Anne Hamilton

Interview by William Furlong

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 18 Numbers 3 & 4, 1999

Transcript

William Furlong: Anne Hamilton we’re standing in front of the American Pavilion where you’ve actually erected a 4 metre screen of steel and translucent glass. Can you tell me why you chose to do that?

Anne Hamilton: Yes, I think that what I wanted to do early on was to engage the building as both a subject and an object and to prod at its edges and push at its solidity and the history that is inherent from that form; it’s one of two primary gestures in the work, both of them are architectural. This is like a horizon line that goes across the entire façade; it liquefies the under part of the building and distorts the view into the inside. It makes it filmic. It renders the exterior quite pixilated, liquid and distorted and so it’s about being made aware of veils and choices so that you can enter, what was once a threshold, to the interior of the building which becomes the first space that you pass through. There are really a series of thresholds and a series of membranes through which you can move to and from. The two elements on the outside, the wall and the table bits in the centre of the courtyard, are both very minimal and when you walk to the interior you see your own image mirrored in a false window that was actually revealed in the building, but has always been there. So you’re centrally placed, imaginatively at the beginning, but you move back out into a landscape and also the interior.

WF: So in many respects the work is very specific to this piece of architecture in this specific context.

AH: Yes

WF: Could you describe the appearance of the piece?

AH: My first assumption was to make a single work, and to make the interior of the building a single work, so when you come in you have this mirrored image and then, either way you go it’s different but also the same.

WF: So if we turn left then, we immediately see a red pigment that is coming down from the walls and collecting at the edges.

AH: The false ceilings have been removed and so for the first time since the eighties there’s natural light and the skylights in each of the rooms have been opened and so now light is returned to the space. The whole interior has been filled with this movement of descent, and this powder borders its edges. It’s slowly accumulating in drips. It is catching on the texture of the Braille text that covers the walls.

WF: Tell me about the Braille text on the walls; what is the text?

AH: The text is actually from a poet Charles (Eshnekov?) who was writing in New York in the thirties. He made two volumes called ‘The United States Testimony: One and Two’, and they were based on legal documents at the turn of the century in the US. They are not narratives but they’re, spare, terse accounts of Acts that end up in the courts that are both arbitrary and intentional and are often quite violent. People caught in industrial accidents. It’s divided between domestic relationships, property relationships and racial relationships. They are all pieces that ask us to address the things that are actually hard for us to absorb into the mythology that is projected into this kind of civic building.

WF: So in a way the work is a combination of histories that you’ve brought and then a response to the context of Venice and this particular building.

AH: Yes, and one of the things that’s really wonderful is the way that there’s this part that’s really conscious and ordered and graded and then there’s the part that you can’t hold on to. Like the powder in here; there are all these lines that you see that are actually from spider webs.