Permanence/Transience: The Afterlives of Ann Hamilton's Installations

Abstract

For this essay, I have examined four installations—the capacity of absorption (1988), privation and excesses (1989), lineament (1994), and human carriage (2009)—and their afterlives as seen in a table; a grouping of a hat, chair, and sheet; balled threads of text referred to as book/balls; and book fragments, respectively. I concluded that when re-exhibited, the objects are cut off from the viewer and are presented to him or her as static artifacts through the use of plinths, vitrines, and spotlights, where before the viewer would have had a more interactive and multidimensional relationship with the objects The distinguishing qualities of Hamilton’s installations are embodied knowledge, the felt relationships between elements, site-specificity, and the process of unmaking/remaking. These qualities are virtually absent in the objects when they are exhibited in isolation. The action and durational qualities that were so important when the objects were created are gone. Additionally, the interaction between the installations’ performers and the objects is absent, and the objects instead become traces of a past activity.