miniature, stacked dovecotes, and the immense white silken fabric that billows from on high, responsively rising and falling according to the visitors’ velocities as they sway on their swings, pushed often by perfect strangers.  And the site irresistibly harks back to that other Armory, the one where in 1913 Modern Art erupted upon America.  Like Theodore Roosevelt back then, New York Times critic Roberta Smith (reviewing this show on December 6) wonders whether what surrounds us inside these Armory walls is art.  But, oh! It is!

Looming vast and drafty, 250 by 150 feet, the uncanny erstwhile home to military maneuvers, Wade Thompson Drill Hall seems forbidding at first glance. Lit dimly by Hamilton’s cunning lighting design, its awe and tremendum could easily dwarf anyone cursed with even a trace of agoraphobia. But any initial frisson of anxiety soon dissipates, for one of the triumphs of the art is how it “meets” that presenting enormity of space and—to borrow the verb chosen by the artist herself—“animates’ it.  She tames it but without completely sacrificing its inherent wildness.  Intimations of ambivalence about wildness abound as we enter the hall and try ourselves out in its immensity. Live pigeons, for example, greet our view, but caged, not free (at least most of the time, for there is a plan to release them once each day).  Pigeons, moreover, we note, are members of the same genus as doves (columbidae), which are symbols of peace; thus concord enters symbolically into a place devoted to the trappings of war.  And Emily Dickinson’s delicate trembling comes to mind, for, just as she, with her poesy, engages and magnifies the infinitesimal, so Ann Hamilton, artisan and conceptual visual artist, gentles, for us, the savage enormity of gargantuan space.

Hamilton’s enigmatic title strings words together that don’t at first make sense: for how can there be an event of a thread?  But wait!  ‘Event’ denotes not simply a happening but an outcome, as it joins the Latin prefix ‘ex,’ meaning ‘out,’ with ‘venire,’ meaning ‘to come.’ The outcome of a thread, when we parse it, takes us back to weaving, the craft with which Ann Hamilton began her trade as an artist.  And the outcome of a thread can be, indeed must be, open, free, undecidable.  This realization leads to an astonishing feature of the piece, namely, a large glass window seemingly cut through the exterior wall on the Armory’s Lexington side (in fact, this was achieved by rolling up a garage door and inserting glass) expressly as a way to release the work from its confines within the building and expand its metaphoric extension into the city streets.

Quality of attention matters profoundly.  Imagine readers in furry capes sitting beside pigeons and reading aloud to them—words of complex texts, which are simultaneously transmitted into paper bag radios scattered about the floor of the Armory, among the swings, so that visitors can pick them up and carry them hither and yon. Through them, we become attuned to the notion that listening intently for individual words so as to catch their meaning only causes us to miss everything else that is going on in the space around us: our driven, unilateral search for logical connection lures us away from greater proto-logical and trans-logical states of mind and of being. Hamilton’s dense texts moreover cannot be followed logically, for they mirror woven fabrics, where the warp-and-woof is what matters.  We become like pigeons, who attend on a wholly other plane, or like children too young to grasp the intended meaning but not to feel embraced by the warmth of the reading human voice.

The Sufi epic by Farid al-din ‘Attar floated into consciousness as I swung through Hamilton’s installation.  In this work, paradox, reversal and mystery reveal truths inaccessible by the tools of reason and where, as led by the hoopoe bird, feathered creatures of all sorts (Hamilton’s pigeons) go in search of the unknown Simorgh.  Simorgh is found in the end by means of a mirror, just as one is set up in this piece to reflect the Armory space and its visitors while the transparent window extends it all in another direction.  Antimonies unsteadily holds truth, like a swing:   large and minute, individual and communal, human and animal, war and peace, inside and out, voice and motion (the rhythm of the spoken words, for example, which reiterate synaesthetically the back-and-forth motion of swinging).  And high and low, as the swings are attached by giant pulleys to the billowing white oceans of fabric which, suspended from the ceiling, extend across the entire space of the Armory hall.  By the most gossamer of threads— of silk and of sound—connections proliferate.

Gertrude Stein, in her celebrated 1935 essay ‘Pictures,’ seeks to separate the notion of literary idea from visual one.  Ann Hamilton blends these in her work.  By so doing, she unwittingly and uncannily evokes Stein; their streams of consciousness mutually establish intricate filaments of connection.  And one small wise child, standing at the entrance to the drill hall remarked: This is not like play, but like “wonder!”

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The Berkeley Art Museum’s “Human/Nature” show offers the results of a UNESCO-funded project in which eight artists were matched with an imperiled region of their choice. Thus by design, the show is a revealing jumble, expressing something of what it has come to mean to respond to a place (or site, region, niche), and something of what it can no longer mean. Conspicuously absent are two of the great historical exemplars of response to place: that monument of the long labor of the locals, like Wordsworth’s Michael and his unfinished Sheep-fold; and the more recently prominent model of artistic self-effacement in ecological art, where place is all, and artists put themselves in the service of vivifying or restoring a site, while covering the traces of their own activity. Here most of the works are in the artists’ signature styles, conveying the sense that these are just the most recent products of long artistic mid-careers. The surprising commonality here is the prominence of pedagogy, the artists passing on the knowledge gained in their hithering and thithering from home to region to museum.

The work that initially seems closest to the Romantic evocation of place is that of Marcos Ramirez Erre, who has installed a version of a building, part home,  part shrine, from the Yunnan region of southwestern China. There are two video monitors on each long side of the building; one shows in real time the interior activities of cooking, playing, and eating, the other the construction of a building. An evocation of place? Well, yes, but the experience is aversive: the building seems crammed into its space, hunched just below the ceiling, its dark wood somehow foreboding in the underlit gallery. Its few decorative tiles, on the other hand, are seen as if from too close, which gives their floral patterns, which ought to be highlights, an apotropaic quality. This is a romanticism stripped of the fantasy that the representation of alien places is in the service of the viewer’s psychic integration. One is instead confronted with something unrecoverably alien, and that is unconcerned with what you think of it.

The unadorned pedagogical impulse is apparent in Mark Dion’s Mobile Ranger Library, a moveable kiosk displaying the books and maps you’ll need to make the most of your trip to Komodo National Park in Indonesia. Rigo 23’s works from the Atlantic Forest Southwest Reserve in Brazil are crowd-pleasers, and he recruited the labor of crowds of indigenous makers into them. The threats of habitat-loss and environmental destruction are seen through the now oddly atavistic metaphor of atomic weaponry. In Cry For Help, statuettes and maquettes seem to cascade from a large basket suspended over the gallery, or “Struggle For Life” to populate a nuclear submarine that has the low-tech appeal of a vacation cruise on a working trawler. Of the show’s works of pedagogical recruitment, Xu Bing’s is the nerviest and most unsettling: He taught an art class to children in Kenya and gave them the project of calligrammatic rendering the local trees with combined pictorial and linguistic devices. He then copied the results in Chinese ink-and-brush style into a single composition. Across the top, in half presented and half hidden in an English inscription in Xu’s invented quasi-ideogrammatic script, he proclaims that he has “copied the work of the children just as if I were copying from a book of old masters.” The children, he adds, are part of nature, like trees. “You must respect them.”

The two most artistically achieve works take something like Xu Bing’s achievement as given, and then take one more step. Ann Hamilton’s step is forwards: she evokes the symbiosis of humans and nature in the Galapagos through mixed sound recordings of birds cries and children’s chants..In her installation’s niche she circulates just below the ceiling images from a camera whose lens is centered on a water’s surface. The work regains something of the intensity of the Romantic evocation of place with its disillusioned inclusion of the artist’s movements and bare technological bits included among the constituents of place.

Diana Thater, forges another of her signature video installations from her trip to a South African wetlands preserve, probing animal consciousness in images presented across a skewed grid of monitors. The work earns its central placement in the show by recruiting the viewer’s movement down the museum’s central walkway into the piece.  The shifting viewing height and distance intensifies the splintered grid’s suggestion of the only ever partial and ephemeral glimpse we have of animals. But Thater’s step beyond Xu’s achievement is a step back: she renounces concern for a human/nature symbiosis, and instead launches herself with quixotic ferocity towards an unknowable other. Like the great autistic animal researcher Temple Grandin, she treats the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s answer to the question “What is it like to be a bat?”—Nagel thinks we cannot so much as imagine a coherent answer—as a provocation. One might expect that the project of an American artist evoking a bioregion in Africa would allude to Peter Kubelka’s heavily ironic and self-ironizing  experimental film classic “Unsere Afrikareise”, wherein German bwanas and their wives mingle with the natives and gun down a rhino or two; but Thater is post-irony. Her work perhaps best fulfills at least one hope motivating such a project, that the work will be a plunge into otherness, and one where the artist takes the viewer along.

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