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Art & Ecology


Art & Ecology:

Perspectives and Issues



Social Restoration

Ann Hamilton, privation and excesses

by Elizabeth Garber

Ann Hamilton is a graduate of the Yale School of Art whose medium is installations. She constructs intricately fabricated environments that often include solitary performers and live animals. The environments are labor-intensive and often juxtapose humans with animals, social interactions with isolation.

In a 1989 installation, privation and excesses, Hamilton and assistants laid 750,000 copper pennies on a honey-coated floor. Behind these sat an isolated figure in plain clothes, wringing its hands over a honey-filled felt hat. And behind the figure was an enclosure of grazing sheep. The pennies, notes Pagel, looked like the scales of a gigantic fish.

The materials Hamilton has used in this installation give us clues to the meaning of the work. Laying out the pennies took systematic organization and intense labor. Honey is produced by bees, noted for their organized labor and for their factory-like production of a life source that is, for humans, a commodity. The honey and the pennies might be seen in contrast to each other. A penny has little inherent worth. An exchange commodity, a penny itself cannot feed, clothe, or house us. As the smallest unit of U.S. currency, most people who see a penny on the street will not even bend over to pick it up. Honey is inherently valuable both to bees and to humans as a source of nutrition. Despite the human labor of laying the pennies and their accumulated monetary worth (the budget Hamilton was given for the installation, $7,500), the performer, without companionship and apparent meaning, looks isolated and anxious. Wringing its hands over a hat of honey, but not eating the honey, there is no evidence of any communal bonds. Ironically, the sheep, who appear content in their enclosure, would die of melancholy if isolated from one another. Los Angeles art critic David Pagel notes that the figure is separated "from its animal need for companionship yet profoundly incapable of finding satisfaction in its impressive collection of the leftovers from an increasingly abstract economic system . . . this installation's figure mourned its divorce from the animal community and was paralyzed by anxiety over the expectation that an accumulation of money would adequately pacify this extreme alienation" (p. 61).

Cumulatively, then, privation and excesses speaks to the loss, in post-industrial societies, of community, the separation of humans from activities that provide meaningful social interactions and life-sustaining labor, and the resulting isolation of individuals in them. Materials are important to understanding the work. They are in excess, much as we have an excess of material goods, in general, in the west. But they become empty when the basics of life,including meaningful social interactions, are absent. Hamilton comments on human interactions as a type of social ecology, and her view is not optimistic.

Questions

References

Morris, G. (1989). Capp Street Project, San Francisco. Art in America,77 (10), 221.

Pagel, D. (1990). Still life: The tableaux of Ann Hamilton. Artsmagazine,64 (9), 56-61.

Spector, B. (1989). A profusion of substance. Artforum, 28 (2),120-128.

Wexner Center for the Arts/ Hamilton, A. (1996).The body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1984-1996. Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University.










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