stylus: a project by ann hamilton

One of the wonderful side-effects of the unbearable Saint Louis heat is more art and culture for Saint Louisans. Because, well, what do you do to hide from hot summer weather? Go to a museum or art gallery! The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts is neither a museum nor an art gallery, but its current exhibition is very worth seeing.  The current exhibition installed at the Pulitzer is Ann Hamilton's stylus. My sister and I ventured to the Pulitzer (read about it here) partly because we were interested in contemporary art, partly because we wanted to do something fun indoors to escape the Saint Louis heat, and partly because we wanted to do something for free.

Although we went to the Pulitzer not knowing anything about the artist or the exhibit, we were very intrigued after a brief look at the exhibit description:

As a visual artist whose contributions to contemporary art span three decades, Ann Hamilton's installations are notable in part for their capacity to weave a broad palette of media into engaging sensory environments. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her installations create immersive experiences that respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites, while also engaging the public with broad questions of what it means to assemble in such spaces. Hamilton's installation stylus, created specifically for the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, was conceived as both a sanctuary for listening and a laboratory for experiments in collective vocal exercises.  The installation asks the following questions: How do we communicate? What external forces act upon or inhibit our collective need for social contact and response? How are relationships enacted (or not enacted) by the architectural spaces we inhabit? While the Pulitzer building is the main structural element, the project spills outside the walls, onto the broader stage of the built and social environment of Grand Center and beyond.

For those of you who will not be able to fly to Saint Louis to enjoy this exhibition (and the summer weather), I will attempt to give you my personal impression of this extraordinary project, in hopes that you will attempt to visit any and all exhibitions created by Hamilton, should she ever venture into your corner of the world. There are various multi-sensory, multi-modal elements for the actual exhibit, so I'll try to briefly describe the ones that imprinted on my mind the most.

Upon entering the building, we are immediately given a brief explanation about the concordance, with said briefing occurring in full view of a small shelf of concordances (I saw several kinds -- concordance for children's tales, concordance for Whitman's writings, concordance for the Bible, etc.) lining a blank wall. The written explanation that we are handed contains the following:

concordance:At the threshold of the exhibition is a concordance. By its definition, a concordance is an alphabetical arrangement of the principal words of a book with reference to the passage in which each word occurs. A concordance is also an agreement, harmony. [This is when I began thinking of concordances that tell me where I can locate the word "smite" written in the Bible.]

The printed concordance stacked on the first table of the exhibition draws also on an older definition of the word concordance,

A composition combining and harmonizing various accounts. [This printed concordance which we also found dispersed in various places throughout the exhibition looked and felt like a newspaper, and it was printed on newsprint in lettering like newsprint lettering, and the title consisted of multiple newspaper names -- I remember seeing "Tehran News".]

The words that comprise the two vertical spines of the composition serve as principal words describing the interior register of the space of the Pulitzer Foundation for the ARts as stylus inhabits it. Though the selection of words will shift with each printing, a base selection of words forms the spines:

Act, Address, Being, Black, Blue, Body, Call, Calling, Chorus, Finding, Hand, Hear, Hearing, Light, Listen, Listening, Mind, Mouth, Sense, Soul, Speak, Speaking, Spirit, Time, Touch, Touching, Voice, World

In the concordance, published weekly as part of the stylus project, horizontal lines of text which contain one of the spine words are lifted from international English language newspapers. [I wondered why only English, and, what would happen if/when we truly intersected our meaning-making with the multi-lingual experiences that many of us share/claim.]The selected lines are thus pulled from their original context in the newspaper and arranged according to the alphabetized list of principal words. Through this process, the composition intersects the interior structure of the stylus with the exterior of world of events.

This process of creating a concordance of the words of stylus with lines of text from the world's major newspapers results in fields of text with juxtapositions of accounts aligned to created new possibilities and contexts for meaning. As you read the fields of text, you are invited to respond to your own register of how you read it, aloud or silently, within the interior of the piece.

One entire wall of the main exhibit hall is lined with shelves that contain replicas of hands made out of wax and paraffin (I think). In the middle of the main hall, tall ladders are erected as stations from which photographic images are projected onto blank walls. Toward one end is a large drawing table where you can sit and play games and speak into a microphone which has been connected to a piano in a back room. When you speak into the microphone, the words that you say are then translated into notes that are then projected throughout the building with amplifiers. Strange, you think? It is quite interesting, though, to see how words, ideas, and actions are translated, retranslated, and transformed from one medium to another. I quite enjoyed the experience, although I did wonder why no one talked to each other. In some sense, we were quite limited in our human interactions. Shyness? Maybe, maybe not.

Mexican jumping beans on a steel table

When you walk up to the Mezzanine, you will see a gigantic table outfitted with wired microphones that point down at the tabletop. On this giant steel tabletop-canvas are approximately 3,000 Mexican jumping beans, crackling away and you can hear the crackle vibrations amplified through speakers in the floor of the Mezzanine. You can read more about it here.

As the Sister and I were conversing with the gallery assistant, we started mulling over the primary questions raised by Hamilton's exhibit: How do we communicate? How are relationships enacted (or not) by the spaces we inhabit?

I noted out loud to the gallery assistant that I was surprised Hamilton would choose jumping beans to illustrate a point about communication and interactions, especially since her exhibit seemed to invite the participant to engage in modes of human social interaction -- I mean, we were discussing modes of human interaction, not bean-talk. But, that was not something for us to figure out right on the spot, I suppose. Another point that kept nagging at me throughout the exhibit was that the entire exhibit was in English. Even the newspaper print concordance, which claimed to pull texts from several international newspapers, contained only English text. To construct an entire exhibit of this magnitude and scale about human interaction and human communication, an artist must think about multilingual, polyphonic communications, mustn't she? As a bilingual speaker from multi-cultural backgrounds, I am disappointed to see that we are engaging only in English, thereby undercutting the depth and richness of human experiences.

Although it has been several weeks since I visited the Pulitzer, I invite you to go see the exhibition for yourself. It will run through January 2011. Admission is always free. Go here for visitor information for the Pulitzer. Or, visit the blog.