Theatre as Installation: Ann Hamilton and the Accretions of Gesture

This essay presents descriptions of varied involvements with installations by the artist Ann Hamilton, interspersed by analyses on how each of them was viewed, moved within, and then finally recalled, reconstructed. In conjunction, the author examines--as theoretical and formal prototypes--the work of Samuel Beckett, especially his prescient, early study of Proust. ********** Degraded. The leaf torn from the calendar. All forgot. Give it over to the woman, let her begin again--with insects and decay, decay and then insects: the leaves--that were varnished with sediment, fallen, the clutter made piecemeal by decay, a digestion takes place--of this, make it of this, this this, this, this, this. --William Carlos Williams, Paterson Entering a large gallery space in what was once an old ware-house, we see near the centre of the room a young woman sitting alone at a small metal table, a book open before her. The floor of the gallery is covered in thick bundles of dark horsehair that have been scattered evenly throughout the entire room and a muted sunlight comes in through large, translucent windows. From various directions at once, we hear the recorded voice of a man struggling to speak, his voice softly, awkwardly, murmuring the words as if he were learning the language all over again. What--ha ... ppened--what met that--o ... pen--and--what has--been--clo ... se--the door.... The echoing room smells faintly of smoke, and approaching the seated woman from across the open space--walking upon the matted hair, our feet entangled in the long strands--we see her holding a small electrical instrument in her hand, gripped like a pen, as she burns lines of language from out of the book. Patiently and with a kind of single-minded concentration, she lays the hot wire across three or four words at a time and they instantly burn to black, an acrid smoke rising off the paper, leaving a series of charred, parallel lines to fill the pages. Writing in reverse, unreading the book; beyond erasure, language's incineration. Finishing one page, she turns to the next, starting again at the top and slowly moving down. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] We walk around her, watching and listening, as she (without lifting her eyes) goes on about her business, working her way through the book, one page after the next, the words going up in smoke. As we leave the large room, the voice of the man can still be heard in the distance struggling to say the words, extracting them, as if caught in his throat. While the woman continues her deliberate work, moving from page to page, burning, uninterrupted by our brief presence. The installation, by the artist Ann Hamilton, was entitled tropos, taking place at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York from October 1993 to June 1994. What was it that was just encountered in that room full of horsehair and burning words, a space echoing with broken voices, muffled footsteps? Walking about the remarkable installation by Ann Hamilton, what was seen at that quiet site, and what remained to be seen once it was left behind? Remembered, what was happening there, as those of us present (and accounted for) wandered through the room, listening to the sounds, looking at the objects, seeing the woman sitting there burning the pages of the book? And how, retrospectively, to describe and think about this installation, elaborating upon ideas and impressions perhaps only fleetingly engaged, peripherally seen? For, like the secondary revisions of a nearly forgotten dream, thoughts and insights about such a room may arrive after we have departed from it. The words arrange themselves after the fact, as if to somehow recreate the vanished event, supplementing it with language, shaping an experience that happened so quickly that it may not have happened. Were we there? Did we see it? Did we see? In this essay I describe my varied involvements with several installations by Ann Hamilton. …