Ann Hamilton

NK

Across your practice, there seems to be consistent interplay between the intelligence of language and intelligence in other forms—the body, the senses, the world beyond disclosure. How do you think about the relationship between embodiment and text?

AH

There are so many intelligences, so many ways of experiencing and understanding our experiences. When I work, I'm thinking about the capacities and conditions of being a body, though not necessarily the body’s image—more, what is our experiential condition? We are corporeal, we are cells in a constant state of growth and decay. We describe and distinguish our insides from our outsides, right from left, up from down, because we're also born into the ability to language our experience. But that description is often disembodied. We know the mind is in the body, but we forget and think it exists only above the neck. The forms in which I work are my way of tactilizing words, of finding spatial relations for these dialectics and of exploring embodied intelligences.

My first hand is a sewing hand, is a hand stitching into relation. The word textile contains the word text—theirs' is a shared lineage. For me, quite literally, language is in and of cloth. It is thinking and feeling, abstraction and materiality intertwined. We are born into language, just as we are born into touch. Rare are the moments in which cloth is not touching our bodies.

NK

The breadth of materials you use to interrogate the body in space can be startling—they really privilege an open-ended, multi-sensory experience. When you’re approaching a new project, at what point does form come in?

AH

I think a lot about how different contexts or conditions elicit different vocabularies and forms. In that sense, form is always responsive. So much of my practice has been a response to architecture, to the social conditions and histories of a place, and, however disparate, my response always carries my own formal habits and questions, even as I try mightily to leave them at the door. Always with me is the relationship between felt knowledge and language. But the challenge is how to take the obsession of one’s questions and respond to very different contexts and forms, like making a book versus giving a talk versus working in a museum. Finding form, it seems to me, is really shaped and influenced by where I find myself.

NK

Your career began with your education in textiles. At what point did you scale up to thinking about architecture?

AH

That part was a very natural extension, although it was a leap in scale with ultimately huge implications. I went from working at the immediate surround and scale of the body—thinking about skin and cloth, membranes and encrustations—to reaching my hand out until I touched the next surround and container, which are the walls, the ceiling, the floor. It was a literal step from body to space, and, at first, how I met the walls was no different than how I was making cloth.

NK

So you were already thinking about inhabitation when working with textiles?

AH

Yes—inhabitation, incorporation, embodiment. Because, I mean, we are the only animal that needs clothes. Our clothing is our second skin and our first architecture. At that point, it was just a shift in scale. And when I began pressing the edge of a space, I understood pretty quickly that I didn’t want to layer on top of it, but that I wanted to be “of” it, to be embedded in it, as I am in my body. At the time, that was a huge distinction and recognition. A similar moment occurred when I started photographing people through Duraflex, which is this opaque membrane I’d been given by Bayer Material Science, around 2012. My way of using it came about as a result of a small associational leap. Like the shift from coat to architecture, working with the semi-transparent qualities of the membrane led to a photographic process that shifted the relationship between a camera and a subject and, in turn, gave me a new form to work and think within. I’ve carried that practice with me now for years. I think the hardest thing as an artist is to find form for your questions.

NK

When it comes to making a new project or working in a new environment, are there constraints for you as far as which materials to use? Do you often work out of your archive when approaching a new space?

AH

We all come to a situation with our habits of thinking to some degree, right? But I don't ever go with a material in mind, or a form in mind. For me, the site visit is extremely central and important to the work. And sometimes, there are several before it becomes clear how the project is developing, because I really have to listen and I have to spend time in the space. The hardest projects for me have been situations where I didn't have that time, or had to work in response to photographs. But I try to visit a site without too much preconception or expectation. I try to pay attention to where my attention is drawn, whatever questions or impressions it evokes—knowing that will be the stuff I will rub together to set out on the path of research that will eventually form the response. It’s different in every situation. In some places, it’s about understanding where the windows are and how the light moves, and in others it’s what’s in the archive, or what happens when I walk around the block. Recent projects that have brought me into institutional and private collections have begun by thinking about how the objects found there might become the material of the work, as with the scanners.

I actually started my practice of scanning archival objects at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas, when I was working with the artist Cynthia Schira, who was also my undergraduate professor in textiles. The museum had asked us to make an exhibition together. They were rethinking the display of their collection and were in the process of bringing the university’s ethnography collection into the art museum. There were obviously a lot of questions—about categories, cultural lineage, and context. Cynthia and I were looking at the ethnography collection and thinking about how some of the thread and textiles might become part of our project. Seeing some of the beautiful handmade objects, I said to myself, “These would be so cool to scan.” So we went into an empty administrative office that happened to have a computer and a very old scanner, which is the very scanner I still use. We laid cloth dolls from the collection upside down on the glass and what I saw blew me away—I thought, “Oh, wow. The shallow depth of field as this bar of light passing across the object really makes it present.” It transformed the object, and at the same time made it almost tactile. That moment led to the development of the project and, ultimately, to a process that I’m still very engaged with. So, it's this wonderful thing about going somewhere and really just trying to be open to what you find. You don't know that it’s going to change your life. Sometimes it does. In this case, these inexpensive portable tools were a gift. They’ve given me a way to work in different kinds of collections and situations. They allow me to enter a conversation.

I so completely trust process, even when my thinking may be full of doubt. I know that if I stay with it long enough something will happen. The impetus for me, early on, to make installations and inhabit them as a live presence was simply a way to continue that process of making: to carry the energy of making into the ongoing public life of the work. And this is in some ways a refusal of closure, an invitation for the making to continue, to evolve, to find itself to be ongoing.

NK

What histories do you pay attention to when starting on a site-specific project?

AH

I try not to deny or erase what’s already in a space. I don’t want to make it into something it’s not, but to respond to the conditions of what it is. An obvious early example of that for me was in Charleston. I was commissioned by Mary Jane Jacob as part of the project Places with a Past to respond to the social history and contemporary context of the city. After much searching, I settled on working in a storage garage, located only a block away from a central market that had once auctioned enslaved people. It was also one block off a main street where lots of new construction was taking place, and I remember every morning hearing the narration of historic tours amplified in the streets. You know, Charleston really markets its history in a robust tourist economy. I had a strong reaction to the presence of this litany, recounting the good deeds of famous Charlestonians. I was angry. How does one begin to tell the story of everything that story leaves out? In my case, it wasn’t through language, but through material and the history of the body it holds. I started assembling blue cotton workwear—shirts and pants dyed with indigo—which was the first cash crop in Charleston. Cotton, you may know, when it’s not blended with synthetics, it holds temperature and holds smell. Experientially, those are not such subtle things in the humidity and wetness of a southern summer.

During the installation, we worked with the garage door open, and as I was getting started on the project, some of the men working on the construction site next door came over, thinking I might be selling used work clothing. I shared with them what I was doing, laying the clothing one uniform at a time onto an enormous pile. We talked about labor history, the history of indigo, of the color blue. I think they were dumbfounded, in some ways, that my task had no obvious function and that I was not doing it for pay. Two of the men actually returned and once or twice helped pile and smooth the clothing. Although it went unspoken, I think they sensed a recognition, and perhaps an honoring, of their work. Amazing things happen when you work in public. Conversations happen because you’re there. The processes of some of these large projects are inherently social—the work is a way to be in the world.

NK

Have you noticed a change, institutionally, in how you're able to take advantage of that? How do you think this kind of socially engaged work has changed over time?

AH

My practice has always been responsive—it’s grown from and been dependent on my collaborations with curators, institutions, and the programs I am working with, and that continues, but the opportunities to make new large-scale installations have changed. The atmosphere is more conservative, the regulations are tighter. The work’s duration, process and scale can push and make demands on institutional structures, and while it is a process I love, it isn’t for everyone. The work asks a lot.

NK

Especially if it involves dealing with some of the unspoken or unadvertised parts of that building's history.

AH

I don’t feel like that’s ever been an issue, but I do think about how a work makes present what’s already there but is perhaps not already open to experience. It has a politic, an ethic, a poetic. In 1998, I did a piece at the Aldrich, before they expanded with a renovation and an addition. The project allowed me to respond to the history of that house as a post office, as a church, as a school—it got into the history of New England and the Antinomian Controversies and more. It was just a great situation. We were able to cut holes through the floors and walls and install a cable that carried a white cloth, animated by movement, through almost all of the rooms in the house. We cut an eight-foot hole in the floor and reinstalled it as a spinning platter. And, you know, those are pretty unusual circumstances. I remember when they were renovating, Harry Philbrick, the director at the time, said that they used that project as a benchmark for the kind of flexibility they hoped for in the new building. So, spaces that have social histories before their life as an art space or a museum, those are circumstances I’m drawn to. A white box museum or gallery is so much harder for me.

NK

That gets into some of the politics of the white box gallery as a form of erasure. I find it really interesting that that’s our paradigm now. On one level, there’s the logic of a minimalist design meaning nothing in the room will get in the way of the art, but it can also make the space feel like a non-space, lacking locality or historical specificity. A lot of work is done to make the gallery or museum today seem like as much of a blank slate as possible, which strikes me sometimes as almost a fear of history.

AH

You can't really erase context—the “white cube” is itself a context. History contains generations and layers of erasure and loss, but our present is haunted by what has been suppressed. Don’t get me wrong—I love big white empty spaces, but it is much harder for me to figure out what to respond to in the context of the white cube. Sites with histories of labor and social use have been a more natural home for me, they’re the kind of spaces that have really tuned tempered and shaped the work.

NK

And for at least the first decade or so, your presence was a pretty integral part of whatever happened in that space. I've been thinking a lot lately about the artist's body as a tool. Going back to some of those histories, I’ve been realizing how much things since the ‘90s have shifted back to a much more object-oriented ontology. There’s a Times article from 1997 that talks about your work alongside that of Matthew Barney, Kiki Smith, and Robert Gober as this counterweight to the market-driven art world of the ‘80s, and the kind of performance work that came about response to the AIDS crisis, when the body really became one of the artist’s most important tools. Do you feel that the pendulum has swung back since then to objects?

AH

I see a lot of performance that is still carrying that forward. But I do think that the idea of art as a thing that circulates independent of the body is very present, especially in New York.

NK

Has that affected your way of working?

AH

I don’t think so much about it, but I am acutely aware of how the structure of arts institutions are, for the most part, set up to show and house objects whose form is fixed and at some level portable. My work is so often not in the objects themselves but in the relationship between them. I always want the work to evolve and change. As a consequence of the scanning and other photographic processes, I've spent the last several years doing more image-based work, and it’s been important to me to find means for that to circulate in a non-precious way—in many cases, through the mail. The Duraflex portrait series became a series of phonebook-style publications printed on newsprint, which were given away as part of the project.

My work has always been very material—it’s been made up of things, but because I think relationally and spatially, making and trusting the presence of an independent thing outside of a context has been an enormous challenge for me. It can be hard for me to classify, sometimes, what I'm doing and how I think about it. But I love making books. Books are independent things, they’re portable democratic objects. When you hold a book in your hand you determine the pace and duration of your attention. I loved working on Sense, thinking about sequence and duration, imagining it as a film, playing with color. The immersion in a book is not so different from that of an installation.

NK

Absolutely. One of the difficult parts about discrete objects is that we ask the materials to hold up in whatever context they're placed in, and as an artist you have to cede control over that context. Are there materials that you feel stand up to that challenge? I know you've worked a lot with gampi paper lately.

AH

I don’t know—perhaps that challenge is more a matter of form than of material. Some of the materials I’m drawn to are delicate, so they age and will need care over time, though probably no more than normal. I like understanding material processes and social histories, and have always worked with familiar materials: paper, cotton, raw sheep fleece. I've worked with live sheep too, of course. Most of my favorite materials muddle the difference between something grown and something made. Gampi is a plant and a paper that I love. It’s a long fiber and the paper it makes is tissue-thin but very strong, and somewhat transparent with a sheen. It holds an image in a particular way. Right now I'm having a hard time getting the paper because of climate change. It comes from Japan and I’ve learned that the plant is more scarce now, since the harvesting is more difficult and at higher elevations. Actually, I just got an email from Hiromi Paper—they’re looking for a solution for me, because the papers we have been able to find recently don't have the same sheen or hand as the works you saw in the gallery.

NK

That's interesting. You have to deal with the natural constraints of some of these materials.

AH

Sometimes sourcing material—an acre of linotype, or the horse hair from tropos, my project at Dia—can be a challenge in any quantity. It’s also interesting to find how unfamiliar people can be with material histories. Horse hair, like language, grows from the inside out. It carries cellular memory, and at Dia it was an oceanic expanse, sewn into a giant carpet that covered the entire floor. I remember a journalist coming in soon after it opened, walking across the hair, not really looking around, and asking me, “What does the horse hair mean?” And I just remember thinking, “What do you mean, ‘What does it mean?’” It's more like, “What is it?” I think about how ingrained our habits with art are—instead of looking at what and how something is, to think outside the work so quickly. One of the goals of the work I make is to try to invite you to join it; to be in it long enough that that habit of mind might loosen.

NK

Yeah, I find that a lot of your work turns attention back to these elements of corporeal life that we often take for granted. Everyone has a body and everyone has been a body. But we don’t tend to privilege that experience.

AH

We often lack language to describe it. At its best, I think that the felt qualities of the material elements creates an atmosphere of relations. They are simply places to suspend, to spend time, to be in. A friend of mine, an artist I was working with in China, gave me a book about atmospheres in architecture. I loved how the writing sought to establish a vocabulary that values the feeling of experiencing a space. I’m interested in giving more value to that intelligence and the qualities of felt experience, especially in a world so dominated by the over-valuing of information.

I arrive at my work through associational processes. A huge help for me in thinking about how we conceptualize the role of emotions in our thinking has been the writing of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In his books, The Feeling of What Happens and Descartes Error, Damasio writes about the biological processes of cognition. We know that the model of cognition described by Descartes is not really how we all experience the world. We think up through our feet and in through our hands. We think through our whole selves and yet we seem to privilege language over other forms of knowledge—those experiences that we sense, those experiences that might resist language.

NK

It seems to me that animals come up a lot in your work as a way of pointing toward those alternative ways of being.

AH

Not as alternative ways of being, but companion ways of being. I’ve worked with sheep and with birds: pigeons, canaries, peacocks. In the work, they exist not as symbols but as themselves. For the Armory project, I was thinking about how we are a species with weight and birds are a species without weight. Initially, I was inspired by the navigational skills of homing pigeons traveling great distances and delivering messages during war and peace. I had aspirations that we might raise a flock of pigeons that would fly from the Armory at night to roost in another borough and return to be read to during the day. Obviously, that was a complication beyond the scope of the project, but thinking about forms of intimacy that link the near at hand to the far away, it did have an influence on the decision to ask people to write letters on airmail paper that addressed the qualities of the space.

There are many materialities and mutualities that connect human animals and non-human animals in the work. Even back to one of my earliest projects, an installation with three sheep looking across a sea of pennies, I was thinking about economic relations and value hierarchies. The relative value of a copper penny sitting in relation to the bodily presence of the living sheep: how to compare or reconcile the abstract and the actual. I've actually never said this before, but I do think of certain aspects of my work as more like epics. While my work is not overtly narrative, the relationships of the parts to one another and to the space have a material narrative that point to our condition as a species.

The theater director Anne Bogart and I hope someday to work together on an opera, which is truly an epic form. Its themes can manifest in different clothing, across different generations, but it takes up human drama and subjects that endure across time. What is living? What do we consider animate versus inanimate? Addressing these questions is historically charged, and changes over time by what science continues to reveal.

NK

Taking time for the unspoken or the unspeakable really is a job for tragedy. I think so many ancient myths stick around because we’re constantly in need of reminding, as language continues to fail us in describing what it's actually like to be a person.

AH

In that vein, a friend of mine introduced me to The Craft of Zeus, which describes how the weaving and spinning of threads in classical myths both enact and symbolize social relationships. I love noting how often textile metaphors are evoked to describe social metaphors, grounding them in materiality. How do we describe the intelligence of what a hand knows and senses when it touches cloth? I think a lot about forms of knowledge in relation to technologies of information. We have so much information—we’re drowning in it—yet information alone is not enough. If it was, we wouldn't be where we are today.

Our cultural habits privilege and value certain kinds of information over others; we tend to privilege naming over sensing, speaking over listening. One might say that one of the projects of my work is to invert these hierarchies and, as a consequence, the work is slow. Making a show that’s very still, like this one at Elizabeth Leach, is the point. In the gallery installation, there’s a whistling record playing that may slow the pace of one's attention. It makes more space for feeling what you see and hear.

NK

I'm interested in this idea of returning to focus in a media-saturated world. I wonder if you feel like the stakes of your practice have changed as information and digital culture have taken over.

AH

Your question makes me think about how to participate and also how to resist. Of course, my work has spanned an era of unprecedented change. I mean, when I was your age, images were slides, they were printed on film, and it was all material. The materiality of an image is something I think about a lot and is important to me. The revolution of the iPhone and its instant connections didn’t exist. I remember the international phone we rented when we were working in Venice in 1999. It was the size of a box! We were communicating by fax on paper and even that seemed like a miracle. So, yeah—we make technology and technology makes us. The form of my work has been shaped by intersections of the analog and the digital. The qualities of an image, its materialities, are so often a consequence of technologies that are passing out of currency, but also are only possible because of the digital tools we have today. So, for example, the shallow depth-of-field, early-generation flatbed scanners I use make a particular kind of image that is particular to the intersection of this tool at this moment in time. I also use a wand scanner, which is an over-the-counter device for copying documents. With this cheap portable tool, each passage of light over a three dimensional object is a trace and a drawing that can’t be repeated. Even in my early video work, I was using inexpensive, single-chip surveillance cameras, because they had the same focal-length constraints. The only thing you could adjust was the focus. I would read with them and the letters and words would fall in and out of focus with the rhythm of the hand's motion. It's always about bringing the body back into technology. Tiny, handheld—the hand, the breath, the body, intersected in images that I can’t replicate with more recent and improved devices. So what is the reciprocal relationship between our bodies and our tools?

Actually, an early video of mine, a really foundational piece for me, involved drawing a line. I had a pencil in one hand and the camera in the other, and the pencil was just a little ahead of that tiny camera. So the video documented this space between two hands traveling together in time. One hand was marking, and one hand was recording. The shallow space between them made a rhythm, falling in and out of focus. I don’t draw so much on paper, but I understood this as a form of drawing, the endless possibilities in the intersection between a camera and a pencil. My work emerges from paying attention and recognizing the moment when something materializes. And what gets me excited when I work is when I find a process, a tool, a material, that I can get lost in, that invites immersive attention, that can evolve and become a form for thinking. Often it is accidental, like finding the scanner.

NK

What has always really impressed me about your work is the fact that you’ve been able to find these intuitive forms that are also totally your own. By following your instincts, you’ve arrived at these really unique ways of creating images. In that sense, it's interesting that you continue to bring text back into your work, and in doing so you point to how operationally different it is compared to image.

AH

Words are material. They are made of letters and sounds and, like structures in weaving, they can be made to do different things. Much of my work with texts is literally a form of weaving—a line of writing crossing another line of writing, like two threads crossing to form a concordance. I like to see what emerges from a non-narrative compositional process, to see what happens when words are shaped with the same hand I might use to transform or manipulate other kinds of materials.

I still have boxes and bags of cut-up books I’ve saved from the Guggenheim project, and I am completely and totally engrossed in pulling a pile from the bag, sifting line by line through the fragments, finding phrases and words from the chaos. The process is responsive to what I find, and in time, compositions emerge. Though they differ in scale, it’s the same form of attention I try to practice when I respond to a space or an object. Perhaps you could call it an attention of possibility.

Anyway, the words and fragments fished from the sack meet on endpapers with fragments of cloth that have also accumulated in the studio. A particular phrase with a particular quality of printing finds a relation to the shape, color, and texture of a particular fabric on a page that is yellowed and edge-turned, and when they sit together in a “just so” relation, it forms a recognition I like to think of as a kind of touch. I love the modesty of these collages, their humble materials, the lack of production that’s involved in making them. And a little goes a long way. The ethos of one’s practice is in the “how” of how it is made, how it circulates, and the relationships it invites. My ethos involves work with the conditions at hand, with what’s possible within the circumstances whether that is the scale of my lap or the scale of architectural space; one is an address of a single hand and one is an address of a collective hand.

There’s always an element of time exerting its pressure, but for me the core of my practice is about finding processes that make spaciousness. The work comes from those moments and recognitions that well to the surface when you're not really trying to do anything. If I don’t pause, if I don’t listen, if I am too focused on “getting there,” nothing happens. Work comes from making work and from being inside it, but if I cannot be inside myself—if I am not paying attention—again, nothing happens. It takes patience. It takes forgetting yourself.

NK

I love getting to that headspace. One of my favorite things about collage is that once you start working, you don't have to think you're doing anything special. And then you find out that suddenly something has appeared there.

AH

Exactly! And you're like, “Oh, oh, look what happened,” Right? It’s really special. And we live in a collage era. Everything's increasingly fragmentary, and those fragments are smaller and smaller. So having the presence of mind to put them together, just to explore how they combine, that has never been more important. Though not new, it’s a form for our time.

NK

Who were you paying attention to when you were just starting out?

AH

After coming out of textiles in Kansas, I was living in Canada, and I was exposed to a lot of conceptual work through the program at the Banff Centre. And then when I was in graduate school we were near enough to New York City that I could visit frequently—I could see shows, or shop Canal Street. I saw many of the productions at BAM's Next Wave Festival. I got to see Robert Wilson and Pina Bausch, and was completely taken in by what was then called Visual Theater. That was a big influence. My impulse for work to be live, to occupy and inhabit its space, came from those experiences, and was then married with my wanting to extend the process of making into the public life of a work. But at that point, the idea was still being developed, it was all still very nascent. I remember being very confused about the form, what exactly to call it. Because I see my work as more of an inhabitation than a performance.

NK

Right, performance implies a certain separation between the audience and the artist. I agree that what you do is a lot more collaborative than that.

AH

I’m not sure it’s collaborative, but the installations are an invitation to join, to enter, to come into the atmosphere of its relations. That thinking kind of clarified for me when I was working on the project at MASS MOCA, Corpus. It was the first time that I understood that the central figure of the work wasn’t necessarily the elements making up the work, but the people visiting and moving through it. That recognition opened and loosened the work, moved it out of the earlier tableau-like quality.

NK

Was that one of the first exhibitions that didn’t involve you being somewhere inside the piece?

AH

It probably wasn't the first. But because Corpus was a multi-room installation with a long hall and a back room upstairs, I started to understand that the core of the piece was in how it orchestrated and held movement. Like the public works I'm doing now, they're meant to be experienced in motion. At MASS MOCA, blank white sheets of paper fell from the ceiling, a corridor of raising and lowering speakers formed a passageway, and walking through it, your attention was turned by the voices from the speakers, the light streaming in the windows, the paper falling and the paper accumulating underfoot. When you arrived to the back room it was very, very dark, and the spinning speakers overhead were circling around you instead of you passing by them. And I remember feeling like, “Oh, this piece exists in the shift from walking through to being held by sound.” And then upstairs, following the roving light of a projector with your eyes. The movement from walking to standing to following with your eyes is the piece. I don't think anyone else would describe it like that, but this is how I came to understand that the figure of the work is the bodies of the people who walk through it, who are in there.

NK

That idea of moving speakers—but more generally of the centrality of the audience’s role in the experience—reminds me a lot of seeing Ann Imhof's show, Nature Morte, last summer at the Palais de Tokyo. There was a main entrance, but beyond that where you went in the space was totally up to you, and it went quite deep into the bowels of the building. That show was a lot about performance and the feeling of using space as a staging ground for something, especially something subversive, even though there wasn’t an active performance going on when I visited. What was so interesting to me was how, in the absence of some main event, I became so aware of the other people just existing with me in the space. I think about this a lot when going to raves or bathhouses—anywhere that’s really oriented towards the body, but is also shared, it often feels subversive because that kind of experience is so unprioritized. We’re taught to be very private with our bodies. So if you spend enough time there with other people, even if they're complete strangers, you come away with a sense of affinity from having shared this experience.

AH

Don't you think that's why going to the cinema in the theater is different than staying home and watching? Because it's something that's happening to all of you at the same time together, even if you never speak. In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti writes about that, about the intimacy of sitting in a theater. You admit to a kind of intimacy that you wouldn't tolerate in other circumstances. That's really interesting to me, allowing that kind of intimacy in public. Where are those opportunities for a non-sexualized intimacy, and what does that have to do with civic space? One of the ways I used to describe the Armory show and my experience of it was that it created conditions for being alone together. I think that is also what happens in the cinema.

NK

What’s interesting about the cinema is that the metric is proscribed, it's edited in and so the experience of being there is very passive. Whereas, for something like your project at MASS MOCA, the metric is really in walking. It's about the viewer’s own direction and pace. And so it returns agency to the participant and to the body.

AH

That’s exactly right. And that’s essential to these public pieces, like the piece at the World Trade Center subway, or the piece I was just working on in San Diego, which is opening in April. The new project, in the Stuart Collection at UCSD, is an 800 foot long stone walkway of words in relief. Standing on the threshold, looking across, you see only texture, a sea of words. But when you look down, individual words and phrases catch your attention, perhaps slow your pace, become a composition as you walk its length. In this way, the work is alive and changing, even if the stones are static. The piece is just a structure, a woven concordance of multiple texts animated and recomposed in each crossing. So, if each passage is a new composition, it maintains an openness, has an ongoingness, is never finished, is always being re-made. Perhaps this is not so different from the presence of an attendant figure in the early installations. Re-animating—returning time to something fixed in time—is something I think about every time I visit the Met. These historic objects are re-animated by time, and by every viewer.

NK

You can never come across the same piece twice.

AH

Exactly. It's alive.